Saturday 13 June 2009

Kay and Milo Modelling update

Hey Guys,


Just thought you might like to see how the modelling of Kay and Milo is going. Any critique, comments or advice is most welcome :D



Friday 12 June 2009

Thoughts On The Jungle Environment

I was thinking about how we're going to do the whole colour change with the star in the forest and began to think of alternatives to it. 

We've got milo and kay having a cold relationship at the beginning of the story and by the time they reach the big tree they're friends - could we build and texture the environment to reflect this? 
In the clearing perhaps we could have the cold blue/purple colours together with spiky, hard edged, straight, sharp and dangerous looking plants like this:

and then gradually change this from blue through to green and yellow and finally into orange and red with the plants becoming softer and more curvy symbolising their friendlier relationship. A change of colour from green/yellow to red during the chase could look cool too - symbolising the increasing tension etc.

My main thinking behind this is it would be an simpler task to do and wouldn't rely on some time consuming post production trick which we still don't really know how to do and could go tits up. Also applying that masking effect to ~30 shots will take some time which we might not have come the end of the project and of course it would mean one render of the environment instead of two - halving render time that again we might not have come August/Sept. We'd be able to get it right in maya just by changing the textures gradually. It also kind of goes back to the idea of a different colour scheme for different areas which was one of the first ideas we all liked but kind of lost along the way?

I know this changes the role of the star but it can still be a magical object - it could emit pixie dust type particles or a glow or something and that's what draws barry - and at the end the star could still bring colour to kay's bedroom.

I'll think about this some more and talk it through with you all on monday.

J


Tuesday 9 June 2009

FFS! Have Pixar been spying on us??

http://www.fubiz.net/2009/06/09/partly-cloudy/

I've no idea how they did this? Rigged Fluids! :S

;)

actually they probably used something like this:

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/texturing/3D-Cloud-shader-356.html

cloud shader! This could be the answer - polygon modelled clouds and then given a fluffy animated cloud texture - i think it could be more dense than the example given then a Physical Sun/Sky setup with a pinky/orange light could look good. Could even look at using the RGB lighting Pigeon Impossible technique to get the shadowing right...(i'm thinking out loud)

Will look into this more end of Week2/Week3

How Pixar create a forest














Big broad leaves facing the camera to fill space.

Final modelling done after layout and camera finalised.

Awesome lighting.

easy ;)

Monday 8 June 2009

Turok Forests

Here some occlusion rendered animation tests from turok. Aside from the really nice animation I though that the forests looked quite rich and detailed. See what you think.

Also lots of nice animation stuff at http://fliponline.blogspot.com/

CamAnimation08 from Cameron Fielding on Vimeo.

Sunday 31 May 2009

Forest designs

There's a post here about the art design in Up and there is a good section about the forest, I really like the stylised shapes of the trees so maybe we could use this as inspiration for our own? There are also some videos of lighting tests which are interesting to see.

http://louromano.blogspot.com/2009/05/art-of-up_3697.html

Sunday 17 May 2009

Dungarees

I just saw this video, perhaps we could do something like this for Kay's dungarees so that the straps move?

Some of his other videos are pretty good too although I'm not sure if they would be helpful to us.