So with the concept in mind, I started modelling my ghost. I used a sphere and deleted the faces at the bottom, then used the edge loop to extrude down to give me the general shape of her body. After that, I merged the vertices to centre to give me a point at the bottom and close the gap created from deleting faces.

I smoothed the shape out and used a plane to begin modelling the eyes. The pupils are a separate mesh that was created from a stretched out sphere. The mouth will be created from a curve and sweep mesh to create her displeased expression. I’m happy with how she’s turning out so far, I think she resembles my concept quite closely. I still need to figure out the outer shell that’s transparent, but that’s the idea.

As far as updates for the project overall, we’re not incredibly organised due to the fact a lot of our group aren’t consistently in. Will got Covid and Sam has been having health issues. A new guy was added to our group, we caught him up to speed with the project and he’s volunteered to do the previz as he has previous experience with 3D. In the meantime I’m going to continue modelling my character and also help UV unwrap models that are sent into the onedrive.

 

So we moved onto the animatic with the storyboards done. We decided to split the animatic so the workload would be more manageable.

Ciara did the sketches, I lined and then Samantha coloured the animatic. The completed animatic can be seen below.

Samantha completed the animatic while very sick and it was very last minute before we did the presentations in class. For this reason I think some of the slides and timing were muddled. I had made the animatic layers a png so she could colour beneath them, but I think the change in software might have messed with the transparency or something to that effect judging by the white outlines between lines and colour.

I’ve also included our presentation, with Sam’s absence I discussed the animatic and then the contextual references that inspired our idea.

As a group we decided that the best thing to do would be to create separate storyboards and then combine ideas from there. These are the storyboard thumbnails I came up with super quickly.

We all generally had similar ideas for shots and framing, but it was interesting what everyone thought.

We just used little placeholder ghosts until we concepted further to nail down a concrete design.

Alongside the storyboards, the group agreed we should begin concepting for the animated short. I started a Pinterest board to gather inspiration for the ghosts, their shapes and what sort of style would be best suited for the 3D short.

I looked at a variety of different ghost designs, but tried to keep within a similar style that Ciara and Caity had been concepting in so the style would remain somewhat consistent.

Aodhan recommended that we begin with silhouettes to explore shape. These aren’t great concepts, admittedly. I was very uninspired at first, but then I explored further with shape and pushing the ghosts’ shape language.

The newbie ghost is supposed to be eager, naïve and generally a bubbly personality. With the above concepts I tried to convey this through different shapes and styles. In the end one of Caity’s designs was the preferred one and then we divided our attention onto our own background ghosts as the brief of our assignment instructs that we need to model, rig and animate at least one character.

I started sketching out some ideas, again trying to focus on silhouette and also keeping in mind what the rest of my group were doing. I decided I liked the top right concept, the grumpy ghost would be set apart from the rest of the group. I also liked that it would fit well with the story overall, in the scenes she will be seen, she’s reacting to the new ghost’s noisy work.

I drew up a cleaner plan for her with a better look at the details. I’ll be modelling her in Maya, and as she’s just a background ghost I don’t think she’ll need the same intricacy in terms of rigging. Due to this, I’m not too worried about creating a super detailed model that can blink or anything. In short, she needs to move and be able to move her hands.

I’ve created a group with Ciara, Caity, Will and Samantha for our 3D animated short. We spent two hours or so ideating, trying to come up with ideas for characters that fit the brief. We’re allowed to create characters who have arms, but not legs, so there was some debate over what would be suitable. Eventually, we landed on ghosts, and then we went back to the central theme of ‘nature’ and decided ghost gardeners would fit the brief.

This is the Miro board where we ideated. Due to less that appropriate drawings I can’t upload the entire board with our references.

The story is about a newbie ghost gardener who, after watching his mentor fix up a grave, is given his first grave to design. He does a bad job, and after floating away thinking he did a job well done, the mentor ghost fixes the grave and that’s the end.

Noticeably, this is different than the board, this is because we refined the idea in our group chat. We believe that the final story plot will better demonstrate our knowledge of 3D animation and the animation pipeline.

We also explored some contextual references for how the short may look. Caity really likes the appearance of low poly models, so I think that influenced her references.

The idea was to have a spookier background with cool tones, purples and pinks to juxtapose with the cuter ghost characters. Because of this, we examined games like Rayman 2 and Spyro. We plan to make slightly more complex models and environments but will aim to emulate a similar feeling to the references.

Alongside the lower poly appearance, we also decided it would be cool to make models of flowers that bloom at night and flowers used for funerals like lilies and night gladiolus.

We began concepting for the assignment.

We were tasked with doing a 6-10 minute presentation analysing short films. I was in team 1o, and we were looking at Lost & Found, a stop motion short film about a crocheted dinosaur saving the love of his life. It’s a story about love, sacrifice and hope.

Lost & Found (lostandfound.film)

This is my recording without the sprites.

 

Sprites

These are my sprites, which look far better than my last ones, in my opinion. The thought crossed my mind to do doll-like sprites to match the theme of the short film, but the rest of my group didn’t want to do that, which is fine. I really like how these turned out, even if I only got two done.

 

We also had to complete a peer review. My group were lovely! They were communicative, active and the quality of their work was of a brilliant standard. They were a pleasure to work with.