The Fire Thief – The Avenger

I got in contact with a TV and film production company in Bournemouth called LoveLoveFilms and asked them if there was any CG, After Effects or concept art related work that they had to give out at the moment and then after looking at my blog, they responded by asking me to do some initial concepts for their upcoming film ‘The Fire Thief’.

The script for this film was written by the Horrible Histories writer Terry Derry and the story is an adaptation of the tale of Prometheus. The film was to be a mixture of CG, green screen and live action and there was a number of (to be CG) mythical creatures in this film that they wanted designs for. I was very happy to receive this opportunity as it was much like something I would like to do as a career.

The first character I did designs for was called ‘The Avenger’. This character was supposed to be the main antagonist of the story and he was described to me as ‘horrific, sharp, eagle-like and dangerous’. So, I started by finding as many reference images as I could because I felt this helped me generate ideas.

This was a Greek helmet that gave me the idea of possibly giving him armour in one of his designs.

I started by using these reference images as inspiration for different head designs to give him. But first, I did an observational drawing of an eagle head to help me understand the defining traits of an eagle and thus making it easier to do more eagle-like designs.

I then painted a whole design that incorporated different aspects of the head designs, such as the ears from the top middle head and the abnormal placing of eyes from the bottom front-on head. I developed this further to fit more with the design so I made his ears more wing-like like the rest of his body and the eyes as holes in his chest because I thought his head would look too crowded with detail if I added a third eye there.

I also decided to give this design four legs instead of two because he will have three different guises, one as a creature, one as a human and one as an in between being, and as this is the design for the creature version, I decided to give him four legs to make him look more like a beast than a man.

I quite like this design, but I will definitely try many more different ones because I think this one makes him look a bit too elegant and regal to fit the character of The Avenger. In the next design, I will work on making him more horrific and cruel. I chose golden brown colours for him in this one because that was the colour description in the script but I think next time I will experiment with a darker colour scheme to make him look more evil.

The Artist – Lion Statue Model

This lion statue model was to go in the Chinatown section of the city in ‘The Artist’. For this model I was given quite a lot of freedom as I was just asked to model a statue that could go in Chinatown. At first I considered modeling a Buddha of some sort, but then realised that lion statues appear a lot more commonly in Chinatowns. So, I started trying to find two images of a lion statue; one of the front and one of the side. I needed both to make this model because I knew it was going to be very complex to make. The only statue I could find these images for, were of the lions from ‘Forbidden City’ in Beijing:

However, these images were not taken exactly from the front and side, so it was very difficult to make it look exactly like the lion in these photos. Therefore, I decided I would just use these photos as a reference, but not try and make my model exactly the same.

As this model was quite complex, I went through quite a few different steps to get to the final model.

First I started with a cuboid and modeled it into the rough shape of the lions head by basing it on the side image.

I then started shaping in eye holes and a nose because I think they were the most prominent features of the statue.

I began to round off the head and began molding the lips so that they were more defined like in the images.

After the lips were defined, I added the canines by molding them first from a cone shape.

I then started doing one of the more complex bits – the eyebrows. I had to make these by extruding a nurbs circle around a curve and then tweaking them with the lattice tool until they looked right.

After that, I began my first attempt at making the ‘curls’ of the lion’s head. I tried doing it by using a similar method to how I made the eyebrows. However, it didn’t work well at all, so I decided to move on to another part of the statue for the time being.

I started modeling the ear and then made the cheek pattern using the same method as the eyebrows.

I also extruded some nostrils in the nose.

I then tried to make the hair curls look better by readjusting their positions on the head.

This didn’t work so I tried to make it better by changing the shape of the head slightly.

However, none of these adjustments seemed to make the hair look better so I moved on and made his chin pattern. I did this in a similar way to the eyebrows, using curves and extruding nurbs circles, but I had to edit the mesh quite a lot after extruding because the chin pattern consisted of different widths and the curve extruding technique can’t create different widths.

Here I finished refining the shape of the ears.

I re-tackled the hair and finally managed to make a good shape for it by starting with half of a sphere and adjusting the topology and then extruding out each layer of the curl. It was a very difficult shape to make, so it took a long time to make it.

I also made the collar and did this by making a collar shape using a curve around the lions neck and extruding a nurbs circle around this curve and then adjusting the mesh to make the sides of the collar more defined.

I then began making the arms by extruding outwards from the body and then molding it downwards. I molded the arm to look more like the reference images and then extruded a hand out from the arm. I then did the same to make the fingers and began molding the fingers into claws.

The fingers looked very plain and empty so I decided to model the lumpy texture (show in the reference images) into them. These were quite difficult to make so it took a long time to mold.

I then cut off one of the fingers, duplicated it and then restitched it on to the end of all the fingers and toes.

To make the collar more interesting, I modeled a sort of turnip shape to dangle from it and this was based on the design in the reference images. I also did the same with bells.

I began adding some curly shapes to the forearms to make them more detailed like the head was. Without the detail in the arms, I felt the model looked really unbalanced in terms of detail, which made the body look bare and naked.

