Narrative - Character in scene

Narrative - Character Rig Complete

Narrative - Character Textured and skinning complete

I have corrected the Uv's from the initial layout that we accomplished, because of the radius and distortion of the eyes on the character it may have to be a case of only allowing the eyes to blink but not move. We will have to create free floating iris's to incorporate the movement we desire into the animation.

Texture was supplied by Ashley which i added to the Uvs that I had re-done correctly. There are distortions in the mould due to its paintily effect. 

When it came to skinning it was hard to follow Alans tutorial and incorporate his functions into my own work. The characters head in essence is his body and I managed to skin everything to a relatable joint that can move each area of the character.

Finished Skinning on the character. initially I imported the file with the tutorials ribbon spine into the scene to sculpt around, but i experimented using raw joints and parenting them with the mesh to allow movement. 

* The Ribbon Spine Concept

Narrative - Environment Uvs

Uv plans completed by myself, The wall, floor, porthole, chair and lamp. The table was imported from Lisa which she Uv'd and textured herself

Narrative - Environment Progression

Narrative - Initial Character Progression

Narrative - Initial Room Blockout

Under The Sea - Layout Development

                                                            Titanic Blueprint
Designing the interior and exterior of the ship we are going to have to look into preserving a section of the ship to make it more believable. It doesn't have to be a full model of the ship but if the camera decides to travel the space we need to give the illusion to the audience the whole ship is on the seabed. We originally wanted the characters environment to resemble the size and décor of the original Titanic. But we might consider modeling the environment to a luxury yacht that gave the Titanic a nod for inspiration.

                                                           Ship Layout Example
Here we took an example of a plan from Google images and looked at possible places we could place our character. To hint towards that heritage of a 20th century maiden voyage we must bring all the design aspects from the Titanic and place them aboard this vessel. Also we need to place the set environment carefully because with these sort of ships there are potentially multiple levels of luxury. We need to tread carefully and go with a trend of build to not lead to confusion. For example, placing the luxury Suite above the command deck/station. Because then how would the vessel sail if the bridge cannot sea the ocean?

'Under the sea' - Researching styles

On my group blog we have been discussing possible styles for our animation and with this post I want to cement my opinion on the matter. So please if you haven't yet seen our blog please check out www.blueturtlestudios.blogspot.co.uk

I really like the idea of creating 2D flat characters and dropping them into a 3D environment. Of course I understand that we need to first create fixed idea as we are split for choice at this moment in time, but I believe visually that they could use the style to compliment the animation in a selection of ways. I will be posting some storyboards and camera plans soon of our chosen idea to illustrate our intentions more clearly.

So the 2D characters, I would like to present them with flair possibly with animation sounds to symbolize actions and emotions. Initially I had thought of using pixel sounds, they are widely known and something as recognizable as the Pacman death tune or the Mario level up.

 

   Wreck it Ralph arcade machine

 

From the film Wreck it Ralph the perspective of the games machine is that the characters are presented in a 64bit pixelated form. It is when we are transported into this world that we discover that the characters are actually 3D and the only difference is their sizes and builds. All presented in the same sort of style. There are some items that do not translate into 3D and instead become cliché iconic items that are recognizable to the wide gaming community. I think that if we were to implicate this into an animation it would give it energy and form, playing with the use of perspective to open up the world in relation to story.

Researching into Initial Ideas - Rhys and Kyle

So Kyle and myself began scripting together our ideas and beginning to research into possible paths of creation. We had similarities in our initial ideas and we look to further express them by looking at possible styles and audiences. From my last post we both agreed that the following were intriguing for further investigations:
- Fishermen's Jealousy
- Crustaceans changing shells
- Submarine mechanic causes havoc



This animation short was just a bit of test footage for someone's animations, its quite simple and the use of the fixed camera with pan shows the environment smoothly to the audience. Perhaps we can use a fixed camera with a dynamic effect to show time passing and to speed the animation.



After watching this animation we came away with the thoughts that perhaps our idea could have the problem/ broken item being the item that causes success. For this animation it was all about the Polar Bear trying to get a catch and the problem being that the penguin was stealing all the fish.