Tuesday 11 December 2012

Soundtrack: Chopin Nocturne No. 20

We have been looking for a suitable soundtrack that would reflect the mood of our animation. After the research we really wanted to use Chopin's Nocturne No. 20, but unfortunately even though the music is not copyrighted, every version played was. Luckily enough  when I was searching YouTube for different versions of the soundtrack I found it being played by this very talented artist- Kevin Wu. After messaging Kevin on Facebook and asking if we can use his music, he was more then happy for us to do so! (:

This is the video of Kevin playing Chopin Nocturne in C Sharp Minor No. 20 


CD & Case Artwork

In preparation for our crit I've been working on our CD and case artwork. I tried to keep it simple and symbolic just like how our animation is itself while keeping it professional and linked to our animation and art direction at the same time.

CD Design
 

Case Design


Saturday 8 December 2012

@ Alan

Hi Alan, on Thursday you asked all the groups for their animation names but we forgot to tell you ours sorry!
The name of our animation is 'The War Plane' :)

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Little Boy Fully Rigged and Ready to Animate!

This little boy has caused us a couple of problems which has delayed him getting finished especially over the last couple of days but we've finally got there and it was definitely worth battling through! :)

Here are a few images showing the final character with his range of costume changes.

As his typical 1940s self. However, the outfit will be textured differently so that we can also use it for the 1950s outfit.
 
These are the extra outfit components that we have skinned after fully rigging and connected through visibility attributes on the main character control. The 1940s boy's pyjamas and the 1950s hair.
 
Finally a shot of the base character minus the components that change. Also showing the skinned skeleton more clearly.


Jewish Shops: Improved


Saturday 1 December 2012

Little Boy Costume Swap

Our group has recently been discussing the change of character that happens during our animation as well as the change in outfit that our main character undergoes just before the big climax. We had a few options when it came to this one of them being to rig a whole new character but this would have used up unneccessary time. We spoke to Alan about other options hoping that there was a way we could get the pyjamas that he changes into onto the existing rigged character.

The solution was to put them on a separate layer, hide the existing clothes and just skin the pyjamas on top of the full rig. Then add attributes to the main character control which allowed the visibility of the clothes to be turned on and off as needed.

I have added a few attributes that control the visibility. 'Clothes' is the usual outfit. We will then later turn this off and turn on 'pyjamas'.
 
Normal clothes and 1940s hair
 
Pyjamas.
 
In regards to our other character who represents the start of the 1950s this would have been a completely different character but he is very similar except the texture of his clothes, his face shape and his hair. So we are going to use the same clothes but a different texture map, blend shape his face so he just slims down a bit and like the change into pyjamas for the first character I have added a visibility control for the different hair styles.
 
1950s Hair.
 
Now all I have to do is re-skin these elements :)


Character modeling: stipped pyjamas model and fixed UV