Its been a while

As stated, it has been a while since the last post, basically due to an extreme case of laziness and zombies on black ops. nevertheless its time to commit, there's been a fair bit going on, vis nav story idea's, character modeling and this C&CS module that pretty naff to be honest. 

So lets start with an up date, the character model. 

to begin with i was kinda struggling with things as in relating what i was creating to the wire frame back plates we were given, i couldn't really get how other could get it all to match, you move one vertex in one view and its out of line in another. i ended up modeling flat, for example, i modeled the front half of the body and then the back. I'm now currently shaping it all together because i have two flat side at the moment that need joining. now having overcome i have to create the hands, like them and the head to the body then pose the character, simples?

Now back to some crazy vis nav stuff, after doing some of the tasks set by Jeremy, which at the time made no sense at all, i finally realise what he was getting at. the concept of creating new words for things and the idea of getting from wheel barrows to bungee jumping is basically a way of creating original idea's. as our time with Jeremy comes to a close i decided to do some more of this to create some story idea's to show and get feed back. A few emails and new stories later this is what I'm aiming for and I'm currently waiting for feedback on this too.. enjoy :) 

DEA - DEJA VU 

The story begins as a 1st person zombie video game, played by and office worker that gets interrupted by the thud of a large stack of files being dropped on his desk by his boss. stressed and tired Darren heads to the staff room for coffee. On route office is in panic, people rushing frantically around, due to Darren's tired state he doesn't take any notice of whats going on. now with a strong cup of coffee Darren sits back at his desk puts his feet up and slowly dozes off. waking several hours later he gets up to stretch noticing the office is empty, again heading to the staff room he sees on the TV there that there has been an extreme stress disorder outbreak driving people to excessive violence. the story goes on to include Darren being chased by his crazed boss. resembling the scenario in the video game, resulting in Darren pushing his boss out of the window and viewing the worlds end as buildings burn and sirens echo.

IDEA - DEJA VU (in shot detail)

- (POV SHOT) character running through city streets
- (CLOSE UP SHOT), showing sweating face, scars etc
- (MEDIUM SHOT) character running still, seems to be running from nothing, 

 then a wave of zombies come running around a corner
- (CLOSE MEDIUM SHOT) boom, "DARREN!", (files dumped on office desk) i need these by tomorrow
- (CLOSE UP SHOT) of screen, GAME OVER in big flashing letters (showing that the character Darren has been playing computer games and has just been interrupted by his boss)
- (MEDIUM SHOT) Darren walks to coffee machine, there is absolute mayhem going on in the background, people rushing around frantically, Darren walking past oblivious
- (CLOSE MEDIUM SHOT) at the coffee machine, still not paying attention to whats going on around him and then retreats back to his office cubicle
- (BUST SHOT) Darren sits back at his desk, stretches and rests his hands behind his head, puts his feet up and falls asleep
- (CLOSE MEDIUM SHOT) Darren awakes hours later, gets up for a stretch to find that the office has been trashed and abandoned
- (POV SHOT) Darren looks left then right out of his cubicle and then heads to the staff room
- (CLOSE MEDIUM SHOT) arriving at the staff room that is also empty, the television is on, flickering from static to the news
- (CLOSE UP) reporters explain that there has been an extreme stress disorder outbreak driving people to excessive violence
- (MEDIUM SHOT) distressed Darren heads back into the office to grab his car keys, once there he hears a low mummer, a slightly snarling sound
- (CLOSE UP) turning to find his boss standing at the entrance of his cubicle
- (MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT) both staring at each other
- (EXTREME CLOSE UP SHOT) eyes twitching, his boss's with an angry twitch and Darren's with a worried look about them
- (BUST SHOT) Darren See's something flashing in the corner of his eye, he turns to See the zombie game and raises his eye brow
- (MEDIUM SHOT) Darren reaches for a compass and stabs it in his bosses neck
- (CLOSE UP SHOT) the boss pulls it out and growls
- (MEDIUM LONG SHOT) a chase begins round the office
- (MEDIUM CLOSE SHOT) Darren trips and a scramble on the office floor, resulting in Darren kicking his boss out of a window
- (BUST SHOT) Darren brushes himself down and looks up
- (CLOSE UP) a shocked expression
- (BUST SHOT)an over the shoulder view out the window at a burning city with sirens going on in the back ground
- (BUST SHOT) still over the shoulder view, Darren says, "deja vu?"
- (CUT TO BLACK) end  

