Final Management Reflection

Final Management Reflection

Some of the management tools we used was a Gantt chart to distribute tasks equally through 3 months time we had to develop the project. The work plan was to divide the process in three stages: the first one, assets production. In this stage we create the models of the characters, environment, textures, rigging. This part was the most extensive of the project and in this way it was planned. The second one, animation, lighting and render. In this stage we introduced all the assets into the actual development process. The third stage, post-production we made the composition, sound and edition. We also have a fourth stage that is not complete yet which is the distribution of the short-film. We are planning to participate in different festivals that can give recognition to the film and to the directors, Daniel and I.

A management issue which was difficult to manage was the times of the project for accomplishing this stages. At the beginning we planned that the first stage, assets production only take us 1 month. However, the reality was that it took us 2 months of 3, which was the total time we had. The initial idea was 1 month for assets production, 1 month for animation and the third month for post-production. The timing issue left us short time for animating that we strongly needed that result also in shortening the time for post-production. This last stage we wanted to have enough time because we got external financial and expert support for music and sound effects. As a result, we could accomplish the short film in time but the music is incomplete. Somethings to improve in this area is have a backup plan, we should looked for a theme song that we can use freely and without any copy right meanwhile we can finish our final music. In this stage we also had to work with other artists like the composers, we tried to be on time for him to have the music, short time but it was there, however the composer got sick and he couldn't performance his job to the submission deadline. We are going to finish this issue in the coming weeks with the objective to have a very quality film short for the festival awards.

Some management issues as a group was the balance of ideas. we were only two people making all the short and we had to take a lot of decision. It was hard to take the decisions mainly because some times we disagree and couldn't reach consensus. In this way, it would be better to have another person in the group to define in number the decision. A management issue that could improve was the constant feedback in all stages. It's not enough with tutors and team matte opinions, It's essential during the process to identify the mistakes, shortcoming and hits of the project in order to improve the result.

Final Critical Reflection

Final Critical Reflection

Some of the most interesting learning outcomes of the course was the process of art and design and how it relates to inspiration artefact and forefront practices. This mixture really gives to the creative process a string methodological approach that can show results in the artefact. At the beginning we had a scrip but I as art and design director had to find a way to express with images the art concepts that we wanted to evidence. The use of reference was a very important technique to define the look of the short film and the personality of the characters. For example The Pink Panther was one of the biggest influencers that's not just help to define the look how also the characters move and interact in the short film.

In this way, you can see that the characters have long legs, this special physical characteristic gives to the character a funny, mysterious, non conventional way to walk as old style cartoon; very exaggerated in its movements. In the same way, The kid hair styles are a classic of cartoons like Dennis the Menace, which tried to evoke a rouge personality. All this elements from inspiration and undestanding of artistic artefacts contributed to each characteristic of the art and design of the film.

Other learning outcome of this short film was the understanding of the animation concepts. We have learned from class all the concepts and theory like weigh, overlapping, timing, spacing, however, you I only start learning when I have to apply it in the real animation. It's only practice the tool and technique to success in a well done animation. For example, in the rigging process of the Thief character we needed a lot of squash and stretch to achieve our goal of a more cartoon style which doesn't answer extrictly to physical laws. since we had a exaggerated look we needed a exaggerated animation in special in thief character. After, a lot of practice I achieved a very well done rigging with excellent performance that can performance a very smooth animation that express exaggerated movements but in a proportional way. 

One important learning outcome is how the communication of the story has to link with the technical development and movements that can contribute with the telling of the story. In this way, we didn't have dialogues between the characters, in result we used other techniques to communicate like the facial expressions. There is a big difference of techniques in these two characters: one is the use of controls to change the geometry and the other much simpler and clever is using 2d textures, which allocated a sequence of images of the expressions to a 3d object. The most interesting issue of using this 3D and 2D technique was that it separated the two main characters conceptually, It clarifies that they come from different worlds and realities.

Finally, what I learned is the importance of lighting and compositing in a short film. We had a final animation, however it couldn't reflect in many moments the atmosphere and the feeling we wanted the audience to feel through our visuals. In this way the lights and the composition are great tools to give the final look and feel that transmit emotions to an audience.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 33

Wire Cutters [Animated Short]

It's the story of 2 robots that are looking for resources in an unoccupied desert. At the beginning they were working together, however something happens that show that these robots have a bit of human inside.

