Created a cartoony house today.
It is in two versions.
Hi poly for main character’s house, with beautiful ambient occlusion shadows on the walls and low poly for house estate background.
The hedge will be less ‘solid’ – going to add alpha maps for leaves and branches.
Stay tuned!
After gathering loads of reference images, I chosen the best ones and compiled them in moodboards including colour grading.
Enjoy!
Carl
Max
Old lawn mower
Automatic lawn mower
House
Garden
Lounger
Stay tuned!
It’s fascinating to see how your idea is being developed during this module.
It seems like every week the script changes and I must say – it’s better and better.
This was my original idea, not more than a month ago:
Sunday afternoon. The guy with the beer belly mows the lawn. Suddenly the mower jams. He’s rying to launch it and nothing happens. Tries few more times and falls. Then, the mower runs itself and starts rushing straight into the wife’s flower garden, destroying everything on it’s way. His wife looks out the door in horror / shock. The guy gives up.
Then, after the first feedback:
1. Black screen. #1 opens garage doors and gets his old lawn mower.
2. Totally resigned, with a bit of trouble starts mowing his small lawn.
3. While he is close to the hedge, sees his neighbour (#2) lying on a lounger, while his wireless, brand new lawn mower does all the job.
4. #1 gets really jealous. Looks at his lawn mower then at his neighbour’s. Then, suddenly he gets an idea.
5. He goes to the garage, gets the shovel and goes back.
6. #1 kneels on the sidewalk near the lawn of his neighbour and with a bit of turf he tries to lure the automatic mower. Behaving like he’s luring a dog.
7. The mower follows the path (on the sidewalk) made of turf and starts mowing #1′s lawn. #1 lays back and drinks a glass of lemonade.
8. Suddenly, #2 sees what happened. He comes to the #1 lawn and takes back his mower. #1 is sad again. Then, he gets a brilliant idea.
9. #1 is relaxing and drinking lemonade while the ‘gloomy’ sheep is eating the lawn.
However, the viewer couldn’t empathize with our main character (#1) so I thought of:
There was still something wrong, like contrast not visible or Max being too nice – no reason why Carl can’t help him.
So, I made a few changes:
1. Max saying rude things to Carl
2. Carl acting like Ned Flanders saying ‘the old ways are the best’
3. Max smashing the mower rather than being scared
4. Carl offering to lend a mower for a tiny bit of salvaged garden – being mean.
But again, that was too complicated and confusing. So, the last, simpler version:
And this version was sent to tutors for some feedback.
Hey kids!
Today I created the official website of my upcoming animated short film – ‘the lazy gardener’.
Final version, yaaay!
Worked on render (more bloom effect, brighten up, improved quality), hair meshes (now less boxy) and tweaked some moves to look perfect.
I’m happy with this version. Already submited my entry on 11 Second Club site.
Okay, now some words about this project.
With my really easy idea it couldn’t go wrong.
It was rather short. I think it took me around a week (implying I would work every day by day) so it’s not bad. The tempo was amazing and I really felt good with that.
This project was rather relaxing compared to the Mimes.
I really enjoyed working on this animation.
I think it is a good idea to combine university task with 11 second club competition. It feels like we, the nine master students on Teesside, are not the only one doing the same task. And it is amazing to see more ideas and work in progress animations!
That gave me some boost to produce high quality animation.
And about animation, there are some bits I would still improve like right hand on ‘professionals’. It could be better? Could it?
I don’t know. I’m really happy with the final results. The eye darts looks amazing and blinks are in the right place (I hope).
I think I can empathize with both characters and that is really important. Especially in dialogue scene.
That thing which I was missing in previous animations – acting principles. I had no idea there is something like that. Now I know what to do, when and.. why.
With group work I’ve learned how to split to-do things with other people and which is more important – I’ve gained more experience working with animators.
Finally, for the first time I’ve sent my entry to 11 Second Club. I always wanted to compete with other people but never had a reason or… I was just lazy.
Now I will send my submissions more often.
Thank you for really interesting module!
It’s that time to write something about mimes task.
Here we go!
Story
I can’t count how many times we changed our ideas. And it is amazing, right? How we developed, changed minor parts because this and that. I absolutely loved Siobhan’s idea about mime monster instead of mime being late. Then, RRR! came to conclusion that making mime death fest is an awesome idea and should totally develop that.
Then, some minor changes like in disarming bomb, mime #2 stopping half way or mime #3 dying inside the box.
All this little things made our story much more interesting and which is more important – CLEAR.
