Tuuqayi

New Year, New Additions
Happy New Year! And with the new year comes several additions to the site. The teaser trailer is now online, and the first webcomic is up too. Hopefully this will whet your appetite for everything that's coming in 2008. Look for additions to the webcomic story every Monday from now on.
Topic(s): trailer webcomic
By fruehdom on January 1, 2008 at 8:34pm EST	Add/View Comments (2)

The Teaser Trailer Concludes
Happy Holidays! Wrapped up all the visual work on the trailer. Just have to add the music. Funny how certain bits of animation that should be so simple can actually be really hard. For example, Peter just has to turn around and face the camera in his shot (I included a picture of it along with this post). But I ended up coming back to that simple move three times to get it to look right, and I'm still not sure its entirely natural. In any case, the renders all look good. Just did three passes on each, a base pass, and ambient occlusion pass, and a fur/hair pass. So provided I can get the music put together this week, the trailer will be online early next week, along with the first webcomic! The second one is finished and the third is drawn and just beginning to be painted.
Topic(s): trailer
By fruehdom on December 27, 2007 at 1:20pm EST	Add/View Comments (1)

The Teaser Trailer Continues
Steady progress on the trailer this week, which is also serving as an early test for the actual rendering of the film. All the particle system text is completed, as well as one of the blocks of animation. This picture is an action shot of one of the crows flying towards the camera. Just 16 seconds of fairly simple animation to get through next week, along with mixing the music, and it will be ready to go. I also made some progress painting the second webcomic, but not as much as I would have liked. So hopefully that will get wrapped up this weekend.
Topic(s): trailer
By fruehdom on December 15, 2007 at 1:06pm 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)