Friday, May 27, 2011

Working in Maya

Ok so sadly poor john gunning has been ill stricken with the T-Virus or as its more commonly referred to as the flue, so i have not been up to much the past few days also had to go meet a lecturer about my thesis arg with the flue and then i got stuck in the dam rain !! this post could easily turn into a rant about how i hate when a bus driver turns his head as your standing at the door and pulls off but i digress my good friends. ( looks around no one actually looks at this blog). So ive been building the set for this "where the dale blows" idea im fiddling with,
So i havent made anything in 3d since like last summer when i finished college.

I am trying to get back into it now i have done some animation and stuff with motion tracking during college this year, So now i must delve deep !! into the 3rd dimension once more to full fill my destiny as lord of the rings ohh no sorry my bad i did it again i mixed my life up with a film i saw.

Here are some render's of the set im building.

This was the house when i started, I never textured in maya before now so im trying to learn as i go on this so come september i wont be in a panic trying to figure out small technical issue's. As you can see here was a big feckin mess of a thing.

eww ugly

Started the whole thing out with just some polygon cube's had issues with the texture streching as you can see on the left and right side walls above. Just went through some trial and error as i tried to fix it. Got it eventually.

I had no light's set up


Then built it up a bit more textured the roof and bunker thing in the front worked ont he grass with a 3d texture, and the kind of slates on the grond, I textured the building and objects with by using the psd network option under the rendering>texture>psdnetwork drop down menu. Again just learning as i go along im not sure if this is the correct way to do it at the moment.

this came out really bright for some reason oops. 
So after i was happy enough and got the texturing down, I thought about what i wanted from the set a bit more, i just looked at my story boards and thought about what i wanted to be seen around the garden it was going to be set in, I was picturing my old childhood house for this but that would just look boring so i made it look a bit wierd and stylized it up a tad.

Building up the scene
I was fairly happy with the house i built and the back garden, little fence and what not so then me being me i gave myself more to do and thought id build more incase i decide to go a bit further with the idea. I was thinking what if i decide to do another short with the same character etc i could do a few things on the street or what not.

I worked on the lighting after I blocked out the shapes for some house's

So I started to work on the house's they were kinda like the ones in the background above very rectangular so i want to give them a bendy style which i was able to do with the Sculpt Geometry tool, I didnt use the smooth mesh option because i thought maybe if i end up rendering in maya software it wouldnt show up. Then i found out that i could just convert the smoothed mesh to polygons but anyway moving on. 

So i had done all the windows you see here and textured them you they are more like glass, And made some nice window ledges etc then Maya crashed and i had to do it all over again. Yay. 


So After i redone the windows they didnt look as nice i had them before well i think so anyway but shit happens lesson learned ctrl+S more often, I had auto save on after the crash but then apparently it likes to make Maya crash 10x more often.
Also at this point i added a garage to one of the house's
Made some doors but you cant see these to well here at the moment i will textures these new houses at some point, Altho i do like that the only house textured in the one in the middle hmm.


MAKING A TREE

So by now i had a fair bit done in regards to the bulk of the set i want for this animation to play out in, And Then it dawned on my i need to make a tree, This turned out to be a bit of a head ake as i made a few trying to get one that i was happy with, The first one i made nice, i liked it a lot it had branches and leafs and all that jazz but it also had a nasty poly count which was crashing everything and slowing down my computer so i had to scrap it and start again, here it is below.

I havent taken meny screen grabs while ive been making this.


The Tree of cpu death !! deehhnn dehhnn dehhhNNNNnnnn


So then i made another one, But i wasnt happy with it, Looked crap was bland bleh. It is possible that i could have used one of the stock tree's in maya from the paint tools but i have some specific things in this that i want shot from the tree so i thought it would be a better idea to make my own tree.

the bland brown tree of blandy bland land
So for the 3rd time i started over just kept the poly count really low, added a twist deformer to give it the look i wanted I think it turned out much nicer than the previous two, Il perhaps just sculpt it at some point to make it mor round on the branches. 
Gave it a more kind of looming feel
The Scene with the tree in it

Here are some renders from the camera's i set up in the scene, which i set up to try and correspond to some shot ideas i had in my story boards.


My lighting messed up on here, It was due to the original tree i made crashing i had to go back to a older save file, Tip; Keep loads of save file's.

Ok so by now i was thinking that i have some shots but there wont be anything to see behind the tree which in my mind would be weird so i started adding some more in, I added an extra house and a garden, But this stage i also started to add in new things like sheds to some of the back gardens and some clutter for the back gardens, They may or may not be seen in the shots but better safe than sorry I guess.

Made some dust bin's some wooden planks up against a wall, the shed out the back next door, Il add more i think it needs it. maybe make a car to sit in the dirve way perhaps.

