Me? socialising... maybe

So I've never been too much of a social person, not that I don't want to, but my comfort zone is incredibly restricted to just me and a few people around me. That's it.
After a lot of encouragement over the fist year, I decided to take some initiative and start moving around and get to know people, selfishly just to make working contacts for my benefit.
That's how I started going to the All Animated group that just happen to take place around the corner from where I live. It was nice to see people attending and showing their work (I even showed the russian dolls I made on first year). Over all I didn't talk to many people at first. I stayed in a corner and the few that had the bravery to come an talk to me probably didn't get the right impression of me.
I blame my language barrier a bit as when I'm nervous I either talk a lot and fluently or it completely dies and people have to figure out what I'm trying to say, in most cases is the second one that takes place.
After that experience I decided to push myself a bit further and kept attending to those talks that carried on until Bradford Animation Festival where people would actually come and say hi to me! I suppose seeing me frequently caused that.

I also tried commenting on a few websites and on Linked in which resulted with getting contact with people all over the world in a friendly way. On The second social network I made a friend from the Midlands who just graduated from a Game related course and invited me to a group of his friends that do constant challenges to keep skills and practice up to date. I'm looking forward to keep improving my social skills and even if I don't get the dream job out of this at least I'm getting and interesting group creative friends.

iAnimate - game showreel

iAnimate
It's been a while since I saw this showreel and now that I'm starting to have a more define route towards the videogame industry I can't help but to want to give it a try to gaming animation.

After watching the video I went to their website just out of curiosity, but it looks like it's a decent animation online school and it had a section explaining the difference between featured animation and game animation.
The online last 14 weeks under a price of $2000 ... if I had the money I would definitelly look into booking in. Meanwhile I'll probably experiment on my own and watching free online tutorials.

Invasion - VFX Final

So it's done!
This is the final submission project for my VFX module. It has a few things I'll work on it: colour correction, some effects that created some odd squiggle, and simple mate choke for that white rim.
The animation might not be great but I'm quite pleased with the end result.
Please comment :)

I'm also aware that the sound is just...not good, but I'm hopeless when it comes to sound design... I'm sorry 

VS the World

Other than getting films that try to achieve real life like VFX, I wanted to mention how much I loved Scott Pilgrim VS the World.
As an adaptation of the comic by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim became straight away one of my favorite films for integrating all the silliness of a comic and yet making it look EPIC!.

Double negative was the studio behind this, and from making things like Skyfall, a project that has invisible VFX, Scott Pilgrim is a project that had to have this effects purposely visible.
It integrates videogame like effects that are actually acting in integration with the story.

This video is one of the fight scenes that has everything you can ask for: Music, particle monsters, waves, irony and action. Love it ♥
Check their website for more information.

Animating spaceship

Having the deadline upon me and having retarded issues with my health sure managed to get me quite behind on my schedule for the project.
As I mentioned before, the concept of my spaceship is an eye; the idea of a massive eye comming from the sky, looking at everyone and judging sure gets me the creeps, and this idea came from a while ago when I saw some pictures of the Helix Nebula also known as 'the eye of god'. Also my flatmate started watching a series called Fullmetal Alchemist and at some point towards the ending a creature summons god and he is represented as an eye behind a door of giant dimensions.

 

Now for the animation I wanted quick movements that will give a sign of desperation but also the idea of it scanning everything at an extreme speed.
I want sure of the textures when I thought of it; I had a concept of an abstract spaceship that would only resemble an eye, but at the same time hard to understand its purpose. I abandoned every spaceship concept I saw as inspiration as I wanted to make it something organic, so doors, windows and any ship-like feature was straight away ignored.

There is not shape more organic than a circle, so luckily most of the animation took place by rotating over a central pivot point, and by groping certain objects it became really easy to control individual spins and other movements.
Also to cause the effect of a pupil dilating I had to involve some scaling which gave the spaceship a bit of part on the silent narrative behind the shot; you can tell that it's looking around and also when it finds its target.