The look, story and the characters are pretty similar to WALL-E from Pixar, even how they communicated with each other is  the same. The aim to bring this short film as inspirations is that the distribution mechanism is something that my group wants to achieve. They used a very good network of student awards and art festival to make their work recognize, which is the same mechanism we are hoping to use. It that way, I think is important to see how the work from other students that have been in different Festivals get recognized and finally released to the public view. 

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 32 Stop-motion & 3D printing

One very interesting trend in 3D world is the mixture of traditional animation, stop-motion and 3D printing. In this particular movie of Boxtrolls produced by Laika they used stop motion to make most of the movie but used VFX to make more complex animations and environments. I think this kind of interesting techniques where 3D is used also as a support to traditional gives to the production new perspectives. It makes some processes easier and faster however keeping the charming of traditional stop-motion features. The main characters are Trollbox which are part box, part troll and live in the fictional town of Cheesebridge. This funny creatures are hunted in its fictional town for being evel by a wolf vigilante. In the middle of this background the Boxtrolls raised a child which they saved from the street.

The making of the movie involved the building of Cheesebridge in a very small stage and the citizens were hand-made puppets controlled by actors. The faces changes all the time which involved near 400 stuff in Laika Studio. The movie keeped the same traditional stop-motion however 3D printing was introduced to help in the creation of every possible expression, first modelled in computer and the printed out. This was a very complex process but it achieved a outstanding level of perfection in the mechanical of the faces. In this way, Laika pushed the boundaries of animation and innovate to be in the forefront.

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 31

I finished this week with the walking sequence of the generic character for our short film which is a variation of the Thief but with different customs and expressions. In that way we had the basic movement. The evaluation of the week was very good, however I took a lot of time learning how to make the walking sequence look good, in that way I will have to improve my timing to have the short film done in time. At the beginning, I had clear animation concepts, overlapping, weight, posture. However, when I started animating, I used them all in one sequence. Causing the movements as walking to look exaggerated. This fact made me think and realized that despite all the concepts are very important it doesn't mean that every concept should be obvious to make look good an animation, each item must be used in a good measure to have a natural and perfect outcome. Animation movements as jumps or shock expressions have clearly evidenced all these concepts in its actions, but when the character needs for the history a more normal, more relaxed performance is no need to make these concepts exaggerated. Before I undestood this, I had to re-done the movements using the animation concepts in a less notorious measures to achieve a better animation shot. To conclude, learning how to do something for the first time always takes time and you have to be prepare to learn and apply it in the most effective way.

Creative and technical process: Week 31. Recording References

I already had the tools, the rigging process perfectly done, books as I told before the "The Survival Animation Kit" , documentation. However, something that it's not written or documented anywhere is the personality of your own characters that also impacts how they move to really connect with the story and its feelings, the animation is not complete without this guided personality movements. We recorded ourselves acting as each character and thus give that touch of personality that needed our animations. Based on that, we tried to reflect it on 3D character animations to give a human fluid motion but also to reflect on their feelings in its movements. Another way to guide my work was my own corporal movements, I guided myself with the movements of my arm bending or my legs to understand fully the human anatomy. The image above shows the walking sequence of the character the Kid, we were trying to run as our character, a very happy child which see the world as a big game; having this in mind, we make very jumpy movements and dancy movements to denote the Kid's hapiness and attitute.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 31 Art Station

This week I would like to talk about ArtStation www.artstation.com. It's a platform to showcase the best 2D and 3D artists. The platform was created in Montreal due the need fo artists to showcase their work in an easy way and contact with potential recruiters and companies for jobs. It has very interesting tools as you can see the best artworks chosen by the community, they are features for the quality and originality of the piece. However artists also can be selected to be featured the Trending category, which are the works that are more viewed by the public. It also has filters to see works in Traditional and Digital 2D and 3D. In that way, It also works very well as an inspiration tool to enrich the creation process due its easy and very visual way. The platform also has a Jobs category when you can see the latest jobs offered in the industry. I also works very well to create your own Portfolio open to see to all the public and you can have followers of your work and follow other connecting your work with others in the community. In conclusion, I think what is important of this kind of tools for an Animator and a 3D artisit is to always be in the forefront of what tools are leading to showcase your job, it's not enough to be good you also have to do a hard work promoting yourself. This process can be difficul to artists that don't hav a very commercial or marketing ideas but thanks to this platforms is easier to connect with potential clients.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 30 "Substance Painter"

