Test Lighting & Rendering

I was told that my previous key visuals are too bright and colourful for the mood and tone of the film. After the animation session, I've worked hard to explore what the film's appearance should be. For me, Autodesk Maya is still difficult to understand and time consuming, especially when I try to learn new things.

Anyway, I got this one after many attempts in lighting and rendering. It still needs an improvement. I will seek more tutorials.

EDIT: I have moved on to do test composite in order to check that all of render passes is enough. As you may see, it has a problem about lens blur. I'm going to fix it ASAP. Lacking of familiar AE plug-ins generates difficulties in getting what I exactly imagine.

Cheers,
WM

Updated Animation

After providing feedback from Wayne and my colleges, I did the animation again based on those useful comments. At this moment, I am satisfied with it although it could be better if there is more time. During animation session, I found some difficulty in using animated texture. Fixing this MAYA technical issue is time consuming for me because of lacking 3D experience. Fortunately, I eventually got a good tutorial which solve the problem by using image sequence.

Anyway, the production must go on. The schedule said that time for animation has ended. Thus I have to keep moving to lighting process.

Cheers,
WM

Layout Animation

This is layout for doing music and sound. I also put some rough animation into it. I know that the animation is not much good, but I have one more week to improve it based on my timetable.

Key Visual 2

After getting feedback, I've improved key visual again to find the look in which the animation should look like. Several attempts were fail. Anyway, I eventually got satisfied version. I want to keep the feeling of children book and paper-like in this animation, so I avoid to make it too dark as the first attempts. I found that bright and colourful colours might be a good idea, but it is  hard to control the overall mood & tone, especially telling night time.

Key Visual

After I've finished rigging, I moved forward to key visual. The texture on environment is just quick, and not satisfied yet. Anyway, I'm waiting for feedback from Wayne.

Character Test Rigging

This is my first rigging for the project. I've spent a lot of time in learning this from online tutorials and Adam's advice. Although there is some problem in movement, It looks like a paper doll as I want. The errors are going to be fixed tomorrow.

By the way, rigging is a pain in my ass. :( There is a long way to go for my 3D animation. Keep fighting!
 

 

This is my first time to animate 3D setup character. I'm still confuse with controlling joints.

 

Environment Mass and Character Update

This is the previous character design and paint. I almost finish this version before I was inspired from new sources of idea. Then I made a decision to redesign it again.

After recent few days of sketching, I've done the character design and initial texture painting. These are ready for doing modeling tomorrow.

I also did the environment mass design. This metropolis is close to what I have been thinking for a while, massive skyscrapers on small island. The mass will be developed to more detailed version soon.