Hopefully the textures can be rebalanced in after effects to avoid looking so dump. Ill have to play a lot with transparencies and glow effects to achieve a decent effect.

Animating the alien

Having no time to keep working on the rig, I had to move on to the stage of animating the character to get things done on time. The rig had a lot of limitations and the weight　paint wasn't great either, but at least I knew what the limitations were so that I could work around them and get the best result as possible.

Having the idea of the character behaving like a lifeless entity became quite complicated and having the hair dynamics slowing down my laptop it was a matter of get rid of that idea as well. I opted for at least trying to get a sexy/innocent movement. Typing this on tumblr brought up loads of gifs looping walking cycles which makes it really easy to study.

TEAM WORK!

Preparing for filming was not an idea that was inspiring me; I could see everything being messy, lack of organisation and it taking hours to actually get to started on the filming.
I was surprised to see everyone participating and how things went faster than expected; people actually took responsibilities and stook to them making it quite handy.
I volunteered to be an extra, but I tried to help as much as I could in other stuff.

Later on it came helpful when a smaller group of us had to set the green screen, lights and cameras for the personal filming session. It requires a lot of work and planning; later on you regret not setting things properly when keying out.
I usually have bad experiences working with large groups of people where only a couple actually get the stuff done, but I'm glad this was an exception.

 The actual stars of everything!

Spaceship - Concept

Having eyes as a big part of the story I wanted to keep the concept to the extend to make it into my spaceship.

Eyes can be beautiful, but with the right movement and perspective it can become something sinister and scary. 

I remember watching something similar on an anime called 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' in which 'Angels' were creatures trying to cause and apocalispse ... (or something like that) 

One of them morphed into various things and most of them where eye-like shapes. 

I have a certain aversion with technological and stereotipical sci-fi at the moment, so I wanted to make something more organic, and at the same time something abstract.

The of the outside of the spaceship is for it to be constantly moving in all direction, as if it was scanning things quickly. A massive eye that appears through the clouds and starts staring and analysing  down on society. The core of the spaceship is hidden behind a series of screens and moving lights at different levels, making it look as if it was made of transparent layers.
I found it hard to make it look as scary as I portrait it in my head, but hopefully the movement brings a different perspective of it. This is the concept I made for it:

The inside of the spaceship still a bit unsure. I'm thinking of something organic and dark. I dont want to get too much into details for the inside as my plan is to focus on achieving a good level of quality for the alien.
My inspiration for it so far is fractals. I love the composition that can be achieved with simple algorithms. I found loads of inspiration but mainly looking for architectural driven ones.

Azureus Rising

With the idea of making a VFX project in mind, I wasn't entirely convinced that it was my goal to follow. Not that I'm not interested on it, but realistically speaking I'm not very interested on working with real life people; nothing wrong with it, but I just thing I prefer to see a whole new world, a different style or even just avoid having the bad habit of judging how good or bad CGI was incorporated on a film.

While trying to get inspiration for my project I came across this short film called Aureus Rising.

Azureus Rising is the proof of concept for a science fiction action adventure feature film saga and next gen video game. The 6 minute proof of concept - short film, has been featured on hundreds of blogs & websites around the world. Since it's premier on youtube.com May 17th, 2010 - Azureus has received more then half a million hits and counting. Azureus Rising has also won 8 awards to date including; Best Animated Film, Best Director, Best Visuals, Best Sound FXs and Best Original Score. Currently Azureus is in development to be a major motion picture and AAA video game title.

It might not be realistic at all, but it sure brings a lot of inspiration and ideas of how far I'd like to expand my animation and 3d skills.
Also I have a 'thing' for watching makings of and luckily the official website provided a section for it.

Blend Shapes - Eye blinking

According to my idea and storyboard my alien doesn't have much expression on her face (thankfully) but I did had to work with blend shapes to achieve the blinking of the eyes. It was probably at this moment that I regretted making so many eyes...
After a while and with the help of mudbox I managed to finish all the eye blinks and a little creepy smile that will appear at the en of the animation.