Substance Painter isa very good tool to texturize and make shaders for objects and create a very detail and rich effect finishes. It gives the artist the option to choose from a big variety of brushes and materials to paint the texture in real time cerating maps until 4K of resolution. This quality make this tool to be in the forefront of interactive 3D painting. Further more, the artist can use particles to paint with physics, making possible to create rain effect in the surface. Substance Painter is used for texture and draw shaders especially for video games, has the functionality to create normal, especulars, beauty. It has very interesting tools for dirt, rust, scratches and create asymmetric textures. It also can be used for film productions but its strength is video games, due its capacity of saving file information and weight in maps, which is very much valuable in video games production. However, I haven't use this tool I think it gives high quality textures using new technology and tools to improve 3D artists works. 

References:

Allegorithmic (2014) Substance Painter 3D World CG Awards 2014 [Online] Availabel at: https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter [Accessed 2nd of August of 2015]

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 30

This week we started the animation process, my partner and I split some files to start working. We realized that the scene objects were very small compared with the characters mainly because they were made by two different people, so we needed some organization, however it was adjusted and fixed to all the components to be well proportioned. We began with simple things to animate like walked sequences, easy expressions to get practical skills and then start more difficult movements. So in this way approaching the animation in fist little steps helped us to approach the process in a way more manageable and suitable way according to our skills. My reflexion for this stage is that at first I didn't know how to do many things, like the walking cycle and the best way to learn is guiding the process with references. Richard Williams author of "The Animator's Survival Kit", he has many walguide and tool to create my own walking sequences. Williams has examples of timing and body positions that help me and enrich my learning process. The evaluation of this week was good we sorted out difficult issues and advanced in the animation process. 

Creative and technical process: Week 30. Alembic Cache

Some problems found in the first stages of animation was that I needed to create a scene with six characters interacting, however I couldn't get more than three characters in a single file. I spent two weeks trying to solve this problem, because it lead to an error in the rendering process. At first I tried to make different files, liek layers, a file had two characters and one that had other two, expecting that in that way I could joing all together to the complete scene. It worked for us in the beginning, but our tutor taught us that this was not a usefull way to make a composion. In orther to address it correctly we learned to use Alembic catche. A tool that helps animator to transfer assets. It exports the animated mesh of the animated object (our characters) without having any Rigg that was the error Maya shown for rendering; in that way, the character came to the scene animated and ready. However, this is a very usefull tool that also can be used to transfer assets in a work team, some of the short comings is taht the objects come without textures and you have to assign it all again.

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 29

This week I finished the process of facial expressions through the Blend Shapes technique. However the process didn't take a long of time it required a maximum attention to details and try to imagine all the possible movements a character should do in the animation process. It was very interesting to see how the facial expressions make a big part of character personality and emotions; how important it's to create expressions that despite they are not realistic because it’s a cartoon style character still can show the human feelings and connect with the audience. I had to make all the expressions first myself with my face and friends to have an idea to make it the most natural as possible. Therefore, I think animation should always have a natural approach to connect with audience feelings. However, this process it's not always easy, replicate very natural expressions that we think are spontaneous requires a very detail approach from the artist in its process of capture reality and convert it in cartoon style without losing its instinctive look. 

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 29 "Wall and Chain"

One trend which is clearly influencing 3D animation is the rising of NPR, non-photorealistic rendering where 3D artistes instead of creating a realistic aesthetic are creating more visual and aesthetic animations linked with impressionist and hand-drawn finishes. The inspiration film that evidences this trend is Wall and Chains from the company AirBnB, which despites having a clear commercial purpose it evokes a very artistic and classical painting in art.  The story of the short recreates a man who was attached to a wall which represented its feelings from a Berlin divided form east to western. The story tells how through AirBnB he can overcome its own feelings and bring down his owns barriers. The characters are pictured like pastel drawings and have the same movements and smoothness as it were painted with a brush; however we know is 3D art it’s very interesting how 3D can takes so many faces and finishes making the possibilities limitless.  

