Other stuff

Company Research

Rigging

Modelling

I started off making a polygon cube, and basically extruded and edited the points to a reference picture i had allready drawn out, the main idea of the tutorial is to point out certain things you should and shouldnt do, some of which i actually did myself during the making of it and got corrected by a few people, i have included this to show where i went wrong and tried to explain why it doesnt work.

Tutorial

I have also made a Tutorial for my industry exercises project, my tutorial is on Modelling and basic Rigging in Maya
this is the link to it: http://nikotutorial.blogspot.com/

The reason i made the tutorial on this subject is because thats one of the areas i would like to go into later on in life, mainly modelling, but i have also been told that rigging helps a lot as it makes your modelling better, but it also makes you much more employable as not many people like to do it.

Filming

Lighting

Modelling

Motion Tracking and Masking

Motion Tracking and Masking

Short test using Motion tracking and masking. these are the main techniques that will be used on our film, motion tracking to keep the tank from looking like its floating about, also masking to make it look like its behind that black boxy thing to the right of the screen.

the main things I need to do to this clip to make it look better is to set up cameras that replicate the lighting of the room where I did the filming, also keep the real life camera and Maya camera to be at roughly the same angle. I also need to look at some tutorials on lighting, as I want to do render passes to get the shadows right.

After doing a few tests on after effects i decided not to use MatchMover, as it gave me much better quality tracking, and it created a 3d space with an animated camera.

at first i found it really difficult to use as whenever i tried using an auto track (which is what all the tutorias said to do,it either crashed my computer or came out as nonsense, so instead i used manual track , which gave me a much better result and it also allowed me to learn how the programme works out the scene by using coordinate systems, which im guessing uses trigonometry?

now that i have tracked my scenes i can see that maybe the filming that we made was not too appropriate for tracking, as it mooved too much and too fast, and also i should film a bit longer than neccecary, as when we did the final edit the tracks started shaking in near the ends of the shots, although we should of edited them out either way, even if it made our film shorter.

The Cast

The Goon rig 

Armoured Car

We are going to use the Goon rig as its a well made and ready rigged character we found on Creativecrash.com the idea is to make 2 little armies of blue goons fight red goons, maybe with tanks aswell.

Equipment

For the filming I rented a Canon EOS 550 DSLR

We are not using much equipment from the shop as all we really ned is the camera. later on if we have time  we have discussed using some green screen to composite one of our team members.

Ideas

Idea development:

• Our first idea is to film in a park and have alien like creatures walking about as if they where taking their dogs for a walk.

• After a group meeting we diced to change the idea to one i suggested which was of two toy armies fighting on a tabletop, I suggested we gave them guns and tanks rather than swords as this would make it a lot easier to animate.
• Then we decided to change it again to a person reading a book ,and while he reads his imagination comes to life on the table top and buildings and a blimp and other stuff happens !