I haven't actually made the blenshapes at the point of the screen cap so the number of polygons in the scene was a bit alarming. I also made the blendshape for the eye of the inside of the spaceship.
Something that scared me later on was the arrange of the inputs; I thought I did something grown when I was trying to animate any blendshape, after having the alien in a different pose it would go back to the original T-pose. Luckily it was something really simple to fix by just putting the inputs on the right order.

Inside of the spaceship

For the inside of the spaceship I wanted to make something quite abstract.
My main inspiration was based on my obsession with fractals. So far I've seen a few artists that manage to create this amazing works on 3D, but I've never manage to understand how they manage to manipulate fractals on a 3D environment.

After thinking along with the storyboard and wanting to have an eye in the background I released that I needed something organic, and since the ship itself was the alien it all morphed into a flesh like structure.

I had little planned for it as the only idea I had was some pilar-like elements and a massive eye for the background. Mudbox came quite handy again for creating normals and avoiding having hypoglycaemic scene.
The texturing came out of experimenting with bump, normals, reflections and noise to give a flesh like effect. I was quite worried about the reflections of the halo as the alien moves. The time it took to render single frames where quite long so I didn't wanted to imagine the amount of time it would take to create image sequences for it.
At the end and because of the problems I had with animating my alien I decided to just render it without the animated reflections.

It will certainly not look accurate but ill do my best to get a rough effect in AE to simulate this.

The hulk -VFX

The Avengers was one of my favourite films last year so I couldn't help to think about it for referencing VFX work specially after it got nominated for it at this year's Oscars for Best visual effects.
Not counting how awesome Iron man was, my second most likeable character was hulk.
Before i went to see it i remember having a weekend of the hero films that i havent had watched at the moment and both previous films of the Hulk were included.
They where not the best films ever but I could imagine the hard work that it must have been to creat such a massive and destructive character.

When I saw the avengers it became really easy to see Mark Ruffalo's essence in the hulk himself. I was quite impressed that despite the different looks between the two of the them, the creature had so many expressions and features that are characteristic of the actor.

Grantland was the company in charge of creating most of the VFX for this film and they put together a short documentary series on the history of ILM.
Here's the part of it that talks about the creation of the Hulk.

Hair movement

After the new 'hair style' was finished, I moved to experiment a bit with nCloth dynamics; the hair is geometrical therefore there was no point on messing with the nHair from Maya.
 I wanted only the sideburns to move about and the rest to stay still (mainly to avoid killing my laptop with a complex simulation). On a video on Digital Tutors they showed to to make a flag and make it pin to a pole. By taking those same principles I added the nCloth dynamic to the hair, then selected the vertices that I didn't wanted to move and go and click on nContrain > Transform.
That created a locator which allowed me to parent it to the head control and get the hair to follow every head movement.

For the kind of movement that I wanted for the sideburns it became a matter of trial and error. I ended up messing up with the presets and blending them in until I got something that I was satisfied with; I didn't wanted a natural hair movement but something that could be as a hanging part of flesh. Also I slightly modified the gravity just to get a more floating effect (it's an alien anyway...). Also, a nRigid collider had to be added to the body, just to avoid the hair going through it.

It didn't look quite as I imagined it, but this process of baｔch rendering sure takes a bit of time.
Also I started thinking that probably I could have achieved a decent movement with the previous hair if I used this technique, but it surely would have consumed way more time to calculate dynamics.

Alien - modelling

Having no much time to polish the concept art I had to move to modelling.
 This was the final that I decided to go for:

I wanted to make it as realistic as possible in the time in hand, so I opted to follow tutorials online that would help me to get the topology right from the beginning. It all went well and I managed to get a decent female human shape. After that I started to move back and forth from maya to mudbox and started to deform it to get the extra eyes, the incredibly skinny shape and the strange 'hair' like part of the head. 

When I got to the part of sculpting out details in hight dense meshes on mudbox I noticed quite late that there was a big problem with the inside of the eye cavity and some part in the nails. I panicked as I had no clue how to fix it, and being quite late at night I just opted to rant online. Around 3 am I got a tweet from a guy called Craig Barr that runs the Autodesk Mudbox blog at the-area.com and he offered to have a look at my model. 

