Weekly Journal - Week 8 - 19 March

This week I brought the pictures Matt and Mike had drawn an done some colour swashes on them to get an insight to what they may look like towards the final environment and character.

I helped with the motion capture that we were doing for the fight scene we have. With doing this we came up with a lot of errors during the time we were in the motion capture room, therefore we are having to book it out for the next few weeks, as we need to perfect what we have done. We also recorded some bluescreen footage for the realife character.

I also continued the development of the 3D environment that I am making, adding different elements in too it to make it more realistic and more visually pleasing.

For this I wanted to create quite a cool looking environment that you would consider a place a fight in a game, such as Tekken and Mortal Kombat. I added grass to show it had some sort of life too it as well as the flat area where the two characters would be able to fight. This is only an idea of what it could from looking at the different fighting games that are out, as well as concepts other people had created.

I decided to do some research in to other peoples concepts and existing game landscape concepts to see how theres looked and what improvements I could consider doing to my own landscape if it were to be used in the final sequence.

This week we all gave ourselves the aim to look at the 3D location that we wanted to use, the reason we all decided to do this was it enabled us to have a larger sum of research to give us more of an idea, as well looking to create our own in the early stages. This worked well as we had many ideas and designs that we could implement in to our idea.

Weekly Journal - Week 7 - 16th March.

This week I drew up two storyboards, as these were to get the initial ideas that we had come up with, this also allowed me to see whether our ideas would work. The second storyboard was more successful as well as being cleaner.

With this being the first storyboard I decided to keep the elements we were talking about and roughtly intergrated them in these four images. After thinking more logically about are concept, we came to the conclusion that it wouldn't make sense to have the character select screen in there at all, as we already had the characters pre-selected.

This became a more finalised version of the storyboard, there were some major changes that I made, for example the scene where the character gets sucked through the T.V. was diminished and replaced by a portal, as me and Mike were looking into what would be more appropriate as well as being more visually pleasing.

I also began to develop some early character concepts, mainly featuring on the head, these were quite rough but helped to inspire the final desgin character that Matt and Mike created on sculptris.

I began to create a 3D environment on 3ds max, it is a wasteland, it is still in development, as well as research in to characters in games that are out now, for example Tekken and Mortal Kombat as this is where we drew inspiraton from.

This week I believe we worked well as a group as we all were delegated tasks that we wanted to complete for the following week, this meant that the following week we had all done some research of the genre we were going for, therefore this lead me to do what I have shown above in this week.

Location

The location that we are planning to film our real life section in is the Priestly building, focusing on the seating area, the reason for this is that it has a more homely feel with the sofa and T.V. which we need for our filming. We will have to arrange the sofa and surrounding furniture, but other than that the location is perfect for us.

The 3D location that we have thought about doing have varied massively, they consist of a cemetary, mountain range, train station/subway, forest/park setting, highland and wasteland. From these we have cut it down to the mountain range, wasteland and subway as we all agreed that it work flow with our sequence nicely.

Research

With the idea we had for the assingment we were given, we knew what type of research we had to do. For the real life side of things we looked at environments which already exsisted that we could get inspiraton from for the development of our own 3D environment, as well as other 3D environments that people have laready created, including the environment in games.

For the character research we began looking at different fighting games and the characters that were in them, example of games that we have been looking at are Tekken, Mortal Kombat, Dragonball Z, Soul Calibur, Soul Blade, UFC series and WWF games.

3D grpahics

In the first week of 3D graphics we looked at creating still life. To do this we were given a premade scene of a kitchen work top in whcih we had to create a orange and move the objects around. To do this we had to mainpulate a sphere and add materials to the objects to make them look more realistic.

This is the video sequence that we were required to make, this shows that I know how to move, rotate, scale and record in 3ds Max.

 

In the second week we were given the task to create either a Cup and Saucer or a UFO with the skills we have learnt, I decided to create a UFO.

This is the UFO that I created by tapering 2 spheres and adding a Greeble effect, then I just added metal and glass materials to it for the futurstic look.

The third week consisted of us creating a robot from a box, I found this to be quite challenging. We had to convert the box to an editable poly, from there we extruded the different sides to create the figure.

The fourth week was about mapping and materials. For this we we were given a model of an axe. In which we had to texture it with the given materials. We had to add the materials all to the same layer, then we could just put on the single material and it would texture the three different parts that were needed.

In week five we started looking at area and lighting, and how to cast different shadows for the different strenghts of lighting and the material the shadow was being cast off. To do this we were given a premade wine glass and tray which we then had to setup target lights which we then manipluated the strength and position and looked at how this effected Tay Trace shadowing.

Week 6 consisted of us looking at animation in 3DS max, to enable us to do this we were given a premade scene of a space like planet and a UFO, we then had to use keyframe animation to move the UFO around the environment.

Video and Audio Concepts

In the first week of video and audio concepts we began looking at storyboards. Our challange was to draw up a very simple story board than create a video piece from this and edit it within Final Cut Pro, for this we worked in groups. My group consisted of Mike Northwood and Matt Merritt.

The second week we entered the realm of Codecs. This meant we were given some footage to render out in several different codecs to see the different aspects of each codec. For example we looked at how long it took to render, the qaulity after it had been compressed as well as the different file sizes.

In the the third week we looked at the effect split screen, for this we had to use a camera and create two pieces of footage that were in the exact same position. In one of the pecies of film I had to act on the left hand side and wafe to what was no body, I then had to do this on the right hand side, we then overlapped the to pieces of footage we had and cropped one side down to make it look like there was two of me. For this I worked with Mike Northwood and Matt Merritt.

In the fourth week we were trying the film effect that Sin City uses, this is when the fim is black and white but with the emphasis on a certain colour which has a big impact on the film, for example something red. We achieved this by using the program Final Cut Pro.

The fifth week consisted of us creating our own explosions and effects, for this we had to download some special effects clips. These were missiles, from there we recorded one of us walking up to a car then attempting to shoot at it with our hands. We then put the clip into Final Cut Pro and used the effect Luma key to put the missiles on top of the original video.

The final week of audio and video concepts consisted of us looking at blue screen, and applying a background to a piece of footage. To do this we searched for a picture off the internet that we wanted to put the video on top off then we used Final Cut Pro. The effect we used was called Chroma Key, which allowed us to remove the blue from the video and then just have the person on top of the picture.

Graphics and Design (weekly tasks)

In the first week of Graphics & Design we looked at Character design. For this we were given a template on to which we drew the features up to make the head of a fantasy and surreal looking characters.

In the second week we looked at Vehicle Design.

By the third week we were looking at Creative Costume Design, we were given templates to colour in using Photoshop. This also tied in with week four, where we began to colour costumes, tho see what effects this would have.

In the fith week we began lookign into colour once again, but this time we looked at what feelings we could promote with the use of colour, for example a warm happy feeling.

In the final week we looked at Rule of Thirds. We were given images and we had to place them in a way where the main focal point on the image wasn't central whilst looking visually pleasing.