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;)