This week’s tutorial session

Okay let’s look back onto the latest discussions in concern to the minor project. As you may have already noticed the first tutorial of the week starts with tutor Phil followed by a more technical discussion with Alan the next day. I’m half way through the project, looking back at it now I’m in a more comfortable driving position to carrying it on however that said still many more challenges lie ahead.

Firstly the topic started with the up coming interim crit. What has been achieved so far? And what will be preparing for the presentation? In the past the way I have dealt with the presentation has been quite illustrative this time round I’d like to keep things simple and discuss only the necessaries of the project appose to the smaller details like how I designed the logo for example. Getting straight to the point should hopefully capture the attention and veer away from a dragging presentation with my audience.  

The aim for the interim crit deadline is to have full character sheets ready for the modelling rigging skinning texturing phrase of the assignment.

An important conversation was made in relation to the engine in which will drive my aesthetics, animation, design, influence and other criteria and this is (expressionism), what defines expressionism simply is – distortion – use of shadow- light- high contrast and many more factors of this nature, taking these in account I have already covered for the most part of my project, so therefore the next set of tasks I set for myself didn’t need any additional research, it was important that this was established as more time was going to be spent searching for an aesthetic when one already existed.

 Now tutorial with Alan.

To start with examples of the boujou practises had been shown after some anticipation over the week with rendering and fie problems. I explained the issues. Question 1-(I relieved and error message when scrubbing the time line and often Maya shuts down causing the loss of my scene, the work done on the scene then goes down the drain?) I believed it was something to do with the memory being processed into Maya, after assessing my scene it was made clear that having the sequence (environment) imported as a Jpeg’s caused this problem the solution to this problem was to stick you a smaller file format either Tiff or Sgi.

Question 2 - this was to do with the aspect ratio of my renders which was more of a light concern more then anything, should I stick to HD resolution as it could prove to be quite expensive time wise? To get the best result it would be best to stick to what the scenes was shot at with the camera. Solving the earlier question has countered this one as well.

 I have been using some freeware software called Alchemy to generate some art work for my characters, these examples where shown ready for some feedback the last question was in relation to the workflow for my characters. It’s really vital I get a good result with the separation of my bear shadow as it will make or break the scene. Question 3 – how can the model of my character deform/distort/mutate? I was given a solution to the issue at hand… (create character i.e. model with rig then duplicate the character leaving only the model which can be manipulated, casting the shadow from the original position of the rigged model then becomes solved, I can then switch in-between the rigged model and duplicated mode.) I other words - Rigged model>duplicate (leaving model only) > animate model.