Two days ago I showed finished piece to all my friends. No body questioned what mimes are doing and why they get injured.
We’re awesome!
My contribution
I really don’t like this part, because we’re a team and everybody did a hard job but… but..
From the beginning:
I was that ‘Maya expert’ in our team. Teaching how Maya can destroy your life is fun!
Also, Rachel R helped the other Rachel faster than I did! Aaand, British Rachel became friends with Maya so fast that my tutor job was really little. Good for all of us!
I’ve made Gantt chart with all milestones and weekly meetings. As I planned, I started rendering a week before the deadline just to have some more time for final touches. And guess what? I was right!
To make our team more awesome I did a poster with catchy phrase ‘They’re dying to get that job’. I still love it :-). Of course it was not required by our team, but I had some free time to do it.
Then, I’ve created really simple theatre stage (and later Rachel R changed it colours) with lighting and render settings.
Every combined version you saw was sacrificed with my tears and swears. Every time I’ve imported other mimes, handled multiple Maya crashes, playblasted 4 gig files and edited it in Premiere. Worth it!
Then, the hardest part. Rendering.
To show my suffering I present how my 3×14 hour marathon looked like:
1. Combining three Maya files into one long animation
2. Checking cameras, safe playblasts etc.
3. Changing texture paths to render space due to rendering in Qube
4. Rendering on render farm!
5. Rendering failed frames again
6. Checking failed frames again and again
7. Copying frames from render space to local computer. Our network is SO slow that editing it from render space was pain
8. Baking frames into H.264 file. Working on 20 gigs of frames on our machines was even more painful
9. Editing movie, postproduction – fun part
10. Rendering finished film
And I had to go through that process three times. Gah!
But still.. Totally worth it!
My animation
To be honest I didn’t like it AT ALL until we added director and sound effects. It was.. umm.. bland. That’s the right word. When the other’s stories were hm.. fun (?) my was.. I don’t know. I didn’t enjoyed it like the other projects.
But.. suddenly.. We’ve added all these sounds and.. I’m really happy with the results.
Of course if I had more time, I would work on every part and polish it until death. Defining the box could be more interesting (the animation would be longer, though) or there could be more interaction with the director.
There are some parts that I totally love like crawling, running, shaking or walking. I spent some time on polishing these moments and I’m happy with the results.
Team work
I think we’re awesome.
Okay, we.. or.. I had a crisis with rushing with animation. Yeah, about that.
Why I work so fast? The answer is simple:
I worked in advertisement and post-production studio. We had maximum 7 days before the deadlines. So, we had to do really fast our work, which normally was for at least a month.
As I worked there for a year it is my habit working fast now.
Okay, I had also a bad workflow before (which worked perfectly for me when I was working alone), but I’m really happy that I switched to traditional one now.
Continuing about the team work.. we’ve met twice a week to discuss our ideas, sketches and animation.
On our Facebook group we kept informing each other how our latest version looks like. In that way everybody had a constant feedback and our animations were better and better. So, even when Rachel R went to France (business, not pleasure! – She studied mimes in their natural habitat) we had weekly meetings on Facebook chat.
I really wanted to learn how to work in a group and how I should adjust my workflow. Now I know! Other two R’s! did awesome job. Thanks for a great time spent together.
Summary
It was really great to wok on some body physics. We’ve worked with professional voice artists and recorded our own sounds in a studio.
That gave experience, which I’m going to use in the final project.
About the final project – if I want to work in a group – now I know how!
Really nice module with great task ideas.
Again – learnt a lot. That’s why we’re all here for.
Now that’s short and funny!
With stunning attention to little details Yum Yum London created a short animation ‘to brighten up your day’.
And it really does!
I love it! I just love it!
Extremely simple story with unexpected ending.
Brilliant!
Source:
http://www.yumyumlondon.com/
The final version! At last!
New camera, old cuts and still loads of fun!
Project summary and warm words about RRR! team coming soon!
Another day has come and again I was struggling with render farm. Again, same student completely block renderfarm with jobs over the weekend.
Yes, 7 jobs, 1000 frames, at least 1h each.
Em, Scott, Kristian and I went to technicians to do something with that. But.. all what they could do was being REALLY arrogant and saying: ‘Then what are you doing here? Go to the labs and make your place in queue. You will have your frames rendered on Monday.’
Annoyed we came back to labs and started rendering on our own computers. Whole this situation is not student-friendly.
Luckily, I found release in creating following image and posting it on TAGERTALK:
