Concept Art and Story Changes

I spent most of the past week refining the body rig and working on the face rig.
i spent way more hours than I expected to finish up the rigging so I didn't have enough time to finish a pre-vis. I did however paint up a quick concept piece for the scene in which the carver holds up the carving.



Additionally, I did some thinking about the story and have decided on some changes. Rather than walk away to look at a book, the carver will get a wooden case from the shelf that contains a collection of carvings of mythical creatures with one open slot. He'll reach down to put the new carving into the case and then realize it is gone and the story will continue as planned. There will be an additional ending scene where after retrieving the carving the character will place it into the open slot in the case, thus finishing his collection. Also, instead of carving the piece he may be painting it when the animation starts.

Pre-vis 3

A third version of the previs for the animation is up. The timing is much closer to what it will be in the final and the final model with a preliminary rig has taken the place of the robot place holder.

I will also include the storyboards that I completed previously.

Jervo Week Homework 2

All of my menus that will be used for the dvd. "Play All" and "Artwork" will not need menus as they will launch right into their content from the main menu.

Previs 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr_pNqaUva8

Digital Figure Sculpture

Last quarter I took an independent study in digital figure sculpting. I sat in on a figure drawing class twice a week and drew from a model. Outside of class I worked with Maya and zBrush to create a human male digital model. It worked out great because I got experience in organic modelling and had the opportunity to draw from a life, one of my favorite things in the world. I started with a base mesh in Maya using a figure drawing book as reference. Once I had a simple base mesh I imported it into zBrush where I sculpted the detail. Later using zBrush's "tranpose tool" I molded the figure into a version of a classical sculpture of Zeus. Thanks to Jake Nichols for the model of the column. It was created for our midterm animation (which will be done soon, hopefully) and I just went in to the project files and snagged it for this project. My professor wanted me to put the figure into a background but I was never able to render the figure so the windmill made an appearance as a backdrop composited in Photoshop. All in all it was a good experience to try something new and have fun.

I'll post the drawings I did in the class later on.











T-Pose Turntable

Posed Turntable

DVD Menu Mock-Up

Animatic

I changed my project timeline a bit for this week. Rather than taking up more time on new storyboards I decided to jump right into an animatic. Building the proxy geometry helped me to visualise the shots and figure out exactly what I need for each one. I used a model and rig from an earlier project as a stand-in. I intend to have a sequence of establishing shots that bookend the animation that I did not include in the animatic.

Animatic

Next week I will focus on refining this animatic and modeling the set and character.