Pre-Production starts NOW!!! aka 2 months ago!

Woah! I've been WAY behind on blogging so I better get my ass into shape and get going with showing everyone all my stuff!!

Sooooo for pre-production me and my buddy Joe O'Connor are working on a VFX action sequence together with aliens and soldiers and spaceships and explosions and everything!! We want a strong piece of music to contrast the war that's going on between the humans and the aliens. All the designs have been done, some may be tweaked a bit, and the final Animatic is ready ... but let's start from scratch shall we?

This is basically what Joe said on his blog. He's better with words so I'll just copy and paste most of it here as well since we are directing the same film:
"We were inspired a lot by the Halo Reach Advert 'Deliver Hope' and wanted to create a piece with a similar focus on atmosphere and mood. We want it to be epic and want to have a strong soundtrack to it, as this seems very important. Although we are focusing a lot on the mood and feel of the piece, we still need a narrative to give meaning to the visuals. We have made an animatic of our first draft of storyboards which I think gives a pretty good idea of what we are going for. We have chosen a piece of music that has inspired us but we will not use this in our final piece but I think it helps to set the scene. Bare in mind that no character designs have been done at this stage." - Joe O'C

Here's the Halo: Reach 'Deliver Hope' trailer we were inspired by, just to give you an idea of what we are going for with our film and to help visualise our animatics:



Here's what we came up with for our first animatic (mine are the crappy looking drawings ... Joe decided he wanted to make his look amazing for even the first animatic, so now you can tell who did which ... I reckon he was just trying to make me look bad haha!):

VFX Animatic 01 from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

Quick explanation of story:
First shots show some establishing shots to give an idea of what's going on, but not showing too much so we can build some tension/atmosphere. A war is going on between humans and aliens as they've come to dig into earth for resources. The story follows a loan soldier who's been injured in battle and reawakens to find himself stuck in the middle of it. His aim is to get to the giant alien weapon that shoots down the Fighter Jets so that he can reprogramme it to shoot at and destroy the alien Mothership. The film follows his struggle to get to this weapon and to save mankind!

For our 2nd Animatic we cut a lot of it down because it was too long and a lot of it didn't need to be included for it to still be readable. We also redrew some of the shots and coloured the main character yellow as some people found it hard to understand who to follow through the film:

Major Project Animatic 02 from Joe O'Connor on Vimeo.

For our 3rd Animatic we rethought some shots and thought of ways to make them more action orientated, basically to make them look more dynamic and interesting for the viewer. We also changed the action sequence on the roof so instead of bashing through the door and shooting the 3 aliens at the control panel, the Hero throws a flash grenade from the stairwell and blinds them before running up the stairs and shooting them point blank. This gives it a bit more change of pace and gives a bit more variety in the film rather than always only shooting the aliens to kill them:

Animatic 3 from Joe O'Connor on Vimeo.

....................

These are pretty hilarious!

To get some of the camera angles and poses for the characters right for our animatics we took photos of each other and collaged them together to draw the shots

Here are some pretty funny examples to show you, just for shits and giggles:

Biker Mice From Mars!

For our second Specialist Project of the year we had to recreate an existing 2D character and bring it to life in the 3D world sooooo I decided to recreate Modo from Biker Mice From Mars!
I loved watching Biker Mice as a kid so this project gave me a great opportunity to model one of the characters.
I chose Modo out of the 3 Biker Mice because of his Mechanical Arm and Eye-Patch makes him less symmetrical than the others and therefore pushes my modelling skills

Here's the Final result:

Character Turnaround - (Modo) Biker Mice From Mars from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

Here are the Maps I created for Modo and his Armour:



... and some Rendered Stills of his model:

Environment

So 3rd year is here already! ... how time flies when you're working hard!
First project back and I had to build an environment using Maya
Never used Maya before so it was a bit of a challenge getting used to the interface etc. but it was a nice project to get used to the programme ... bit annoying at times, but still

I didn't want to go with the typical boring building and simple backdrop design for my environment so I decided to design a funky, Tim Burton inspired Tree House instead

Here's a couple of Pre-Viz's I made for the Tree House so you get an idea of the design and mood I was going for with my environment:



I like the rain and lightning Pre-Viz but I thought I'd go with the purple sky Pre-Viz instead because there's a better contrast so it makes the Tree stand out more

Here's a video showing Turnarounds of different passes etc. and a slightly dodgy Fly-Through of my environment:

Tree House Environment from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

If anyone's interested what Maps I used for each part of my environment, here they are:

Tree:

House:

Lantern:

Sky:

Mini Trees:

Mound:

Mist:

Transform v.02

My second attempt at the transform, piecing together the character sequence!
This one worked a lot better ... this time I kept the Mesh Smooth modifier on the character then broke it up into pieces
It looks a lot smoother than v.01 but you can still see the shape of some of the pieces so it looks a bit off still, but it's getting closer to how I want it to look


I used bigger pieces this time around so it's not as fancy as v.01, so it's more of a quick test to see if this technique works:

Transform v.02 from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

Transform v.01

Me and Joe O'Connor are gonna be making a film together this year which, so far, revolves around a VFX fight scene. The story and what-not isn't there yet but we've been throwing some ideas out there and one of mine was to have like an Iron Man-esque sequence where the CG character builds around the Live Action character.

Here's a video from the Iron Man film (can't remember which one!) to help demonstrate what I mean:



This sequence is brain-frying-ly difficult to work out exactly how they do it, but from my 2 years in uni, I have some ideas of how it's done
I've been experimenting with my Elephant character from last year's project and trying to make him build together to form the full model
I basically broke the model up into many many pieces and animated them to look as if they are building together to form the Elephant ... before breaking it up I took off the Mesh Smooth modifier and then put it back on once the piece was broken, and I think, as a result, you can clearly see all the separate pieces! (which does not look nice!) ... once the pieces finished forming the Elephant I replaced the pieces with the fully formed, animatable model, so you can see a jump from pieces to smooth so it looks really weird!
It looks pretty cool so far and I really like the idea but the pieces are an eye sore at the moment and looks pretty cheap ... so this is a Work In Progress!
Still more work to do with getting the sequence right, but for now, here's what I've been working on:

Transform v.01 from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

p.s. Fail of my Life! just realised at the end of the video you see the "pieces" Elephant in the corner of the screen! ... oh well, it is a WIP :)

DaniSaur Textured

Texture is finally done!!
Danie was away in Greece for a couple of weeks while I was working on the texturing so I had to wait for her to get back before finishing bits and bobs off, just to make sure it was what she wanted for the character.
Luckily she liked it and here's the final result!

BODY!

UVW Unwrap:
Diffuse:
Normal Map:
Specular:

TONGUE!

UVW Unwrap:
Diffuse:
Normal Map:
Specular:

TURNAROUND! (included some Ambient Occlusion in there as well to make him look a bit more solid)

DaniSaur Textured from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

DaniSaur!!

Over the summer I wanted to do lots and lots of work ... but that hasn't happened because of things getting in the way etc. as it is summer after all :) BUT i have been working on my friend/house mate's character for her, DaniSaur!
She originally started the model off and I worked from what she gave me and following her design
It's going to be the "face" of her blog as you can see here :
http://danimation-x.blogspot.com/
... so a lot of pressure for it to look good haha!


Here are some snapshots of what Danie had given me to work off:








And here's a Turnaround video of the finished model:

DaniSaur Turnaround from Aled Matthews on Vimeo.

NOW TO UNWRAP & TEXTURE!!