Overall Update: Week of Jan 8th

I got a chance to talk to Shervin this week and got some tips on how to add more life to the character with textures. I also learned that I UV Mapped my character in high res and should go back and do it in low poly form. That took out 2 days, but the character is now UV Mapped in low poly. The UV Mapping is simple to start with, I didn't do proper stitching for areas we wont even apply detailed textures to, my main concern was the face and chest so I spent more time on those maps and setting them up. Maya's UV Texture editor is just a PAIN to work with. Tonight I am going to add any final adjustments to the face and mouth maps and move onto rigging the character for animation. I will skip detailed texturing for now as I feel it is more important for us to have maximum time to animate. I could spend weeks on just texturing but we don't have that sort if time. Our characters are also stylized and not hyper-real so I won't get into texturing till we are ready to render our first scene. Ferry's character model is coming along he is a few steps behind me but he can catch up when I move on to lighting and setting up our set location for shots. I want to still stick to my goal of having atleast a walk cycle done this weekend. This week is running on 6 hours of sleep and lack of GYM time, which sucks...

Interview: Ben Sanders (Animator)

I got in touch with Ben Sanders, an animator I managed to get a hold of while I was searching for animation colleges. He has worked so far at BlueSky, DNA Productions, and Animal Logic and was very informative and willing to do a quick Q & A online. I asked him to take a look at this blog and explained our general concept and idea to him. Immediately he had some excellent feedback.

He does think, like James and Shervin, that our storyline is a bit too long and complex to pull off in good quality in 5 months. One of the suggestions he gave to cut down on production time was to use a 2D set which I think is a fantastic idea. Essentially we focus on the interior of the coffee shop only and have everything made in 2D except the characters. He said this might be a reasonable way of focusing more on quality animation and getting the story completed in time. I personally think it is a very intelligent idea.

He also suggested we practice good animation tests, they will be helpful as a demo reel item in the future.

Thanks for all the tips Ben. By the way, this is Ben's site.

How to draw manga

As we are getting closer to our final product in concept i decided to do a little searching on drawing styles and ran into this site which I think will help in getting our character from paper into digital.

It has some quick tutorials and drawing steps that would be beneficial to me in improving my drawing style. I am still searching for a specific style to the characters on paper, like how all disney characters have a specific style applied to them. Once I find that I am going to start making better drafts of our characters.

Research: The Coffee Shop

I searched on Flickr for some coffee shop images, targeting specifically Tim Hortons and Starbucks. I found a few good reference images that would help us in making/deciding the look of our coffee shop. My production and scenography professor Valerie has found a coffee shop for me that might let us snap pictures in their shop, if the location and set-up looks good it would be ideal to start making a schematic and start modelling in Maya. Ferry and I will have to eventually check it out if it's close by.

View Coffee Shop Research Images

Research: Main Character

*Note: If the images above look distorted, click here.

These are some of the images I collected from the Metro Toronto Reference Library to get started on making our main character; the combination of Michael Jackson and Superman. We have so far been able to sketch out an ideal face for the character but are still working on what the body should come out as. These are the images we looked at to get started, Ferry will eventually post some images of the face sketches we went through.

Credits (left-right)

• Image 1: Vanity Fair 2006 pg.421, By: Ernie McCreight
• Image 2: Gamma Liaison for Time; By: Ron Mc Millan; June-Sept 6, 1993
• Image 3: By: Harry Benson; Dec 6, 1993
• Image 4: Globe Television; June 24-30, 2006
• Image 5: People; Sept 21, 1992

Research: Animation Look & Feel

After looking at several 3D short movies from Shorts Drawer 2004/2005 DVDs I felt that the look and feel described in my earlier post about our project should be something like this. For the Character look we want to go for the Buckets animation (3rd thumbnail), as for the enviroment we want to keep it simple like the rest of the images. A majority of these are student work and we do not take any ownership for these images.



*Note: If the images above look distorted, click here.