References:

Creative Bloq (2014) 5 new animation trends for 2015 that will change everything, Creative Bloq. Available at:  http://www.creativebloq.com/3d/animation-trends-2015-111413522. [Accesed 25th August 2015]

Creative and technical process: Week 29. Blend Shapes Maya

This week I made the process of creation and animation of the facial expressions of the characters. I used a very useful tool in the 3D artist's background, BlendShapes. This technique is used to deforme an object in a determine way from the original model. In this way, I first copied the face in its original state and the from the copy I modified it to create another facial expression, like moving the mouth. The BlendShape tool creates a shape transition between this two models, making the animation of the facial expression natural and fluid. The deformations of the objects are controlled by a controller for each specific area. I made an special effort for create a user interface to manage easily the movements of the face like eyebrows, eyes, etc. making the animation process easy. In this way, when the animator has to modified the mouth for example he doesn't has to go inside each component to modify it, instead he can do it from the user interface of controllers I made; also making possible make differentes movements like eyes and mouth at the same time.

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 28

The rigging process of the two main characters was successfully finished. Some of the interesting applications of animation concepts into this stage was the use of strength and squash principle. It was used to make the Thief character more cartoon in its movements in a stylized way. In the other hand, the Kid character didn't used this principles because we wanted it to look more realistic. The skin took a long time, so I have to improve and make it more effective to my work. Some of the challenges in the rigging process was the difference of anatomy of the two characters, the Kid is a human so it was easy to know its anatomy function to make the movements. However, the Thief is a cartoon abstraction of humans not the same, it hasn't hips, so it was a challenge to make the rigging. furthermore, I would take in account in the future the invented character anatomy to start working.

Creative and technical process: Week 28. Maya Expressions

The Expression editor of Maya has been a very useful tool to give exact motion to particular objects that need a cyclic or specific movement. Also it's a very good way to add behaviors and attributes to objects besides the actual rigging. In that way you can have a character arm moving in X settled by rigging, but at the same time it's escalated through expressions. In that way it works to open the possibilities of actions. However, some technical problems I faced is that the programming language is complex and required a high learning curve. In consequence the expressions I could create are basic like rotating or escalating the objects. I used it to scale the arms and legs of the characters which at the same time do their walking or jumping movements. In that way, I accomplish the cartoon effect in the movement that the project desired.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 28 "Chamelot"

Camelot Animated Short is a great example in how to be in the forefront of animation techniques and aesthetic. The history which takes as reference a mythic and historical place as Camelot reinvent itself with a new scene of characters, the cats and the Camelot cat world is a very interesting concept that feeds in an actual love for these funny animals. The technique that it used for movements animation, it's very interesting and applicable for projects like ours, "The Ideas Thief" which has short time and staff to develop. The movements are short and cut, they go straight forward from its start point to its end point. It generates a look and feel of cartoon animation and however it's not fluid it looks well finished and in coherence with the full animation. In that way, the history makes a good integration with the animation style and esthethic of the short film.

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 27

This week has been very important for the project. We basically finished the rigging process of the first main character, The Thief. It showed us that the rigging took much longer time that we expected. Basically, because we have to learn extra techniques and knowledge we didn't expect to require. In that way, applying the strength and squash required the learning of the expressions tool of Maya. However, It's difficult to keep on time the project, it's important to have in mind as core principle of the animation the quality of the product and all that it takes as its highest learning curve. Despite the time constraints, this new knowledge in the first main character helped to improve in the remaining characters, making the next riggings easier than the first one and with quality improved results.

In conclusion, animation it's not a straight way path, it requires continuous and constant improvement to have quality results. The time which takes to learn and improve will have great benefits in the future processes for an animation film and also for the personal professional development of the animation professional. 

Creative and technical process: Week 27. Constraints in Maya

One of the key points of the process has been the use of Constraints in Maya as a vital tool for rigging. This tool helps you to set the position, scale or the orientation fo an object in relation to other, however the interesting thing about constraint is that you can settle specific parameters that made automatic animation easier. You can use the Point constraint to make the linked relation to the position of and object. You can use the aim constraint to follow an objective which can be an object, a light, anything without matter the position. You can use orient and scale constraints to match other object's properties simultaneously. You can use the parent constraint to link one object position to follow a target parent object.

As is shown in the image, the project used for this case a point constraint. The advantage of use constraint against other techniques as Parent them, It's that Constraint allows freedom of behaviour for the linked object, so as an example you can have object 1 move right and object 2 move left. With Parent option you can't do this beacause the objects linked will always move as its parent.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 27 Pinksword of the Bibu

The animation short Pinkword of the Bibu by BIBU team helped us as inspiration in the texturing and lighting process of our short. The aesthetic has a strong use of cartoonish gestures that express and communicate the story without words only managing environmental sounds. This helped us as reference of a good practice applicable in our story. At the same time, the lighting and colors were bright and changed to communicate characters movements or events; we applied it in our film The Ideas Thief creating lighting environments darker or lighter depending of the story development, with strong contrasting colors that stand out and givie it an unique style.

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 26

This week the process has been on schedule, the texturing process for the two main characters is done. Some of te reflections this week for animation students is always look for examples and guides to develop processes. One of my favorite pages is digital tutors, this kind of places have really nice tutorials to base and check, and can help you with your project. An animation professional have always to be in constant reseach of the easiest and best ways of do projects and have a strong personality for self-learning, to get always the best results. If the tutorials are not enough you can also make use of the community of the web-site when people inside can help you.

The conclusion of the week is satisfying and in accordance with the plan, always stay researching for technical guidance and esthetic inspiration.

Creative and Technical Process: week 26. Textures

This week I advance in the texturing process to the other character, Kid. I used the same tools than the first character, the Thief. Mari and UVLayout. However the process was easier this time due to previuos practice. Some of the practices that I applied to make the texturing finishes more real is the use of real skin textures, applied in the skin of the Kid. This improve the finishing textures, not having solid and plane colors instead more mixed, and in this way more near to reallity. The final colors of the clothing and general style of the character were pulled together from the sketches, trying different colors to match. Experimenting with colors was a nice practice this week to create a consistent aesthetic.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: Week 26 Fer Aguilera Reyes

Fer Aguilera Reyes, is a 3D Concept artist. I found his work particularly interesting beacause the use of colors. The above illustration is called Mambacore inspired from African Masks. The design of the character is also very creative, it integrates african simbolism and mechanical futuristic aesthetics. The application of colors is specially inspiring, despite the character shows a dark personality, the colors are bright and contrasting. It's not necessary to use always dark colors to reflect a dark personality in the development of characters. At the same time, I found that applying colors in the same color range could add a personal and strong style.

References: 

Aguilera, F. (2015) CGSOCIETY. Available at: http://pigmachine.cgsociety.org/ [Accessed 29/06/2015]

Evaluation and Reflection: Week 25

This week we have seen the importance of a good planning process in the development of an animation. Our development was slowed down due to changes in the original design of the characters, making us start again the process of texturing and skin, going a step back in the time table and also putting in wait the other process ahead as Animation, this will make the time shorter for this step in the project.

This teach us, that delays in a project are always possible and we have to be able to solve them and react to them to not harm the other steps in the process; in that way, the time table of the projects should always have a little bit more time not the exact time, for dealing with unexpected situations. This also showed us the importance of making trials to the chracters first with colleagues or third persons that can maybe see mistakes that the Designer have not seen, this feedback process should always be present in the first steps, to avoid this kind of delays.

Creative and Technical Process: week 25 UVLayout

This week we have been particularly working in the development of the textures, normally this is a difficult process in programs as Maya or 3dsMax. UVLayout makes this process easier, faster and automatic, some of the difficulties I have firstly with this programs was to understand the interface because is not intuitive and the shortcuts are very different from other programs, so it takes a while to understand it.

The tools that I have learnt in this program that has specially helped me are the Simetry, in this way the process that you do in one side it automatically is replicated in the other side as Simetry. Other tool is Relax vertices, this helped to make more curved and fluid the vertices to adjust more easily and perfect in the image of the texture. The images in the top shows the process of texturing in UVLayout of the Character Kid, you can see how a complex organic model can be generate easily the textures.

Inspiration Artefact and Forefront: week 25

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, E3 2015 showed the newest and innovative projects in the video game industry. However, one of the most impressive launching was the Star Wars: Battle of the Sun, Developed by EA Dice it had the biggest queus by fans and players of the franchise. The trailer( See bellow) was a spectacular piece of art that compiled in video the gameplay and story of the game. The trailer despite of showing the game play it was developed to have cinematographic elements. They used the most representative icons of Star Wars. Starting from the star troopers in the battle field of the first scene of the secons Star Wars move until the final of the film showing the Battle between Luke Skywalker and Darth vader.

The Aesthetic is very much related to the movie, clean not loaded, following actual and modern trends. The music also reflected the excitement and suspense of the game. Being update in projects and Events in the industry is very important for an Animation professional nad shows a deep understanding of the fronthead of the field.

References:

Fenlon, W. (2015) Star Wars Battlefront: fun, sprawling, and worryingly simple. Pc Gamer. Available at http://www.pcgamer.com/star-wars-battlefront-fun-sprawling-and-worryingly-simple/ [Accessed 21/06/2015]

Evaluation and Reflexion week 24

This week we have almost finished the design of the characters, however the tutor advice to us that the principal character the "Thief" was too simple and lack of personality, it was not showing a strong presence as expected. 

Due this feedaback we took design decisions for this character which included making more definition in body parts as muscles, calves, knees, in this way the body was more defined and visually stronger. 

In the same way we worked in the design of the body’s extremities as hands and feet, adding more detail and accesories to give a more interesting and appealing look; we design special gloves and boots with and industrial aesthetic, to make the character look a Little bit tougher in that way representing a better way the role of bad guy in the short film.

The changes in the design of the characters slowed us in the process, because we had to remake some things again, as the textures, the skin because the information was different so we have to change it again to match the new design.

Creative and technical process: Week 24

The Gesture of the characters was designed to aesthetically match the concept and development of the history, in that way the character "Kid" is going to use 3D modelled gestures appearing a more realistic aesthetic, however the character "Thief" is going to use a mix of 2D and 3D aesthethic to simulate a more close relation with cartoons and for the purpose of the concept the world of imagination. 

The technique used is animated textures, which is based in the creation of sequences of gesture maps, applied it in the 3D model and animate it, in this case using the "Blend Shape" tool of Maya. Some of the problems that I have faced in the application of this technique are: The gestures are made in an image sequence which is linked to the timeline by default which makes difficult the process, after researching and watching tutorials, I have to disconnect the image sequence from the timeline, and connect it instead to an attribute, in this way each image form the sequence is equivalent to a number attribute. This process made the animation of the gestures much more easier and faster, at the same time more automated. Some of the images of this process:

References:

Willie, Z. (2012) Maya/Rigging: Using Animated Textures. Vimeo [Online] Availabe at: https://vimeo.com/38122472 (Accessed 13th June, 2015)

Inspiration Artists and Forefront week 24: Between Bears by Hornet Films

Between Bears the short film by Hornet Films, winner of the best animation award at Vimeo first film festival, it's a great example of story telling through music. The film doesn't has any dialogues between characters or gestures that connect the development of the story, instead the film uses music and very light sounds to narrate and communicate the emotions of the characters.  At the beginning of the films the music created a mysterious and suspense environment, then the music changed to show the start of a journey with higher and faster sounds. The silence was also managed to communicate the end of a period in the story, some times very long to also give a enigmatic and artistic meaning.

In our project The Idea Thief, we also are not going to use any dialogues, that's why Between Bears helped us as inspiration to create a narrative which communicates without words.

References:

Amidi, A. (2010). Between Bears by Eran Hilleli. Cartoon Brew [Online] Available at http://www.cartoonbrew.com/cgi/between-bears-by-eran-hilleli-26237.html [Accessed June12, 2015]

Reflection Semester B

Some of the practices that are forefront on the industry and applied in my projects were Arnold Solid Angle, Dynamesh, Zremesh, Storyboarding, Mari.