So I started to work on the behind the tree location, Just building it up, il detail the walls some more at some point.
added some some stuff needs more work clearly but the foundation of what i have made i feel is solid and will give me some nice results for this short.

Ok this is every thing i have done up to today on this project, Silly flue is holding me back hard to be creative when your heaving the T VIRUS!!!  This may be my last entry i feel the t virus taking over my every thought my very being ughh Life in raccoon city is a hard one. Ow wait i did that thing again thats not my life thats resident evil oops i just have the flue. Then why did i eat those people ? who know's

Thanks for dropping by to my blog toodle a doo 

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Small Project: Where The Dale Blow's


So you may or may not remember that I was going to make a little 3d short over the summer to get to grips with maya so i have started working on this now for maybe a week or two, I had actually started to story board it back in the start of may going up and back on the dart from college, The story boards are just rough and not a lot of information on them but this is generally how i story board anyway and since its a personal project no one is going to be looking at them to grade me or what ever so its not like i have to polish them up for anyone. 

The idea itself came from when i was in college and i would be walking home with my pal's Mo and Ryan and we'd be talking about weird shit and some thing came up about violent kids and I spoke about how when i was a kid i used chicken wire to catch a bird, it was funny than it sounds reading this but anyway we had a laugh and mo was like you should really make those things into cartoons and start to put more of your humour into things, so i thought yea fuck it, sure why not i have always wanted to so im doing it now. 

So you wont be surprised to hear im making a short about a mental kid who catches a bird in a cage except i changed the ending a bit he just stomps it to death in the cage, Im going for weird here wether it turns out funny or not i just dont know, all i know is when i told my mother what i was doing she look at me very strangely so that must be  a good sign !!  

Story Boards
These are my early story boards, they may not be to clear but i tend to keep most things in my head anyway. Not that this is a good thing doh bad habits aye. 


So those are the early story i drew up each morning on the dart and the way back home, The end one could do with a bit more pizzazzz (thats a arty word) but anyway i think il make a animatic for it at some point, just to maybe get a clearer idea of what im doing but i may not need to i will see how things pan out after i model the character. I kept it a small setting with only two character the boy and the bird well and his mother but i only plan on her legg's being shown ala tom & jerry style. I dont know why i just thought it'd be a nod to violent cartoons i saw as a kid, Ow il clear one bit up in the story boards at one point he's in front of  a tv i had a little note on the page you cant see, but basically its going to be like a cut to him watching violent shit on tv maybe tom and gerry ? who knows i was going to put in a chucky sound bite maybe a macgyver clip on the tv or some thing im not sure yet.

Early Early Doodle's

These are just some early doodling i have been doing for the kid and the bird, nothing major just getting some ideas down on paper, Il probably just go with some thing i think will fit the feeling of creepiness im trying to go for in this and then do up some Character Sheets so i can import these into may and start up the modelling process. so anyway here are some early idea's nothing major ! 



Ok these are some of the doodles and story boards i was doing so thats all for today i will upload some of my cg work next, I am building the environment this is going to take place in first im trying to do things in the same manner i do my 2d work which tends to be layouts > animation. 

So same John time same John place which is here but the time is random so eh dont mind the same John time line its just a lie. 

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Project Sumer - Pre Production Concept Paints

Wanted to draw out the idea i was thinking about from my early character designs  of the alien guy kind of looming towards some primate ape like things, with the giant ship in the sky behind him. 

I was thinking of a shot from some rough story boards i drew out and thought id do a quick speed painting of it

Didnt actually finish this but i was just thinking about the space ship how it might look

Roughed out an early idea of the inside of the ship

I was just fooling around with the idea of encountering some wild ape like creatures

thats a big ape

Miner Slaves



With these i was just trying to get some ideas out and trying to build up a better of idea of  what i way i would like for the film to look.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Blog no1 : Hello World

Hello and welcome to my blog, I am John Gunning
A animation student, mostly self taught, this year
i moved collage to IADT, And the year went well
for the most part, And will be starting my Degree film
in September so me being the work a holic that i am
I have decided to start this blog to keep track of my
progress on the film, I will keep this blog updated on
my project degree year film and another side project
i am working on.

So il run through the two projects I am working on
my overall project which i am currently doing the pre production work on, Is called Sumer
im basing this project around the Ancient Astronaut theory ,
The Plan right now is to do this in 3d with Maya , this is subject to change. Also kind of depends on how my smaller project pans out.

My small project which at moment working title is "Where the dale blow's" it is about a violent kid and all these messed things he does, I wont say to much about it right now but i am going for some thing very fucked up and hopefully disturbing.

So some of things i will be putting on here will be sketch's and rough story boards maybe , and some concept paintings maybe even some pictures of stuff I am drawing influences from.

So this was my first time blogging really so

same john time same john place eh.. bye