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First Totem
My vision of the totems has shifted a bit from my original concepts. As I started to model the first totem I realized that doing seven of them from scratch was going to take a looooong time. So decided to experiment with the idea of making heads from the same character creator I'm using in Poser, and exporting the geometry to Maya. Then in Maya I could carefully combine them (being careful to preserve the UV maps) and use the Sculpt Polys tool to create a sort of organic look.


As it turns out, I actually like the look of the totems this way a lot better than my original design. The originals were very traditional, based on real world references. This method keeps the look much more in line with the rest of Tuuqayi's world. It also makes them more unique. As I go on to create the remaining six totems, I'm still going to make an effort to have each face represent a particular animal spirit, it will just retain certain human characteristics.


And by the way, comic 10 is up. Ended up taking two weeks. So I'll see if I can improve on that pace for #11.

Topic(s): maya poser
By fruehdom on August 18, 2008 at 10:13pm EDT Add Comment


Digital Animatic
In the two months since I last made a post, I've been hard at work on the digital animatic for the film. Basically that is the crudest simplest version of the final film. You are trying to set up the placement of the characters in framing, the timing of their actions, and the length of the shots. And you do in as quick and dirty a way possible, because when you put it all together, there's a good chance the film won't play anything like it did in your head. And inevitably you'll have to make changes, so you don't want to invest too much time in something that'll just get cut.


When I originally started on the digital animatic, I figured I would break the script down into thirds and complete each section one at a time. I've just completed the first third and it came out to just over 9 minutes (76 shots), and as I watched it I realized the pacing is waaaaaay too fast. So I've made the decision that the material that was originally going to make up the first episode, will now make up the first three episodes. That way I can really take the time to flesh out the characters in this first section and not rush through it. Along with this post are a gallery of images from the digital animatic.

Topic(s): maya script
By fruehdom on May 23, 2008 at 10:03pm EDT Add Comment


The Crow Spirit
Well the crow spirit fur and shaders are as done as they're going to be for now. I'm not totally happy with how its rendering from all angles, but I think that has more to do with the lighting in the test scene rather than the shaders themselves. So I'm just gonna go with it, and tweak it as is necessary once it gets into a real scene.

And that does it for all the characters: models, rigs, and shaders are all done! Now it's time to actually make this film. The outline and storyboards have been done for quite some time, but I haven't tackled writing the dialog yet. So this week I'm taking a little break from Maya to get a draft of the script written.
Topic(s): maya shaders fur
By fruehdom on February 10, 2008 at 9:10pm EST Add/View Comments (1)


The Mall Security Team
With the trailer behind me, its now back to completing final shaders on all the characters. The three to get cleaned up this past week were the department store security guards. Their clothes didn't need much tweaking, and their skin is largely based on the SSS shaders used for Peter and Kiana. As with those two, the fur is on a separate pass, as is the Ambient Occulsion.

Also, in case you've missed it, we're up to our third strip over in the webcomic section. Its starting to get interesting over there so check it out.
Topic(s): maya shaders
By fruehdom on January 14, 2008 at 5:54pm EST Add Comment


The Teaser Trailer Begins

Got the first comic to the point this week where I think I'm finished with it. I'll probably have some friends critique and make a few more adjustments, but its pretty much there. So I went ahead and drew the second comic, which I'll work on painting this week. I'm trying to do a little bit of work on the comics each morning as a kind of warmup. Its easy to want to spend all sorts of extra time on them, but the bulk of my time really should go to the film.

On that note, I got cracking on the teaser trailer, which will be up at the end of this month. One of the biggest question marks for me was how to handle the on screen text. I wanted something more than fade in/fade out, white text on a black screen. But I also didn't want canned effects that would look overly gaudy or cliche. So I decided to bulid the effect from scratch in maya using a particle system. I created the text using maya's text tool, and then had the geometry emit particles. I then advanced two frame to get a solid amount of particles, set this as the initial state, and then turned off the emitters. Then with my field of particles all set, I was free to apply all sorts of fields to push them around.

The particles blow in from off screen and form into the letters, however this is a little bit of a cheat. Since like I said, I had the particles emitted from from the geometry, its easier to work in the opposite direction. The particles start in the shape of the letters, and then are blown offscreen, and I just reverse the clip afterwards.

Here's a quick preview of the first block of text. The rendering is broken up into four sections: 1) the particles flying in, 2) the still text, 3) the particles flying out, 4) the background particles.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the effect, my only complaint is that it looks a little more like outer space than I wanted. I was hoping it would look a little more like fireflies or dust particles than a starfield. Oh well.
Topic(s): trailer particles dynamics maya
By fruehdom on December 9, 2007 at 5:00pm EST Add/View Comments (1)
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The Crow Spirit
Very nice...the crow looks awesome!
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I am eagerly anticipating it. :)
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