Maya Tutorials: Digital Set

Part One: Modelling

Part Two: UV Layouts and Texturing Preparation

Part Three: Lighting

Part Four, Five and Six: Colour, Bump, Specular and Dirt Maps and Final Render

From Script to Screen: Script Ideas

Environment: Joke Shop

Character: Contortionist

Prop: Egg

Idea 1. A man lives above an old joke shop. One day he wakes up and goes downstairs, stepping on a misplaced whoopee cushion on the way, and notices a large box outside his window. Intrigued, he brings the box inside, struggling with it's weight, and opens it to find a huge egg. After many attempts to crack the egg with various items found in his joke shop, he finally takes a running swing with a giant pencil and manages to break the shell. He falls to the floor and watches as the shell breaks away to reveal a contortionist hidden inside the egg. The contortionist unfolds and quickly runs out of the shop, leaving the man confused on the floor.

Idea 2. A man who owns a failing joke shop stages a competition. He claims to have a magical golden egg which he will give to the greatest performer. Many different types of performers arrive, hoping to win the magical item, and amongst them is a young girl who is practiced in the art of contortion. After all of the performers are finished, the contortionist is announced the winner and given the golden egg.

Idea 3. A child visits the circus with his parents and is amazed by all of the unusual people he meets there, including a contortionist. He then enters the circus gift/joke shop. He looks around at all of the items for sale and finds a box of rubber eggs emblazoned with the warning - extremely bouncy. Ignoring the warning, he picks up an egg and throws it to the ground. It bounces around knocking everything over, resulting in chaos. Eventually the egg disappears and the child is left surrounded by a destroyed shop and disgruntled circus performers.

Life Drawing 08.01.13

We started with a series of two minute warm up sketches, which I chose to draw in charcoal. The focus of the lesson was the emotion of the figure. First was nervous, followed by two different sketches of sorrow.

                   

                  

Maya Tutorials: Bouncing Ball with Travel and Rotation

Maya Tutorials: Bouncing Ball On the Spot

CG Artist's Toolkit: Animation - Zoetrope

To create my zoetrope strip, I divided my long strip of paper into 24 frames. I then used pencil to draw my animation frame by frame. I originally wanted to use watercolour to give a soft finish but then decided to use Photoshop to create a similar effect. To do this I scanned my strip in sections and used the images as a guide to paint the animation.

This is the finished strip on Photoshop. I then printed the images and stuck them to my original strip.

Storytelling and Commission: Project 1 - From Script to Screen

Through the development of an original three-act story idea for a one minute animation (from initial premise to computer-generated pre-vizualisation via storyboarding), this unit requires you to engage creatively - and efficiently - with the challenges of crafting successful time-based narratives.

As part of the briefing for this project, we all selected three words randomly to give an environment, character and prop for our 1 minute animation.

My words:

Environment: Joke Shop

Character: Contortionist

Prop: Egg

My initial thoughts when receiving these words were that my animation will either be quite dark or a comedy. I feel that my prop is probably going to end up being a prank object in the joke shop.