Thursday 15 November 2007

Meeting Delay

Meeting has been delayed due to work load on other project, should (hopefully) be meeting week 8 on the Tuesday 20th afternoon.

- Mary

Research - Composition Movie

Some more updates of research which has previous done before, but not mentioned to date yet. While Harn and Cherie busy looking at adverts and 3D animation films, I looked at how to composite 3D character into real life footage.

In-depth research was done into two very successful 3D composite feature films; Stuart little (which was mention before) and Garfield. From research, the most important information found was lighting and shadowing is a very important factor to make the whole 3D character realistic. When research, there was images of Stuart little the character modelled and added into the scene without any lights and shadow, the model, on its own is very well produced, but did not looked like it was part of the scene, after lighting and shadow was added on, it looks like it was actually inside it.

From Garfield, I have found it was using motion capture to make Garfield the character's movement more realistic, which is also one aspect of making 3D character more realistic. Unfortunately, we do not have that facility in the department at the moment. Also while filming, using an orange ball to represent Garfield, which was a method of making real life character aware of where character Garfield was in the scene. This was so the character was looking at the right direction and also shadow would be totally right.

This information was all discussed together, along with other researched material, to come up with the character ideas and designs we have so far.

Photos of designs is upload to our website, feel free to take a look.
Animatics has been delayed on uploading, but will be uploaded as soon as possible, please do keep checking.

www.manic-monkey.net


- Mary

Friday 2 November 2007

Moving Forward

Having done our presentation, which provided us with feedback not only on our idea, but also the research we have to do date, and what else we could do to help us with our project. Our idea seems sound (thankfully) but we have been advised to use good sound, as it will rely alot on sound effects etc to make it real. This is very true, we need to get started on this!!! We have thought about recording thing ourselves; voices, bumps etc and adding it in during post production, but this will be discussed later on.

We have started to to think about modeling. Unfortunately, this is temporarily taking a back seat to the various other pieces of work we have to do at this time. However, we are planning to meet at some point during the next week (week 7 project week), to discuss what we have to do next, going forward, and discuss deadlines for the work.

We were hoping to have all modeling and rigging complete by the beginning of next term (yes that does include christmas holidays, but how much work we will get done in the vacation is beyond me!).

-Harn