Pie animation test

For the Pie project I did a quick animation test from one of the scenes. Within this scene Commissioner Blueberry gets caught by the 'thing' upstairs. I only had 2 days to animated, colour, shade and also produce the background, therefore I am happy with what I achieved in a small amount of time. The animation is not perfect and I do believe the colouring can use some improvement. I will need to add more tweens and also re-due the line work before I will consider it fully finished. 

 

Pie pitch bible

I have now finished the pitch Bible for my Pie project. With help from the team I believe we finished with a good amount of work and a good final bible. I still wish that I had some more time to with this project just to tweak some of the final character designs as they all still have a slightly different style with each of them. Overall I am happy with the progress me and the team made over the period of time give.

Life drawing year 2

Here are a few of my life drawings from this year. I've mainly been focusing on the head, I've been looking at the basic shapes for the head and how to use them to produce all kinds of head shapes. I've also been working a lot more with pencils than charcoal the past few weeks just so I can have that little bit more control over the tool, allowing me to focus more on the shapes than than having to deal with charcoal's messy mistakes.

So far it's been going well, I can see some improvements comparing the older drawings to the newer but I still have a very long way to go. I need to focus more on the strength of my lines, I need to try and lighten my drawing up, allowing me to have more revealing shading without the black outline of my line drawing.

Final 11 second club before render

I have made a few more tweaks to the animation, I have now delayed the head turn even more and I've also added a bit of motion to the arm while he is turning to indicate that he is trying to find the back of the cushion. I have also played around with the upside down man to give him a bit more life with his fingers.

I do believe I am now happy with the animation but I will be waiting a bit before putting it into the final rendering stage as I would like to render this out with Renderman 21 (non- commercial version) when it releases.  

11 second club second last final review

I've left this project for a short break but I've comeback to it now and I believe I have fixed a few things wrong with the animation making it almost ready for rendering.
I have fiddled around with the figures at the start as some where clipping into the rig, I have also played with the turn and have adding in more of a stare of the sitting down character. I have also changed the part when be moves his hand up to say "no" to last slightly longer so it has a bit more of an impact.

I need to look over the animation one last time and also ask a few people to look at it just in case I missed anything, but once that's done I will move onto texturing and rendering this animation out hopefully with Renderman.

Quad draw tool with live objects

 I've been playing around with the quad draw tool within Maya today and working with models created within Mudbox. I've managed to understand the process but I need to put in a few more hours into this until I get thins completely.  

Pickleton's design

I've been doing a few quick design ideas for the Pie city. I'm trying to design how building will look within this city, I like the idea of them being made out of bit's of cardboard boxes and kitchen material or even bit's of food, such as an ice cream cone for a spire. I want to have the feeling of the beautiful Art Nouveau feeling but when you zoom out, you see that it's pretty much made of junk. 

The monorail is the main transportation around the city so it plays a bit part in how the city is designed, there are trams also. 

I need to try a few more things out and then I will go for a final clean concept piece of the city. 

     

Pie

I've been continuing with the Pie project with the end goal of creating a Bible for it. I now have a team behind me also helping me out to create this wacky world
As I need to design this city of Pies I've been spending some time thinking about the people who would be living here. As one of my cards were Art Nouveau so I need to design the city around that ear and also it's people (Pies). This means looking at clothing from the ear and also architecture for the buildings. I have designs for the for some of our main characters and also some random designs for Pie's living within the city.

I'm still playing around with how to make the look as Pie like as possible as some look like potatoes. I've found that through looking at how the crust should look and also the small tin details around them play a big role in changing them from potato to Pie.

I have also been thinking about what objects would be made out of for the Pies, for instance the pram is made out of a big tin and has bottle caps for wheels. I also like the idea that the buildings will be made out of massive fish and chip boxes with added bits for the Art Nouveau detail.

As the story is quite a dark one I wanted to make it that little bit more creepy by having the world look like a perfect picture, golden colors and no rain, yet the gardens will be booming with thriving plants. This will make the whole story seem that little bit more darker, as the first impression you should get is that 'nothing goes wrong in Pickleton'.    

 

Mudbox

Today I've been looking into Mudbox for the first time, had a bit of a play with a few of the tools and had a go at the end to make an alien like head.