To add the finishing touches, I rotated and moved the right arm up to rest over a ball because (like the reference images) I felt this made the final model look much more interesting.

I am very pleased with the final model because it was very complex and detailed so I learned a lot through the process of making it.

Unreel – Fish Models

For this film, I was asked to design and model some fish. Dean (the director) explained what he wanted the fish to look like and showed me some reference images for both what he did and didn’t want them to look like. He wanted them to look sort of brainless, without much character but he didn’t want them to look exactly the same as real fish. This was because he didn’t want the audience to feel any sort of connection or sympathy towards them. So I did some drawings based on the reference images below:

The drawings were just really quick and rough to give him a vague idea of how I was going to model them. I was going to make them very similar to how they are in real life, except give them bigger eyes and huge pupils to make them more cartoony and brainless.

He was happy with my idea so I began modeling them:

I started by modeling the ray because I thought it had the most interesting shape. I started with a flat cuboid and molded it by comparing it to the reference images and then making changes accordingly. After I finished making the ray, I realised that it might actually be better to give it big eyes with no iris or pupils because I thought this made it look even more brainless, which is how Dean wanted it. So, I decided to do the eyes like this for the rest of the fish as well.

I then moved on to making the mackerel. I started with a cuboid and then molded it into a blimp like shape and to do this, I needed to adjust the mesh quite a lot to make it smooth and rounded. I modeled the fins separately using really flat cuboids and added them to the body.

I took the same steps to model the seabass.

I did a similar thing with the squid, except I had to used the lattice tool as well to shape the bend/curve in the squid. I also had to make sure to model eye holes for all the fish, which then added a lot more edges and vertices so I had to edit the mesh quite a lot in order to make all the fish smooth.

The fishes were a lot simpler to model than the other models I did recently, but nevertheless, Dean seemed to quite like them so I think they met his brief quite well.

Praguiem – Doll Model

This is a model I made for the film Praguiem. It’s one of the three characters in the film, but it’s not alive or organic so it needed to be modeled in way that enables it to move somewhat like a puppet.

Jakub (the director) drew this image for me to model from:

Below are the step’s I took to make the model:

I started by making her round head from a cube instead of a sphere because I didn’t want it to have the pinches that are caused by the triangles at the top and bottom of a sphere.

I then began making the shoulders, as in the image they’re drawn as part of the skeletal structure for the doll, so I thought it was appropriate to make this first.

I  moved on to make the upper arm and made sure that it attached to the shoulder in a puppet-like way.

I did the same with the lower arm, hands, legs and feet. They were all modeled from cuboids and it took a lot of adjusting the mesh and cleaning up the topology to make them so smooth and rounded.

I then gave her a top by modeling a cuboid to the shape drawn in the image. I made a neck hole in the top and got rid of the faces at the bottom so that it looked more like an actual top rather than just a shape that goes into her body when it meets the body mesh.

To shape the top, I used the duplicate special function so that I only have to model on side and after I was happy with the shape I mirrored geometry and stitched the two sides together. Then, to give the top more volume, I extruded the whole thing outwards, so that it would have a thin edge all the way round as the normal maya face/plane edges often look terrible when rendered out.

Finally, I made the frills for the top by modeling a semi-circle shape, duplicating it loads and then placing it on the top in the places shown in the reference image. I felt this made her frills look much better than if they were just to be bump mapped.

After making the top, I moved on to model the trousers. I modeled them from a cuboid as well and started by modeling one trouser leg, then mirroring and it stitching it together by merging the vertices. I did however have to make a lot of adjustments to the mesh in order to make it look like a pair of trousers rather than just two trouser legs.

I then began modeling the hair. This step was very difficult because I didn’t have a drawing of the back of the head to refer to and the side drawing of the hair was actually quite different from the front reference. So, I started by making it look as much like the front reference as possible. However, if I had left it like that, she would have had no hair in the back of her head. So I added hair to the back of her head by following the same structure as her front hair ‘strands’. This seemed to work well but her hair looked more like cones than hair, so I decided to show it to Jakub to find out how exactly he wanted the hair.

When Jakub looked at the model, he spotted that (due to the side reference being very different and unclear compared to the front one), I had modeled all the joints in a very square way. This wasn’t a problem until she was tested for animation and it seemed that if we left her that way, her limbs would have gone into each other every time they were rotated. So, I had to round off all the joints so that they would not intersect when rotated.

After looking at my model, Jakub also explained exactly how he wanted the hair by showing me this image:

This was very different to the reference images, so I was quite surprised. However, I really like these sort of curls, so I thought it was a good idea. This kind of shape is very difficult to model in a normal way, so I had to do it by creating a nurbs curve in that shape and then extruding a nurbs circle around the curve. This created a rough version of that shape so I had edit it quite a lot using the lattice tool and then move bits to make it look more like a natural hair curl.

I’m quite pleased with the final model because I think it met the brief quite successfully even though the hair was especially hard to do, but as a result Jakub was really liked the hair and ended up using it for the Julie character as well.

