Working Practices 8

I have finish the 30 second short film and I think it's quite effective. It is dysfunctional and jumpy. I used a method that I've never used before and I figured because it is an experimental art piece it could use an experimental method for the composition.
I imported all of my footage into premier and cut snippets out of the character zoom in camera work and the character spin around camera work. I composited them all together, reversing some footage, speeding up other parts and exported them as one filmed piece. I then imported the footage back into premier and did a similar thing again, cut snippets, reversed and increased the speed of some parts. I constructed the titles at the beginning and the end using After Effects and added them to the final piece. I added free sound effects of people screaming and cows mooing and underlined it with a musical track called Bitz.

I've really enjoyed doing the project and I hope that it's of interesting to those who view it. If I had more time then I may have rigged and animated the individual characters to some extent and maybe tried to get better lighting effects on the overall scene. Although I think the overall picture composition works very well.


Here's the uncut individual character footage.

Working Practices 7

I have been working on the texturing and all of the characters are fully textured as far as I wish to take them.
The next thing I need to work on is the fire element in the centre of the scene. I have never created fire before and I think that using one of the pre-sets is the easiest plan of action.
I have a tutorial from my book "Learning Autodesk Maya 8" so I'll start with their method and see how it looks.

I completed the tutorial and the fire looks pretty good, the only problem is that they have built their flames around a cube shape. I don't want a cube it doesn't look right with my project, so I'm changing it to more of a pyramid shape which looks a lot better.
I have also made the cube/pyramid invisible and underneath I have constructed a general mount shape to stack the cows against, I have changed the transparency of the mound because it is too apparent in a solid colour.

Here is a shot of the final composition:-



I need to work towards getting something like a short 30 second piece of film down just to show the project. I would like it to be quite creepy and dysfunctional, so the filming is jumping around a lot.

Working Practices 6

I have mapped some of the textures using planar mapping and UV texture editor to create a PSD file in Maya. Planar mapping is probably not ideal because it is a flat straight through image that distorts along the sides but to be honest, I don't think it matters for this project because of the abstract element.
Below is a picture of the cow's head, I think it worked out quite well.



Here's the farmer's body textured.

Working practices 5

I have made some textures for mapping on to the models, I've kept them simple and fairly dull, all just in pencil finish.








I'm going to map them on to the characters randomly to give the an interesting look, it's a bit experimental but hopefully in will work.

Working Practices 4

I've been working hard preparing my characters and it's been a challenge!
Because of the number that I had to model, I cut corners in certain areas the best i could, trying not to compromise the final outcome here are some picture of the models I've built.
















I've had a few problems modelling these characters mainly because the polygon count is too high for them and slowed my computer right down.
The time contraints for this project have meant that I'm not going to rig and animate the characters therefore the models haven't been built with allowance for bending of the limbs. If I were to rig them I would have had to model them in a cleaner and better way to help prevent distortion and deformation but this isn't now a problem.

Working practices 3

I have almost finished a final look for my piece the work is only a black and white line drawing but it gives the impression of what I want to achieve.



I think the colours and textures that I will use will change the appearance completely. Picasso's pictures are brought alive by the textures so I think that this is an extremely important part of the project.

I have been thinking about how to get the textures that I need and the idea I have come up with is to scan in various materials and newspaper, tidy them or adjust them in photoshop and then project them on to the characters using the UV editor, I will also use various bump mapping textures and method within Maya. I also have a very useful texture and lighting book for Maya from Autodesk Maya Press - Advance Maya Texturing and Lighting by Lee Lanier.

Working practices 2

I'm having reasonable luck with the cylinder method. The only thing I'm fearful of is that once the objects are complete they may just look like they've been modelled badly, I guess that's the danger of abstract art.

Here's the next stage of construction:-



I have use the extrude vertex method to get the tail to look vaguely cow like, I have also smooth the object during the process just to ensure that the face and vertices line up correctly and don't cause any problems.

The smoothed cow looks like this:-



It doesn't look as abstract once smoothed but I'm going to concentrate on the head and udders now and I think this will help a great deal.