Walker Blend Shapes

My very firs blend shapes of Walker. Apperntly I showed Lewis the first ones I did but they were all wrong because, let's say you do a happy expession, all the controls must be sepearte.So you position everything on the face as a seperate element like the eyebrow, eyes, lips etc. One al those are done then when they come together you can pretty much create any emotion you want. Also the file I got was from Dean the eyebrows weren't supposed to be seperate rather built into the mesh itself. So Lew gave me the right file, however I still have concerns with typology of the model, moving some the vertices just causes it to look ugly sometimes. I 'll speak to Lew about that tomorrow.

Anyways in other news I have to make I've allocated the scenes to the guys in our groups. All there is to do is get those updated rigs and start the animation. Next thing to come up on the blog is my lighting skills to fill up the technical folder, no doubt my strongest maybe my artistic folder, or maybe a combination of the artistic and the animantor folder...who knows. Anyways stay tuned.

Walk Test

Yo guys this is my first walk cycle, which I haven't done in a loooong time. It's quite basic and robotic at the moment, however so unless it's a robot its in need of some major tweaking. The animation is based upon the personality of Walker, for the pirates group. Though we never see him walk, this is a test to try and get a feel for his character since I will be animating him. Not much to say on this one, just gotta drill through this.

In other news I have to give people shots to do instead of letting them choose. Personally I think the latter will make things go faster, but if J.B says 'You don't let people choose shots, it's the director's responsability to give it to them. That's how it's sone in the real world.' Then J.B's will be done.

I am Director

Some interesting developments has taken place. Team dummy has decided to change the story again! Hopefully this will be the last time. We still have the dance in there, since J.B really is really crazy about it. The reason it chnaged is because Mu Li really wasn't satisfied with the "flow" of the story, personally I just want to get this project done. So J.B says that Mu Li and I should sort that out together, so we went in deciding each sequence, camera shot and angles. I had to draw each shot out expalaining the sequence, plus come up with a new dance. The storyboard is finally done and I've sent links to my fellow comrades for them to choose a sequence that they would like to handle.

Rumours has been flowing around me lately, my colleagues saying:

Colleague: 'Neil is director!!'

Neil: 'I ain't.'

Colleague 2: 'Seriously mate. You are.'

Neil: 'Aaarrrghhhh!!!!'

Get the point? So Dan dalli says that I am the director since I decide and draw out the shots that the audience will see. Jeeze, anyway in other news I've done some animation practice. It's been ages since I did any so don't be surprised if it looks shite, it's actions are based on Lewis's Walker character.

Here's an explanation of the sequence:

Sequence 1: The film fades in and we hear the artist working on his computer, at this moment the camera slowly zooms back until the male dummy is in view. Then artist stops typing and we hear him turning his PC off and walking out the room. During this the camera will rotate clockwise 180 behind the dummy, the last sound the audience will hear is the door closing.

The dummy will jump off from his pedestal and take a look at the photograph, the poster and then the photo again. He looks to the left and right and realises he is all alone, he sits at the edge of the desk, camera zooms out birds eye view and fade out.

Sequence 2: The next day the audience enters a time lapse. During this we see things moving about over the period of the day until it becomes night time again. We see a box appear.

Sequence 3: The box shakes and the flap opens up above. The female dummy pokes her head out looking around and climbs out. Cut to the male dummy noticing her and he begins to try and get her attention by wiggling about. Cut to the female looking across at him and then breaks the fourth wall by turning to the screen and shaking her head.

Sequence 4: Cut to male stop shaking and jumping off his pedestal. He walks over to her as she sits there on the box. The male dummy looks at some papers on the desk, makes a paper aeroplane and throws it at her. She acts in annoyance as the male dummy laughs and tries to stop when he realises when it wasn't a good idea.

Sequence 5: The female dummy pouts crosses her arms and turns away. The male dummy hangs his head in shame and notices a coin. He flips it up and begins to roll and balance the coin like a basketball over his arms. He quickly loses control and it drops on the floor. He goes into a flexing pose to make it look like it was on purpose, but she turns away again.

Sequence 6: He looks down again, fustrated he kicks the coin and it rolls onto the wacom tablet, making a line on the screen. Cut to the female dummy looks towards the screen. The male dummy takes a step and a foot print appears on screen. Cut to female looking even more interested.

Sequence 7: He looks back at the female and raises his eyebrows up and down. He takes 2 big steps on the wacom and cut to 2 prints appear on screen. He starts to dance side to side as more prints appear. We are then shown a variety of quick cuts of close ups of the legs dancing, the prints appearing on screen and the feamale dummy looking entertained.

Sequence 8: Camera cuts to a birds eye view of male dummy spinning and the camera spinning in opposite rotation to give a "disco fever" kind of feel. Cut to low angle shot of male dummy sliding towards and over the camera only to fall over the edge of the wacom tablet and hit his head on the desk.

Sequence 9: The female dummy jumps down from the box. Cut to first person view of male dummy looking up at the female dummy extending her arm out to him. Cut to mid shot of the male dummy taking her hand and getting up. The screen in the background shows the hear with the arrow across it. Fade out.

The Loooong intro

This is the long version. This hapened becuase of Mu Li and J.B input together, then Mu telling me to add in extra bits such as very slow zooming out, then panning and rotating etc. The vid speaks for itself.

The intro sequence Dummy

This is the intro I did for dummy, it lasts about 20 seconds. This version has no sound at the momnet but I was animating it according to the SFX of the artist. In this version the credits will be shown on the wall and various objects in the room. The reason for the pause is, when the artist stops his typing. From that point the rotation of the dummy, all the way to the point where the camera stops behind him, is when the artist turns off his computer, gets up, walks away and closes the door. That signals the end of the intro.

Back to Animation

This is the new design of the torch. The one before has been redesigned because of what the torch does in the new beginning of the Pirates animatic. In one of the scenes the torch rolls off the guard's scooter and down to the floor. So Lewis says to make it a cylinder and take awau the handle. He also wanted a flip swith and though I tried to place one in, it only served to mess up the geometry of the model more. So we agreed to do a simple button instead.

The torch has 3 extruded surfaces for improved grip, not too difficult for my modelling skills.

Here is the back view of the torch. A nice accidental modelling happened at the back of the torch, there is a little indent at the back which I'm somewhat proud of.

Lastly this is the front, to get the lense right I thought I need to cut a sphere in half and combine it to the front. However all I needed was to just get the edge tool and make a circle on the len's surface and then pull out the middle a bit to give it a more curve feel. Well it's more or less done now. Got another job that needs to be done for Lewis. Whatever could it be?