They’re Coming to Get You Barbara – Mum Model and Rig

This is the a 3D model of the mum character from the film They’re Coming to Get You Barbara. She will be animated in 3D for a few shots and used as reference to help the 2D animators add more three dimensional volume to their drawings.

This is the image that Hollie (one of the directors) drew for me to model from:

Below are all the stages I took leading to the final model:

I began by modelling the head from a cube and then molded it to the right shape by comparing it to the front and side reference images.

I then modelled the body in a similar way and added eyes to make her look more like the image. I also added a block that I thought I would later use to model the hair.

After that I added the legs and sculpted the face more in order to create the lips.

 

I realised that modeling the hair from the initial block I made would make things extremely difficult, so I extracted faces from the head and extruded them into the hair, as this way, the hair would already be wrapped around the head, thus making it a lot easier to fit with the head.

I then began molding the hair and defining the clothes. I also added eyelashes to make her look more like the reference image.

The hair was very difficult to model as it was an odd shape, so I had to show Hollie and then make a lot of changes to fit exactly the sort of hair she wanted, but I’m happy with the final hair.

I then modelled the hand and fingers by extruding a hand from the arm and then cutting up the hand to extrude the fingers.

Finally I tweaked hair and face and added rings around the iris to make her look more like the reference image.

Then, as Hollie needed a simple rigged version of her very soon in order to animate her, I decided to do this and learned a structured way of rigging that allowed me to complete it in a day.

I found rigging quite easy so I think I would like to have a go at making more complex rigs, such as facial rigging.

I also modeled some props for their 3D background and these were based on Rogie’s drawings of the props:

Performance Video Project – Problems Solved!

So there were a variety of problems that came up when I tried to put the animations into the augmented reality Flash files.

Firstly, the animations would appear with a black rectangular background instead of a transparent one, which looks sort of bad because it makes the mushrooms look more like a video than a character that you’re holding, which isn’t the desired effect. So, I asked Matt how he managed to retain the transparency of his videos and found that it was as easy as ticking an “Encode Alpha Channel” box when converting the movs to flvs.

Then the main problem that then caused many other problems was that the video/sound files would play even before the marker was held up and wouldn’t stop playing when the markers were put away. All the marker managed to do at this point was make the video visible and invisible depending on whether or not it was held up. I tried my best to find out how to get the video to stop and start at the right time, but the code was too complex to figure out. So, I spoke to Adam, as he has very extensive knowledge of Flash and he understood what was going on with the code so he told me that my easiest option was to import the sound separately into each Flash file and just use some much simpler code to tell the sound to stop and start at the right times. Thus, I rendered out versions of the animations that were transparent with no sound and then added sound to each Flash file and with Adams help, managed to get the marker to trigger the sound and video at the right times!

However, we did encounter a few errors along the way, such as, for some reason when we first imported the sound, the initial code we used just made the sound loop every frame, so it played the track twenty five times per second! So, after much experimentation we managed to get it to work, which was very satisfying!

So after figuring out how to get it to work perfectly on one Flash file, I then applied that to the seven other Flash files, resulting in eight Flash files; each with a mushroom animation in!

The video below shows one of the Flash files working!

(VIDEO)

Now all I need to do it check that this will work on eight different computers at uni and also print out eight markers on paper, as markers on paper are supposed to work a lot better.

Performance Video Project – Finished Animations with Music

These are the animations that will be shown on each of the computers.

I combined the music and imagery in the same way for each of them but for some reason some of them have a pause in their loop whereas others are continuous, so I’m not really sure how to solve this, as I did exactly the same for each one and when the music and imagery were separate, all the loops worked fine with no gaps.

Performance Video Project – Music/Loops

I chose eight loops (two for each instrument) from Garageband that were in the same key and placed them all together so that the timing was all random to see if the loops would be able to work with each other in my piece, as they will be selected at random times by the markers and by different people. These eight loops seemed to work, so I exported each one as a separate mp3 and then used one with each of my animations. Below is the track with all the loops together:

Performance Video Project – 3D Mushrooms Complete!

Here are the 3D versions of my mushrooms:

Performance Video Project – Researching ARtoolkit

I did some research on ARtoolkit as FLARtoolkit was based on this, so I thought there may be a possibility that I may be able to use ARtoolkit to use multiple markers. I came across this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATOMIC_Authoring_Tool

which appears to be an interface that someone has created that enables you to do really simplistic augmented reality. However, to install it onto a mac it appears to be quite complex and you have to install something called Fink through terminal and as I don’t know what that is I don’t want to install it as doing things in terminal can possibly mess up the system files. Thus I watched the tutorial video for the software to see what it was capable of. Unfortunately, it seemed that it could do no better than FLARtoolkit and so I decided not to use it.

I then did some more research into the origins of ARtoolkit. It seems that ARtoolkit it just some sort of code library and to use it on a mac you need to use Xcode, which makes it far more cumbersome to use than FLARtoolkit as Xcode is essentially a compiler and so you have to even work out the code for showing the video in Xcode as it’s not automatically linked an any kind of video output like Flash is.