Vis nav's for head cases

Hmm, yes, there's no doubt, vis nav is for the mentals with they're leader being the menteler Jeremy.. (who doesn't seem to have a last name because i cant remember it). Didn't really think to blog about it the other week because i thought it was a one off, all this lateral thinking lark, but no, again a hard start to the lesson as the creative side of my brain was still vacant and far from in any way capable to pump out a crazy idea of some sort. Yet.. out of no where, a burst of madness hit me as what seemed to be my mind going on a mad one. suddenly being able to come out with completely crazy idea's, that some how made sense. Jeremy was handing out random subjects, 2 at a time, and you had to make a few story lines from them, "3 office workers that sleep at work with only 2 sleeping bags" and the other was an "old dart board" started off coming out with the obvious yet simple idea's, the office workers having play offs with the dart board to decide who gets the sleeping bags.. and 15miniutes later i some how came up with the idea of the 3 guys, all board out of their minds came up with a bet to see who could win a race down the fire escape.. in the sleeping bags. topping the idea the third office worker says he recons he could beat the both of them down the fire escape using a random dart board he had under his desk as a skateboard, grinding the hand rail all of the way down. how on gods earth did i come up with that? guess that means i can be fully tagged as one of the crazy clan =/
 
PARTTTT 2

At the moment we are currently doing half of the afternoon with Jeremy and the other half with Michaela, the half spent with Michaela was based on a made up character we had to come up with last week, we had to do thumbnail silhouette sketches of character for practice for our main comic character we have to come up with.. which lead to these results >

"my dads head"

Well, not my dads head, Mark Wallmans to be fair. in last lesson he provided us with a model of his dads head that he had previously made in a tutorial.

He pretty much gave us the head to use as reference and work to work from to create out own head for out corner project. Mark literally modeled his dads head from a plane that he extruded and added edge loops to define the features of the face, he explained that it was important to have good edge flow to match the muscle structure of the face, the same way we had previously done in semester a when doing the organic modeling of the wild cat i created. its still a working progress at the moment, haven't touched it since class yet but plan on continuing tomorrow, need to remember QUADS and EDGE FLOW yeah? 

Nuke it

Nuke.. what a beast, ultimately the more specific images editor.. kind of outdoing photoshop in this particular area, its for comping your render passes all together that you create in Maya for video, and stills. the other day we learnt how to do lighting in Maya, old school. making up the basic key, fill and ambient lights then rendering them out singly. after adding them into nuke and having a basic introduction to the interface we went on to experiment with exposures, layers, lens filters etc.. all the stuff you can do in photoshop and more + it applies to video too. now knowing how to go about creating render passes i can comfortably go on a create the other finishing passes like final gather and amb_occlusions to get the best possible finish =]

An animator that doesnt like animating?

Hmm, to be fair.. not my most favoured topic of the corse, not really into the whole movement side of things, i mean i get animation, the concept and how it works and that its pretty much key, but still, most probably because i don't get how it all works, plan on trying a few tuts to pick it up better and get up to speed. more on this at a later date..




MORE IMPORTANTLY.. hello vis navvv!

possibly my most favourite part of the course. We got the introduction of the new brief, to produce a comic book. Excellent, a 6 - 12 page narrative roughly based around the 7 story outlines of story telling 



i.e. things like the characters desire, his opponent, the battle and so on..


probably going to enjoy this more because the outcome can be digital, meaning concept art, equaling a smile on my face. as well as producing the final comic we also have to do the usual of producing a visual development sketch book our experiments in media colour and styles explored.. all the usual really, again probs why i like this part of the course so much because i like the development process that you have to go through to get to your final outcome and other back up idea's if my first choice doesn't work.
   

From the ground up?

hmm, little stumped at the initial stab at this but it all made sense in the end.. after actually reading the brief, which is to create character model to be placed into a provided corner scene, explaining the Maya file we was giving to work from which was half a foot. 





TOPOLOGY, what on earth, just why?  .. well i know why but god damn you! Slowly working my way just slowly extruding, trying to keep it all quads, it kinda got a bit crowded so it needed tooth picking a bit.. which i wasn't entirely sure how to go about so i just went on and merged a few vertex's, guess il have to wait until till next lesson for crunch time, probs have to have a complete overhaul of it but you learn from your mistakes so i hear, also posted these results on the course forum... http://3dhit.co.uk/index.php?showtopic=18163&st=0&#entry226406 . Will up date on the next installment!

In the beginning...

Well, semester b, a good enough reason to start a work thread../ blog, wanted to document things from now, shows a bit of before and after kind of thing, step by step how i get to where i end up, as well as attempting to show my work off to who ever might venture out to this corner of the net.