old project in a new light

so my last project has been canceled as i mentioned in my previous post.

i have been racking my brain for the past few days on what i will be able to now achieve with the left over time.

about a term and a half left

i've decided not to try and join an existing group, the projects are so far gone now there's no real room for me, jobs are set etc and all the pre visual work is done.

i prefer the pre visual side, script development, character design (not final polished concept work) storyboard side of things.

'Mission Control'

my original pitch at the beginning of the year.

The little girl who visits a space museum, loses her parents and discovers a restricted room. in this room is a rocket ship, she climbs inside and fiddles around. after pressing a few buttons and pulling some leavers the rocket starts to rumble and shoots into space. the girl panics and looks around for some way out of this sticky situation. as the rocket hurtles towards the moon she closes her eyes and hopes nothing too bad will happen. Luckily the ship dips round the moon and starts speeding back down to earth. is this a better situation to be in. the camera shows the outside of the ship flying back down to earth the shot dissolves into a toy rocket in someones hand. then cuts to show the little girl who is safe and sound in the museum flying this toy round. it was all her imagination.

i think this may be too much to try and achieve in such a small time space.

maybe a trailer? yes a trailer could work.

project terminated

bad bad news. Chance Meeting has been terminated. it is no more!

got an email from Joe (project leader) saying that he doesn't feel like enough work has been done and we are not on track to have this project finished in time.
i think this is quite a bit assumption seeing as there hasn't been a solid schedule since day one so things were sort of floating around and was getting done but obviously not as fast as Joe wanted. i think it's totally understandable that the project has been canceled if it's not going as well as first envisioned.

but this does leave me in a bit of a sticky predicament.

what to do?

i mean i've done all this work for this project so far, it's a bit disheartening when you realise it's all for nothing.

whats next? i need to have a think about things...

MatchMover

So my next technical thing to learn is tracking in MatchMover. This is an autodesk program which works really well with Maya, just like how easy it is with the Adobe package.

a lot like the ncloth tutorial there is a tutorial for the basics of MatchMover. Located in the help/tutorial section and the files are supplied so you can complete the same track

it's fairly simple stuff, alot like after effects you pick your point you want to track then it tries to track that point, the quality of the track is shown through colour.
green - good
yellow - ok
red - no good

you keep tracking until you have a decent number of good tracks, then you can import it all into maya which creates a camera and stuff which is very handy. then the camera moves round the points so all the points are put on a level plane.

here is the quick track test i did

ncloth clothes!

rigth like i mentioned before we are planning on using ncloth on our characters.

i have only ever used ncloth for small tests in the past just to get a brief idea of how it works.
so i found a good tutorial. it comes with the autodesk package. you can find it in the help/tutorial section. then they supply the scene files so you have everything they have so you follow the tutorial exactly.

with the dress they give you, you have to line it up with the body. then connect the dress vertexes to the shoulders of the character. make the dress ncloth and make the character model a passive collider so that the cloth reacts to the characters movements.

here are the two videos i got at the end of my experiments.



and now for te walking one.



this worked pretty well as you can see. i plan on implementing these same techniques when it comes to working on the characters on our film.

i now just need to wait for Carlos to finish the models and get the clothes themselves modelled.

next i plan on using matchmover to practice some tracking. i have never used match mover before but hopefully it shouldnt be much different to after effects, or atleast the techniques you need to use.

technical work

so there are a couple of things i need to brush up for this project. One thing is my tracking skills, this is for placing the characters in scene and making sure they stay where they are meant to be if the camera moves. also to keep the tree in place.

the other thing is to build upon my skills in ncloth. We plan on using ncloth for the clothes on our characters. i have used ncloth briefly in tests in the past just for fun etc, just to see how the basics work.
here's an example.



This is very basic ncloth. i will need to work out how to make it work with the passive colliders (the objects that react with the cloth) when they are animated and try to keep the clothes connected to character.

model sheets

here are the finished sheets of the characters so Carlos can model from them.

man front



man side



girl front



girl side

tree trunk

i have decided to use maya to make the base mesh then go into more detail with zbrush.



this is the most basic mesh i then just moved a view vertexes to give it basic shape, then it was time for zBrush.




i then used a couple of different brushes to cut some shape into the trunk. and add texture.



i found a texture online and decided for now to add it to the tree to get an idea of what it could look like once i add the final texture.
using paint effects i managed to create the branches and leaves.

for now this is the final tree.



it's not quite there yet, i think i'm going to have to sit down and think about the texture and how i'm going to make this look like it should. obviously its going to have a lot to do with the compositing and lighting.