Prior to this assignment I’d had no experience sculpting in 3D, but having enjoyed using clay in the past I was quite excited to see what could be achieved (and how well I could achieve it). My first attempt at organic modelling came with an in-class exercise wherein we followed Henry’s tutorial to make a…Continue Reading First exercises in Blender
As soon as we were given a character assignment I got to work thinking through some concepts and what I wanted to achieve. I started thinking through different characters and character types that could be adapted to fit this brief; animals, children, aliens, robots, sweet old ladies feeding birds in a park. I just wanted…Continue Reading My Cute Character Concept- Beginning Assignment 2
Going through the 3D animation pipeline as someone with 2 dimensional ambitions has been an interesting experience. At the beginning of this semester I was mostly missing the work of the first, but as time went on I found myself enjoying particular aspects of 3D work that persisted throughout most areas of the pipeline; I…Continue Reading Reflecting on this Semester: Animated Narratives
To test out some of my previous concepts for our environment I took a rendered screenshot of my character in the our base environment and lit by the sky dome light we’ll be using into Procreate to test some ideas based around it. I came up with the above image through various tests and with…Continue Reading Final Backgrounds
When we came to learn about lighting in 3D I was very excited to see what was achievable. When I was studying Moving Image Arts and Art and Design at a secondary level, considering lighting was and is one of my favourite parts of live action filmmaking and creating artwork. Whether I was making a…Continue Reading Lighting our Environment and Render Tests
Though trying to paint our characters in substance painter was discussed earlier on in our development stages, we’ve decided to texture them more realistically in substance instead to save time while still getting good results. After UV unwrapping my worm and checking (the checker texture is so large because I had to apply it manually,…Continue Reading Texturing my Character in Substance Painter
Once I’d gotten to a good place with my character’s (who I’ve come to call Wayne- Wayne T. Worm) entrance animation, I was left with mostly facial animation and reaction shots; good opportunities to show more of his personality. It was always my plan to have his hat act as cross-looking eyebrows, but in rigging…Continue Reading Animating my Character: Et Cetera
To some extent I had a clear idea in my head of how my character would look when animated, but when it came to animating him I struggled for a while to achieve something that suited his personality, particularly with his entrance. I wanted him to slither into the scene with menace and importance, but…Continue Reading Animating my Character’s Entrance
For a while we’d been discussing how to translate iconic western American landscapes into a 3D style that would suit our short. I’d come up with some concepts based around places like Monument Valley in Utah and the Arizona Desert (as made famous by John Ford’s westerns)- -but when we started to think more realistically…Continue Reading Texturing our Environment
Since we started this project I’ve been keeping a Pinterest board filled with aesthetic ideas and inspiration for characters, environments and backgrounds. Through this board I’ve been able to find a lot of stunning western American artwork from artists like Edgar Payne, Eric Bowman and Ed Mell alongside great real-life references and photography of the…Continue Reading Further Background Concepts and Story Revisions