Animation Direction AM50309 - 6: Week 7

This past week I have decided to make the finishing touches to the floating rocks and also make a start on the ocean shader. 

I decided to make final checks to each rock to make sure that the bump mapping looked right on each one. I also added the palm trees on them, and bended each one so as to avoid them looking to stiff. I'm not quite sure how I will animate them yet, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.                 

Andward Arts Presents

                 

CocoNUTS!!!

Floating Island

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Front

Top

Bottom

Regarding my ocean shader, my original thought was that I would have to create it from scratch. As creating water in maya is very difficult, I wasn't sure whether to carry on with the original concept. Thankfully, I discovered a pre made ocean shader in the software that allowed me to apply  a map with an ocean texture on it. It can also be animated as well, which made things far more easier. This took down my production time significantly, and I decided to focus my time on making the waves look appropriate for the final animation.

Animation Direction AM50309 - 6: Week 6

I'm continuing with the modelling process, this time creating the second title card for the animations name, CocoNUTS!!!.

As with the other two rocks, I followed the same process of creating a basic model in maya, exporting it to mudbox to apply basic texturing and then utilising photoshop to finish off the final details. Like with the other title card, it was fairly easy to texture due to the simple shape. I also followed the same process of making normal maps with CrazyBump.

Before

After

I enjoyed creating all of the rocks, as it was a way of letting me develop my texture and bump mapping skills. It also taught me valuable shortcuts to save modelling time, which I plan on using for future projects.

Animation Direction AM50309 - 6: Week 5

In order to give my film a bit more of a visual impact, I decided to give my film a unique title sequence so as to intrigue the viewer. I have never done anything like this for any of my other projects, so I wanted to try it out for this one.

I first started creating the rock that represented my brand identity. I largely followed the same process as for the floating island, but I used cylindrical mapping instead. After exporting the base mesh to Mudbox, I once again applied basic texturing to the mesh to act as markers. I then exported the texture maps to finish off the final details, and applied bump mapping with CrazyBump.

Mesh

Texture Map

Render

I still have a bit more work to do on them to make them look right, but so far I'm making good progress.

Animation Direction AM50309 - 6: Week 4

I now started to think about the design of the main island. Knowing that I wanted to keep it simple to avoid long rendering times, I decided to use a basic cube polygon, and then sculpt it in Mudbox.

In Mudbox, I applied basic bulging on the edges on top to make it look more rock like. I also added a few bulges at the bottom to make it look like it's floating off the ground. After I did this, I created the textures on top using basic mapping, and then exported the texture maps into photoshop like I did with the palm tree and Fishbone's textures.

Overall I'm happy with the way the island looks, and I plan to eventually include a pond in the hole as well using dynamics to create a waterfall. If I had more time I would probably make the bottom look slightly more defined.

This week has also given me the opportunity to work on the coconut character. As it's a simple sphere, it would be quite quick to model and rig.

For the coconut's eyes, I wanted to give the impression that they are etched onto its surface. To do this, I decided to use a similar technique to making blend shapes, except this time I utilised images instead. To do this, I created a texture map and then created eye expressions       

in Photoshop.

Once I finished the different expressions, I saved each layer separately as tiff files and then mapped them to the top half of the coconut. I then created a new item in the channel box named eye expressions and keyed each expression to the channel.

Image Sequence

Normal

Crazy

Eyes Closed

Once this was finished I added the blend shapes to the top mouth. I felt that this would make the animation slightly easier. Adding these blend shapes was relatively easy, and I plan to use them in the final animation.

Blend Shapes

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