Arnold is a render engine developed by Marcos Fajardo and Sony Pictures, he decide to create his own software to render 3d images for feature films and visual effects. One of the great attributes that Arnold has is the ray tracing to illuminate a scene, this technology allow to 3d software environment behaviour as in real life. In the past when a scene was illuminated only an object radiates light, with ray tracing every object on the scene is able to reflect and produce light as real objects. In this semester project I try to apply Arnold to my development, due to last semester was asked to experiment with render software to improve my personal pieces. As result my project has finished looking, with couple of lights I have got a professional result and the render time was pretty faster than previous exercise rendered in “MentalRay” that is the engine for default in Maya.

Dynamesh is a tool in Zbrush, that permit add new pieces to sculpture that is being done. It is a simple process however, the benefits to work flow is huge since Zbrush is able to work with millions of polygons whiteout crashing nevertheless when the model need to attach one or more pieces was the moment when Zbrush had limitations. With Dynamesh the sculpture process is similar to traditional sculpture way with clay, due to this the artist can focus in creative idea rather than technical issues. In my project a use Dynamesh to model the base mesh to my main character in a faster way, and help me to achieve more detailed results.

Zremesh is other tool in Zbrush that help to do an automatic retopology faster and accurate. In last semester I was experimenting with topology that is the process to create a mesh to be animated, this process could be very slow and time consuming. With Zremesh and its settings the retopology is done in seconds, in my last work the retopology took me 3 days in comparison is an advantage to use this new practice making the process more efficient to the artist.

Storyboard is a method to organize every shot in an audio-visual piece, and is very used worldwide to check if the story and the image is working for a public. The idea is simple use very fast sketches with important information such as camera plane, dialogue and sound in order to every member of team could understand what they have to do in every shot.

Texturing is the method used to put colour and materials to 3d models, in past usually this process was done in software like “Photoshop” where the artist used a plane from model to paint it. Regularly, this texture maps were not completely accurate and they have cuts that the artist intelligently hide in parts that were not important. However, nowadays due to “Mari” artists can paint over the 3d model without concern for anything since the algorism that use Mari do not permit any incorrect finish. For my project I use Mari to texturing my main character resulting in better finishing and more smooth details.

Some artists whom inspirited my work were Headless studio, Jonathan Russ, Heidi Smith, Tsutomu Nihei.

Headless Studio is a Spanish animations studio that make productions for television. This studio is particularly interesting in its character designs, they stand up from others for its special aesthetic, the colour palette is varied, bright and each character is unique making Headless studio always on vanguard. It inspire to develop the Thief character for my final project making the aesthetic more cartoon, stylized and different from my past projects.

Jonathan Russ was a student from Hertfordshire University of 3D animation for its final project he made a short animation where the characters interact in a big city. To solve the time versus effort issues in the project he developed a set of model pieces that join together created the environment. For my final major project we have the same issue and we are going to use a similar technique than him to create different pieces of environment with a pattern of model pieces.

Heidi Smith was the design character for Paranorman film, we used as inspiration the Norman character for our project, taking as reference the colour palette and the corporal expressions resulting in “Kid” main character.

Tsutomu Nihei is the writer and creator of Blame comic, is a Japanese comic based in an underground world where the main character has to cross different world levels to get a girl to the top level. I inspire my project in this underground world to give life to my environment.

Finally, some artefacts or pieces of work that have influenced my work and are in the forefront in the industry are Backwater Gospel, Rotar Park, ODD and Between Bears.

Backwater Gospel is a short film form the Animation Workshop; this piece inspired me for its use of shaders that gives the illusion of comic despite of being developed in 3D. Rotar Park is a South Korean series created by Tuba, the history is very crazy and fantastic we used as creative inspiration to start brainstorming of ideas because the animation worlds is limitless. ODD is a teaser of a short animation, it has a simple aesthetic with a strong idea, it inspired us in the creation of a simple and entertainment history.

In this semester I improve the efficiency of my process through applying new practices as Dynamesh, Zremesh, texturing in Mari and finally using Arnold; improving in that way the relation time versus effort. Also I improve my planning process using storyboarding which helped me as a guide in production development. My personal goal was improve my character design proposals, I achieved looking more reference and inspirations from different artist to enrich my personal idea.