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. 

11 Second Club October (almost finished)

Here is another update, can't remember which number update this one is, there have been so many but I have made progress in each one, I still need to work on it but I have added in the lip sync of person 2 and have also added in the 3rd character in the background at the end of the conversation. I still need to look at the main talker as he his still not right yet. The 2nd character is almost there now too, just a few tweaks to his head movements as some are quite too forced.

Almost there, final stage.  

11 second club October quick update

Here is a quick update on the animation, I have almost completed the rough animation for the first character and I am now starting on the second character. I am trying to get that upside down hanging motion within the hips which within the second character but I'm slowly getting there. I need to work on figure movements and go through the graph editor to tweak some movements as a few are a bit fast and 'glitchy'.

Here is a quick look at a rough put together of the final thing. There is still a lot to be done before it's finished but I'm slowly making progress.  

Pre-Production task

For Pre-production I was given 4 cards, a character, a setting, type of film and an art style. I got Pie, Fish and chip shop, News and Art Nouveau. With these cards we had to come up with our own story.

For me I made up a story taking place in a Pie city called Pickleton which it hidden underneath a Fish and Chip shop. I won't talk about the law and overall story but I do have a plan about the whole film if it was made. I had to make a small anamatic for a short piece of the film. I decided to do a bit where the main character called Pipin Hot is trying to break into City Hall.

11 second club update (October)

I've been working quite a bit on the next 11 second club for the past week, I'm going to take a few days off it now but here is my progress so far.

I still need to work on the lip sync in the first part, it's getting there but the letter B is not being pronounced properly yet and the mouth seems to be very still which makes the lip sync look a bit weird. Also the head seems to slowly move from the right to the left which doesn't make the animation look natural.
There is still a lot of work that needs to be done to the hands and arms as well, I haven't looked at the finger movements too much yet but a simple movement is there at the moment.

For the second video I have just brought it out of the blocking stage at the moment, I haven't started on the face animation yet as I'm still tweaking the body movement in the graph editor.

At the moment I'm reading through a book called Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done right by Jason Osipa. One big thing that was brought up in the last 11 second club was my lip sync so if there is one thing I want to improve on with this one, is the lip sync. This book has a great way of showing you how to tackle lip sync in the right way, I highly recommend it.