Star atop the Tree

Not part of the film, just my way of wishing you a Merry Christmas. God knows I can't say it.

Impact

Hello to all my blog buddies! Just stopping in to announce that my dissertation is finally finished and submitted, and none too soon! I can now finally devote some more effort to my film. So, expect more of this in the near future!

(No inbetweens yet.)

Trooper Backgrounds

Some background art.

Some of the more interesting ones anyway. There's a lot of close ups and alternate angles not worth posting. In fact I've been painting that last one from many different angles and have more to go. Man am I sick of it.

Trooper's Room

Nearly finished working on layout and I'm doing some background paintings. Thought I'd share this one with you all.

Trooper Background Test

This is the first proper background I've taken from layout to colour. Until this point I wasn't entirely sure how the backgrounds would be achieved - particularly when I had a 3D interior scene that needs to look like the rest of the 2D backgrounds. There's also the tricky matter of giving the backgrounds depth and lighting without making them overly detailed or painterly - which takes too much time and contrasts too much with the animation style. I'm happy with the results however. I may go in a tweak a few things, add a little more detail to some of the boxes, but it's more or less done.

Trooper Deep Shot

This blog is doubling as a production diary for my film at the moment, so expect lots more posts like these in the future.

I've been experimenting on the models (which Rob has built for me) to create the 2D style I want that should hopefully match the backgrounds in my film. This is early days, but it's showing that toon shading, shadows and fog in 3D can produce some promising results...


Everything here is the same shader at the moment but that will change. A lot of the smaller and more distant things (like guard rails and small pipes) will have fewer leves of shading (either solid or with one shadow) to stop them look too complex and 3D. And it needs to be coloured too, obviously.

Cannon Ball Smoke Test 2

Paul and I have been tweaking the previous test animation and have come up with this. It's looking much better. A lot closer to the concept drawing. Didn't use it as reference mind you so the colour's a bit different.

Concept:

More Toon Shading Tests

A few little bits in the models to fix so the lines draw properly and we're nearly done! Just a few textures to be added then we can animate!

Cannon Ball Smoke Test

Paul and I have been working for ages (or half an hour) on turning my 2D drawing into 3D. The cannon ball is going to be travelling and spinning in slow motion in the shot, so animating the gas/plasma it vents by hand would be tricky. Here's our first CG test...

Here's Paul's particle smoke:

And here's it again after I played with it in After Effects:

It's early days but we're on the way to getting a good 2D-style effect. I've devised a way to make it fade out like the picture, and Paul's working on getting it wavier.

Trooper Animation Test

My opening shot. Spoiler warning.

Better quality version available here.

Updates

A few updates. Some stills, concept art, the works.

Rob's been doing the 3D modelling for me based on my designs. I'll update with some better pics soon, these are pretty early.

Turnaround:



Turnaround:

My first experiments with the toon shader on Rob's models:

A concept piece, one of my ideas for a title sequence. This would then fade into the opening shot.

At this quality you can't see the stars, but when it fades at the end it should be a space scene. Might need to tweak that.

Trooper Animatic

The animatic, now down to three glorious minutes!

Spaceships

Designs for the two spaceships in the film, The Blueshift (Trooper's ship) and the pirate ship - possibly alien! The Blueshift, like with the character Trooper, is also part of another project I've been working on.

Trooper Production Bible Cover

Detail close up:

2D/3D and Effects Animation

A few bits and pieces I've been working on. There's nothing final here, just tests and animatic material.

Nebulae

My second go at creating some space backgrounds following. I could probably work this one a lot more but I really must get some sleep.

Still mucking about with Trooper's designs. Here's the earliest designs of Trooper, which kind of got watered down when doing the 60 second project last semester.

Possible Trooper Redesign

I'm still working on redesigning Trooper to fix a few issues that arose last semester. A few sketches.

Hooray for MS Paint!

Battling insomnia... doodling with the tablet... trying to figure out how to improve Trooper's design.

Cannon Ball Concept

A wee piece of concept art for my upcoming degree film, based upon last semester's 60 second film which you can see here. You can see some of the development of that animation here, here, here, here and here.