Maya: Progress, Textures & 3D Models

Maya Creation by Thomas Mayfield on Scribd

Antenna

Dish

Large Backdrop Buiding 1

Large Backdrop Building 2

Large Backdrop Building 3

Medium Building 1

Medium Building 2

Medium Building 3

Palm Tree

Radio Tower

Scene Test 1

Scene Test 2

Scene Test 3

Scene Test 4

Scene Test 4 ALT

Environment Animation GIF

Speedo 1

Speedo 2

Lighter Ambient Occlusion

Lighter Lambert

Lighter CTRL

The lighter has been rigged so that the Lid can move, the flame can turn on and off, and the small flint can rotate.

Dice

Gearstick

Miscellaneous Shirt Designs Character

Miscellaneous Shirt Designs Character

There will be a lot of people on the side of our streets into our animation. To make them stand out we will be using different character designs in the animation to add depth.

Research: Art Styles & Artistic Methods & Technical Development

Project Breakdown

The Story

So to begin with each group was given certain themes for their animations such as "Man vs Nature", "Man vs Man" or "Man vs The Universe", we were given "Man vs Machine".

With our idea, instead of going with traditional "Man vs Literal Machine" (Terminator, Megatron, HAL) we decided to go down a much more diverse path, focusing on the machine of society rather than a physical machine. Originally the idea was about a father who had lost his son, who later replaced his sons absence with a small robot. Given our genre the story then developed into something much more different, our storyline now follows a wanted thief in a stolen car, paranoia prominent in this thieves mind. We aim to build the paranoia through light and shape, our inspirational focus being Saul Bass. Bass's work involves extravagant sharp shapes and brilliant colours which will incorporate nicely with our use of bright lights to convey paranoia within the character. With the 'chase' becoming more prominent the colours of Bass combined with the shapes will create an intensity that will build on the paranoia and urgency of the characters. The use of Bass in our city can also be used to our advantage as we can exaggerate the city, make the builds larger than what they should appear - adding to the effect that the character is beginning to feel enclosed. Our animations end sentence is as follows: "His Knees Steadied, His Heart Beat Fiercely And He Began To Run Again", we put this into a literal context by having our main character meeting his demise at the end, he was on the run but isn't anymore.

Art Style

Zaha Hadid

An influence on our art style is a piece created by Zaha Hadid. One of our main goals for this project is designing objects that can only be seen with motion. These thumbnails have a sense of deliberate 'speed' to them, the angles used and the color combinations allow you to see these shapes as objects, but never as a solid.

Overexposure 1

Overexposure 2

Having overexposure lights as an artistic asset in the animation should allow us to give some real feelings of speed and movement. Going back, some of these photos are a good example of showing speed when it is merely a still image, when this technique gets put into the animation we should see some nice results in terms of movement.

Saul Bass

With our main influential artist for this project being Saul Bass. he mainly focuses on minimalist shapes to create organic and easily recognizable shapes. With our concept and production art we plan to incorporate these natural lines in our car, character and buildings to make it simplistic and to add to the paranoia.

The Technology/Development Process

There will be certain methods used in terms of "Creative Assembly" to create the final animation we all want, having certain aspects of the animation more complex than others so some artistic/design choices are able to stand out more.

Software Requirements/Colour Palette

The main production tools that will be used for this project will be, Adobe PhotoshopCC.2015.5, Adobe After Effects CC 2015.3, Maya 2016, CC Adobe Audition 2015.2.,CC Adobe Premier Pro 2015.3 and CC Adobe Media Encoder 2015.3. Photoshop will be used to create our basic concepts and textures After Effects will be used for giving the animation some colour management/rough editing. Maya will be used for rendering and creating our main animation and Audition will be where our sound is edited, created and stockpiled. Premier Pro is where all of the assets come together to create the final animation and Media Encoder will export the video a whatever quality is chosen for the end product. Methods for some of our animation will include characters that are moved around on 2D planes, which can be layered and swapped to give the illusion of 3D. The car will be modeled in 3D as will most of the roads.

The Soundscape

The Soundscape is a priority for this project to achieve this idea of paranoia in conjunction with Bass, the sound will give a feel to the animation without a clear physical visual input. Already we have a big stock of field recorded sounds from some members of the team and we have more coming in soon.

The screenplay for the animation has got two versions, the first is the storyline of the animation, how it flows and acts. But the second version is of sounds specifically tailored for certain parts of the screenplay, so we can get an idea of what it would sound like.

Screenplay Link

http://strideanimation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/sounds-to-screenplay.html

Designing Stride Animation

The Content Creators

The members who make up Stride are; Danni Foley, Rhys Wadmore, Samuel Johnson and Thomas Mayfield. We are coming together to fulfil the criteria of the Narrative and Character brief, one of our first hurdles was incorporating our ideas and designs together and come to choices on both together.

Danni Foley - http://dannifoleycaa.blogspot.co.uk

Rhys Wadmore - http://rwadmore.blogspot.co.uk

Samuel Johnson - http://Samjaycaa.blogspot.co.uk

Thomas Mayfield -http://thomasmayfielducarochester.blogspot.co.uk

The Initial Designs

Danni's Initial Drawing - We began brainstorming a group designation, trying to please everyone  in the group with the overall look of the blog. Danni suggested the idea of 'Stride' and the image of a stag as they fitted together which we all settled on the idea of. We began designing a logo in detail to represent our brand. we came up with the initial design of using a Stag as our logo, we picked up that a geometric look to our designs would be acceptable.

Danni then supplied us with some initial compositions using a geometry technique. Two examples, one with a fill with a dark colour palette and another as a line image. We choose not to apply colour at this point until we were happy with our logo, font and thereafter set up our blog. Once that is chosen we can do some final colour compositions. The font chosen was chose due to its clean appearance and professionalism, Avenir Next (Ultra Light). We experimented with a range of text to incorporate into the logo of the company.

Thomas applied a hatched design to the font to experiment and put the idea forward but we agreed that we should keep our font clean and sharp.

Logo Colour Compositions

Thomas created a range of colour compositions for the logo. Using the four seasons as his focus point he produced themed colour gradients for the design. We came to a subtle agreement that the winter composition gained the best results, so we began using light blues into our designs.

Header Compositions

Rhys elaborated on some header designs that Danni initially verbally suggested. The idea to add a geometric pattern somewhere within the border was to add emphasis to the look of the stag and also to make the banner look a lot more full. Rhys had the idea of placing a tree to the right that represented Yggdrasil the tree of life, the idea of the message being that it is striding toward the best of life. Rhys supplied a few different variations but ultimately we decided the geometric paper patterns in the background wasn't working.

Danni elaborated on her idea of placing a limited amount geometry along with the stag on the banner rather than to cloud the background with geometry. Danni reverted to black and white for this basic first design, once the design is finalised she would then work the colour into the banner and make it look professional, clean and sharp.

Animating the Logo

Thomas took the logo into Maya with the intent of possibly animating the stag into a running cycle. We could then possibly use the small clip at the start of our future animation.