Progress Report

By James Ball

It's the start of Week 5 Trimester 5, so I guess now is as good a time as any to get back to writing blog posts eh!

For my Studio 3 Group Project I'm in charge of rigging.

And also in charge of making a Car.

 

And finally for my Personal Studio 3 Project, I'm going to attempt to make a Dinosaur.


As always, This is Ballzy247 Signing out.

ANM230 Semiotic Analysis

By James Ball

I’ve been inactive for several weeks now so let’s get back into the swing of things with a Semiotic Analysis On what I’m creating for my main group project this Trimester talk about the inspirations behind the idea.

This Trimester we have been given the opportunity to create an advertisement piece for a live client. The client is Princess Margaret Hospital (PMH) Foundation and we have been given the task of creating an advertisement that promotes and tells there Backers about PMH Foundation’s name Change to Perth Children’s Hospital (PCH) Foundation to coincide with the move to the new and bigger building in November 2016.

The Group project for the PMH Foundation has a primary target audience towards current donors, as well as members of the PMH community. The aim with this Project is to create a piece of media that is approachable for all ages and suggest to the given audience an explanation of what the PMH/PCH Foundation represents and also about the change.

Pocoyo logo (Hart, 2004)

The inspiration for visual style the group decided to go for was that of the aesthetic and animation style of the Spanish-English TV show Pocoyo (Hart, 2004).

The reason behind why I pitched the idea of using this show as a key inspiration for our own production was to favour us both technically, as well as aesthetically. Aesthetically, we chose this show because of its simple colours and ‘soft’ characters, giving the viewer the sense that everything is nice and cuddly; and technically because of the simplistic design on the surface with a highly agile animation rig underneath. So simple character, big range of expressions and emotions is what we are aiming for in the character rigging. Simple, non-harsh matte colours have been used in children’s media a great deal. Popular examples: Hi-5 (Noble, K. 1999) and Blues Clues (Johnson, Santomero, & Kessler, 1996)

Hi-5 Logo (Noble, 1999) and Blues Clues Logo (Johnson, Santomero, & Kessler, 1996)

Similar to that of the simple colours and ‘soft’ characters of Pocoyo the Animation style resembles that of traditional Claymation Animation and as such are able to get away with Holding characters Frozen in position for several seconds at a time without them looking out of place. Another aspect that lends Pocoyo to this look is the Matte flat colour Texture. The creators of this show designed the show in this way to save on render time to aid in fast production.

An aspect of the design that we would like to Change but aren't aloud to is the design that they have for the Bear.

As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.

Reference List

Hart, K. (Executive Producer). (2004). Pocoyo [Television broadcast]. Madrid, Spain: Zinkia Entertainment.

Noble, K. (Executive producer) Hi-5 (1999) Kids Like Us Productions, 15 February.

Johnson, T., Santomero, A., & Kessler, T. (Directors). (1996). Blue’s Clues [Television]. Nickelodeon, Nick Jr.

The Calm After The Storm

By James Ball

Metaphorically speaking the Storm has passed and the Power is Back on. All the animations are complete and and so is the Postmortem. With That, I'll Leave you with some Nice Curve!

Those Curves

Final 2D Animation.

Final 3D Animation.

ANM220 Postmortem. Sorry in advance for the Potato quality Video.

Finally I would like to give a shout out to  Danielle Carlow. The sound design on this project. Here is a link to her sound cloud - https://soundcloud.com/emuzen

If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and discuss your thoughts.

 

OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.

The Calm Before the Storm

By James Ball

This past week has been what I can only describe as The Calm Before the Storm. I have nearly finished with the game student collaboration and Finished off the 3D Characters Rig set up ready for animation.

First off, I'll talk about my collaboration Julian Chau. a Tri 6 game design student working on a game that centres on one major theme of meditation and is Titled Halcyon. Halcyon will have 2 Game Modes. Trace Mode which is a game mode similar to that of a game called Lumines and Tetris. with looping animated backgrounds depending on where you are in the level. The Second Game Mode is Relaxation mode Which will give you various audio guided meditations. the animations are saved out as (.swf ) Flash files and will be implemented into Unity using a free Plugin called "GAF: Flash to Unity" which as the name suggests is a plugin that enables the use of Flash 2D animations in Unity.This is goo because I am now able to keep the 5 second long animation loops at a the screen resolution of 2560px by 1440px and still have file sizes of less than 1MB without losing image quality. you can so the final animation loops for the Trance Mode in the video below.

In other News, I have  finished off the two 3D animation Characters Rig and am now on the finishing staged of the scenery and sky-box assets for the 3D environment. I'm also about a day behind on the Pencil testing side of things and should have the pencil tests complete by tomorrow evening at the latest to make a start on the clean up.

#10hourButterflyRig . . . Never AGAIN!

I found some unwelded verts in the first round of skinning so I went back and fixed them up aaaaand I had to re-skin the whole dame thing.

 Look at dat noyce 3D animation Rig.

And this one too!

"Hey!"

 

If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and discuss your thoughts.

 

OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.

Butterfly Character Model and Vagabond Rigging . . . This Blogpost is also My answer to Life and everything in the Univers :-P

By James Ball

So this week has been draining but worth it to say the least. I am about a week behind scheduled on the 3D side of this assignment and to compensate I have cut out about 5 seconds of footage I will have to animate to save time. But I have managed to make a fully working Biped Rig with custom attribute spinners for the hands and feet, for my Vagabond Character in the space of 3 days. The plan for today is to skin the character and add morph controls for the face. The Tutorial that I followed is really in depth and you can find the beginning of it here.

http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/complete-human-character-rig-in-3d-studio-max-part-1--cg-17244

 In any case, enjoy some more progress pictures.

The Initial T Pose.

 Custom Attributes For Both Feet.

 Custom Attributes For Both Hands.

 A Running Pose, all of the joints are working correctly.

Testing Right after adding the Skin Modifier to the Vagabond Mesh . . . Dat Skinning!

This Past Week, I have also Made the second character for this Vagabond story, The Butterfly. I took 2 days to model to Model, Unwrap and Texture this Character. If you would like have an up close look at this character, Then you con go here https://skfb.ly/Nn7G

 Modeling done.

 UV Unwrapped and Texel Density is looking Good.

 Texturing Work Done.

and Just for Shits and Giggles lets look at the Wire frame . . . Mmmm, Topology!

If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and discuss your thoughts.

OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.

Vagabond Texturing Complete

By James Ball

As the Title suggests, I have completed the texturing faze on my Vagabond Character Model. If you would like to take a look at it I have provided a Scetchfab link below.

https://sketchfab.com/models/8414336ef4734901afe91970d3ae14aa 

To keep a similar look and feel to the 2d version of the vagabond character, I opted to go for mostly flat colours with Photo Textures, Light shading and painted in details for Seams, Zippers and Stitching. I then took the Diffuse Texture maps into Quixel 2.0 and generated the normal and Specular maps. I have also Nearly finished the third shot of my Pencil Test.

If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and discuss your thoughts.

 

OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.

Pencil Testing/Layout

By James Ball

Pencil test or Layout Stage, which ever you prefer.

I'm Working on 2's for time constraint reasons and I'm animating in Flash with Backgrounds made in Photoshop.

I have also Started on UV Unwrapping.

If you read through my ramblings and have gotten to this point then how about sharing this post on social media and leaving a comment down below and discuss your thoughts.

OK. As always this is Ballzy247 signing out.