We're done:)

Yay! We're finally done with our short which turned out very good in my opinion:) Here's the link to our movie on youtube: "Advertise this". Overall it's been a great experience and I think we all learned a lot. Since it's been some time since my last post here, I'm will recap some of the highlights during the production and post some screenies. Please Enjoy;)


After I was done modeling John Doe, it was time for the texture part. Esben suggested we should give John an overall to imply he's just gotten home from work, which turned out to look quite good if I might add. To texture the overall I found a sweet jeans texture on Google. I did the same for his leather boots, but his shirt, hair and skin color were simply made in the material editor.

I wanted to give John a set of realistic eyes and luckily found this great tutorial which really helped me in the process.

I had quite a laugh making morph targets for John. By making all these different expressions you begin to notice your character is starting to breath:) I later regret that John's eyebrows and teeth wasn't a part of John himself, but linked and with seperate morph targets, as this caused a bit off confusion later on when our animators were morphing John in our scenes.

Here are some of the facial expressions I made showing John in a suprised, happy and angry state of mind:

As Jørgen was chosen to animate shot 13-16 by this time in the production, I took over his original assignment to texture and further model the apartment. I was a bit freightened by the task at hand because I knew a lot of desicions needed to be made and the apartment scene atmosphere was important to get right. As I started the texturing I begun to feel that our original apartment lacked a cartoonish tone. Many edges felt too sharp and the apartment reminded of a Real Life Minimalistic penthouse. I discussed this with the rest of the group and we agreed I could alter/delete some of the old furniture to make room for new more round and smoothed ones (I.e: Refrigirator, kitchen desk, sink, microwave, tv and so on).

Here you can see some test renders of the apartment (neat version). The first picture shows how the apartment looked when I began working on it, the last one is very close to the final result:

I made cylinder tiles connecting the apartment floor with the walls and cylinder bars around the windows and the door entrance to add some detail and we felt it looked more futuristic:

One day at our group meeting we looked up on these huge pipes in the cantina and someone (Can't remember who) shouts "Imagine those in John's apartment!". I loved the idea and even though it's debatable if those kind of pipes would even exist in any future, we decided it was worth it to stick them in to show how lame his household really is;) Sorry John^^

After I was done texturing the apartment I started to work on the lightning. By using the daylightsystem with mr Photographic Exposure Control and changing the color Saturation from 1 to 3-ish the apartment really started to get a satisfying cartoonish look and felt the "nice" version of the apartment (the one we used when John comes back from "brainwashing") was done.

So now I started to focus on making John's apartment "ugly version". The first thing I did was "messing" things up, everything from overfilling the trashcan to leave plates and accessories floating around. Then for the texturing part I mostly added bump maps of cracks and holes to my existing materials to compliment the messy state. I then spent quite some time trying to make the lightning work, but in the end the render times were too high (damn skyportal:p), luckily Esben came up with a good lightning solution which also had an acceptable render time and saved the day:)

Here are two of the many test renders I did at that time:

I've also been merging our scenes with our animation and lots of retexturing. This has by far been the most dull part, but we can't have fun all the time now can we;)

My last assignment was to make the movie intro and credits. Daniel and I thought it would be cool with a camera roll outside John's flat and it turned out all good:) I then did the credits with some nice input and help from Daniel and he then added his flash-made monkey to add some flavour to it:)

Here's a screenie from the intro:

Well, that's all folks! I hope you have enjoyed reading and if you have any questions, suggestions or comments please do not hessitate to ask!

Have a nice summer;)

Milestone 1

As we now have finished our animatic, It's time to recap and show some of what I've done during our project so far.

I've drawn our two main characters John Doe and the security guard. I also did the first 6 shots of our storyboard. I have modeled a few props to the apartment as well and for the moment I am working on modeling our main protagonist John himself.

Now I'll post screenies and renders and do some comments as I go



Scene 1 shot 3

This is a random drawing I did on our storyboard. It shows John as he goes into his freezer. Yes, you can actually feel the cold:p





The Guard and John Doe Right View

Here is the right view I drew of our guard and John. Proportions here is a bit off as I'm no Picasso but the main deal with this was for me and Tommy to get sort of an idea on our characters looks before modeling. The guard is overly huge and a tad dumb while John is sort off this normal lad, everyday exhausted worker.





Everyone in the group participated on modeling a few parts each for our apartment scene. My tribute was the Fan, plant and trash can. Even though we were 5 different modelers on the scene I believe everything blends in perfectly and has a nice overall style.




I have focused on keeping John as one whole mesh to make it easier for our animators. I gave John big sets of feet, hands and ears and one quite exaggerated nose to complement our cartoon style. I have still not approached the texturing part but stuck on some simple materials to add some more flavour to these screenies.



Front face

I will get back to tweaking the eyes a bit and move a couple off the edge loops from the eye to the mouth a tad more towards the chin. Maybe even add another loop. Who knows?



Underside of hand smoothed. We decided to make a 4fingered hand to enhance our "cartoonish" look.

I'm actually quite happy with this as I usually have a hard time modeling the hands. I might have to come back and tweek the thumb a bit as I sort off never get satisfied with it. The hands are the only part not attached to the character mesh at the moment as I wanna find a good solution on bridging the hand with the wrist. (too many edges on hand at the moment). I'll certainly fix this next week.



One of my first hair and fur test renders (without eyebrow for now;)). We still have not decided if we should go for H&F or go for something more predictable or less time comsuming when rendering. 3ds max often shuts down when I use this mod, this might only occur on my home computer though. Here I have made the hair emerge from a separate invisible "half-skull" inside the main model rather than having it straight on the meshes as I feel this makes the computer handle the mod more smoothly.

It should also be noted that these eyes are just a placeholder as I will get back and make them
more appealing later on.



John in Zbrush

This is a effort I made trying an alternative source for a hair solution in Zbrush.


To sum things up I think I've had some good weeks so far and our short seems to come along as planned. I will hopefully finish modeling John next week and then start the texturing as soon as possible making sure it's done by the end of winter holiday.

On a side note I will sincerely try to keep my blog updated more frequently from now on!
(No promises applied)

I hope you enjoyed reading and if you have any suggestions, comments or questions please write to mardy22@hotmail.com or just hand me a comment on this blog.

Have a nice day;)

10. Februar 09

Hei og velkommen til min blogg om diplomoppgaven siste år på Noroff!

I går hadde vi en oppsummering om hvordan gruppene ligger ann. Forrige uke lagde vi character sheets og modelerte objekter til leiligheten. Denne uken skal vi fullføre animaticen. Dette ser jeg frem til! Skal bli interessant og se hvordan timingen blir og hvor lang filmen vår virkelig er:p Har også startet å modellere hovedpersonen vår:)