I started a conversation with him for a while trying to explain about the project and the model itself. 

I sent him both Maya and Mudbox files and within a day he sent me massive email reply explaining how to fix thing and also giving me tips of how to avoid having this issues from earlier stages of modelling. 

Even thought I lost the layers with the high dense sculpting I was pretty happy to get such a good help from a professional. 

First concepts

Before we went on Christmas holidays I knew I needed to hurry up and start working as soon as possible to avoid making the same time managing mistakes as the last project so I came straight to the idea of wanting to make the last scene with a bit of a spice. With this I mean that the alien I have in mind has to be a sexy or very feminine type.
The idea is that when the photographer get abducted he'll find himself I front of a non human yet good looking space form of living. The inside of the spaceship will be quite dark but what he can see he finds attracting. As soon as he tries to make contact he'll notice that it wasn't what he expected.

There are loads of examples I could find in games of feminine monster/boss that fit the sort of description that I want to my character.
For it to be attracting it has to share some similarity to human features and specially the ones men are attracted to.
With this in mind I came up with the idea of a space mermaid; a creature that lures man with its beauty but has not good intentions.
This is tan inspirational moodboard of examples that I found in games I've played.

Also, over the Christmas holidays I went to the beach got really inspired by all the sea life. Coral reefs, lion fish, manta rays and many other textures gave the idea of some possible looks for my space mermaid.
This is the moodboard of some inspiration for colour, texture and shapes:

Loads of doodles gave me two tentative options for my ending:
-The first one, he only sees the part above the waist as he rest is in the shadows, then he freaks out when she comes out and she has the lower anatomy of a crap like creature.

-the second one she is like an angel until he discovers that she is the bait part of a bigger creature. At the end a massive eye behind her opens indicating that the ship itself is the the massive real creature and that she was and 'organic' weapon made to lure man.

At this point I don't know which one is better and how mad I'll go when I try to make any of them.

This is the final storyboard:

Alien - concept

Having worked over the previous sketches I decided to take the route of the alien as a bait-mermaid-creature.
It inspired on an Anglerfish; she will have a shiny halo on top of her head, she will also look like a snake from the wrist down because she is part of something bigger. The real monster will be using her as a bait to create confidence with the human.

At some point three extra eyes will open in her forehead, right after this a massive eye from behind her will open and the scene will end.

Her appearance will resemblance an anorexic girl. The reason is because the main alien has the ability if morphing the extension to match a standard "beauty" of the civilisation on target. In this case Ii thought of it as social critique of beauty idea.
Her movements will be none natural as she is got no mind on her own and also the point of this is to give and extra level of 'horror'

Watching the video of Overtime made me realize how creepy fake movements can make it look as a zombie or a possessed body.

 I found the work of Timo Grubing on tumblr and some of his works represent pretty well the kind of idea I have for this concept.

Visual effects module

After working hard on the Machinima project, now we have a Visual Effects one which has part collaborative part where the whole group is involve in the planning and shooting and the personal where we all give and individual ending to the story.
The theme is: Alien Invasion....
Now when I first heard about this I was rather... Disappointed...
First of all I'm not a big fan of sci-fi to the extend on working with aliens and second of all, I thing over my time at the college I manage to develop a 'style' which could be cartoon or stylised so trying to work towards a realistic look makes me feel like I'm wasting time developing the wrong skills.
Now this where my first thoughts, but later on and having no other option I opted for looking at the bright side. I thing ill focus as much as I can on the modelling and texturing of my alien.

The story of the short film goes as followed:

A spaceship appears from above in front of a crowd. They all freak out except for a photographer who stays behind while trying to get a shot of it.
The spaceship shoots a beam and abducts the photographer into the spaceship.

Now what ever happens inside the spaceship is up to us, plus the design of the alien and the spaceship itself.

I'm not gonna lie and say that I'm really looking forward to this, but I hope I manage to discover more interesting things on the way that I can relate to my personal interests.