DVD titles

Knocked up some title screens for each reel on my showreel. They keep with the same theme as the menus which i think keeps a nice continuity and brings the piece together.

team meeting. dropping the dragon.

Today Lydia and myself had a long discussion whilst reviewing the time scale. After finally completing her project for raveLIVE with the other dragon, lydia and I had to think seriously about whether we would have time to edit the rig to fit my dragon model and paint weights all over again.

Obviously I had enough to do what with getting the background started and completed, along with lighting, ready for the render. Lydia has to get all the animation done for the piece and fix some of the rig that was a bit shakey in her previous model. Realistically we just didn't have time. Obviously if we did, I would love to see my dragon completed, rigged and jumping around a forest, but we have little time, and thats without leaving time for error.

It is with great sadness that we agreed that the best course of action would be to drop my dragon and use the dragon modeled for lydia's raveLive project. I must admit I am disappointed but it is a necessary decision. It's whats best for this project, and relieves us of some strain from falling behind. I'm very proud of my model still, and think that the design was one of my best, I would love to continue with it in my own time.

Now I shall focus my full attention on the enviroment. Which will be the only thing of mine showcased in this project and im hoping to create something of an improvement in style and quality from my enviroment project.

wish me luck.

colour swatches

These are the colour swatches for the background. I really enjoy the green and orange on still. A good mixture of the two would eliminate the chance of loosing our dragon. How to get that balance on maya will have to be trial and error. Immediate solutions that spring to mind would be to use one of the swatches ouright and use the other color through lighting.

Background Concepts

This is the initial concept for the scene. A merky autumnal forest, with mist and and intense sunlight. After speaking to lydia about this she said she would like play with some of the colours and see what the image would look like with greens and blues instead of intense red. I agreed with her as we are having a red dragon and I am worried that if we keep this colour scheme then we will lose the dragon.

Nghiem Mail!

Finally we got a reply from Nghiem in response to the storyboards and designs we sent her. Unfortunately she cannot reply often and has to sift through all her work before se can respond to us. Lydia and myself are very grateful for the feed back and time she has given us.

Some of the important feed back which luckily came at the right time was to do with the scene itself. Where the story from our boards conveys just fine, the actual setting is off. Knuckers would not live in the mountains. They would live by streams or wells in damp places, normally located near forests.

Upon hearing this I immediately felt slightly daunted. Knowing that i have never had any experience modeling a forest and feeling slightly worried about the complexity of the textures and organic nature of the models. Pushing that aside however, I knew that I was quite capable of modeling a well as it would more or less be the same process I took to create my fountain in the environment project.

Now I'll have to look at completing some concepts, and literally jump straight in. Luckily Lydia is almost done with the animating on the musion project, so should be fully available soon.

ShowREEL menu's

I used photoshop to draw up some menus for my showreel. I wanted them to look simple, and ive decided that the theme for DVD is blue. I really like how they came out. I used the same font throughout for continuity purposes and didn't stray from the blue stripe on either menu. I decided to have contact as another menu as then the page will stay up until they click home. This gives clients time to take note of my details.

I decided to include 3 sites that I post frequently on, This shows all my web presence and accessibility online. Hopefully for future reels I'll be able to expand this list.

I also used the logos from the websites of my chose web presence. This hopefully should make them more recognizable.

Scene.

This will be the basis of our scene. The storyboards both me a lydia initially came up with were set atop a mountain with a cave and pool outside. There wood be a british landscape painted in to fill the skyline.

I really like the simplicity of this scene and of the cave. It reminds me of the flintstones. Theres not really much to write about this model as, it really is the beginning stages of the scene. Will have to talk to lydia about additional props as it looks quite bare at the moment.