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.

Identity

Identity by the definition of the word is the collective aspect of the set of characteristics/behaviours that something/someone is recognizable or known for and at the same time is the quality or condition of being the same as something else.

A pre-modern identity is the one where the individual is well-built and it can be defined by predetermined roles. In this case the possibility of breaking free of this identity was difficult as there where ‘institutions’ that determined the security of the identities.  

In contrast with this a post-modern approach would depend on the construction of social experiences. Considered as a ‘liquid’ identity is something that can change at will and therefore we create a theatrical like demonstration of different facades.

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog” is a comical phrase that started describing the main essence of a modern type of identity: Digital identity. The concept as it describes, predominates on the cyberspace and it is defined as a set of data that uniquely describes a person (or entity in some cases). The main problem with this online identity is to know who the person that is being part of the interaction. Conflicts with the authentication, privacy and security are particular issues characteristic to digital identity.

An element of interest in the videogame industry is the RPG genre (Roll Playing Game) and more in particular the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). This genre is famous for containing an open world that in multiple cases the creation of an avatar is necessary. In MMORPGs the concept of playing simultaneously with a very large number of players in a virtual world requires the user to customise his/her character and give it a personality. In most cases it goes from choosing gender, age, name, race/species, job/profession and many other attributes related to physical capabilities of the character. 

Final Fantasy is the first RPG game to introduce the system of jobs where the player has the ability to chose and change between different identities within the game giving the character unique attributes depending on the choice. 

Interaction with other users that play different facades of their own personalities through their characters in persistent world that continues to exist and evolve even the player is offline represents a real-world like experience that encourages certain level of dedication. 

The images above are some of the costumisations abailable for the MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV on its beta version. The level of physical attributes that can be modify extends to a large repertory making it easy for the user to identify him/herself and create a digital identity.  

This types of games sometimes represents a safe environment in which some people find an alternative to their own reality. The Sims is a popular game that was created as a strategic life simulation, having the ability to quickly experience a variety of personalities through different characters in a relatively short amount of time.

The Sims is a popular life simulation game where the flow of time is controllable, high level of character customization is available and has the ability of controlling many characters at simultaneously. 

The challenge comes in games that interact with other real users around the world, unlike the Sims, the new Final Fantasy XIV is a game that involves a high level of customization for the character; not only offers a huge range of physical attributes but the accessories and jobs really gives the user a huge library of possibilities. It is also the possibility of enjoying the story behind every videogame shared in a social environment that creates a link between the character and the player and increases the idea of a digital identity within a game environment. 

Eye can see you

Most of the model I made it following a tutorial part of Digital Tutorials that a friend lend me. It was basically to build a female human body which then I modified  on mudbox to achieve an alien-ish look.
Part of this tutorial was the building of the eyes which obviously I just duplicated, scaled them and used them for the other extra 3 eyes on her forehead.

Old eyes with simple geometry

I was happy with them but one thing I really wanted to make was the pupils to dilate as that would add some creepy effect to the scene; also I've always thought that extreme closeups of the human eye look rather amazing!. Just as if I asked for it, a video came on my dashboard on tumblr of how to make really really cool eye with Maya and mudbox and it was only 12 min long, so I gave it a go despite the fact that I made the model fitting the previous eyes.

It was pretty easy and despite the fact that maya wouldn't take the texture I made in mudbox for some reason I ended up keeping this new eyes and work later on on their texture. Now, they don't look really special on the screen cap, but at least the pupil is animatable now.

Also, if anyone wants to give it a try to this tutorial, it's pretty easy and it has a good outcome:

Change of hair style

Something that was keeping me quite worried about the project was the "hair" of my alien.
The tentacle like that I had planned where turning out to be a problem for the kind of movement that I wanted to achieve.

On the render tests it was more than clear that they needed a lot of work. so I went up and made a skeleton to animate it. 

The way it was bending didn't get the kind of look that I wanted plus to get a decent animation by hand was going to be way to much work with probably poor results. 

I decided to go on another direction as the movement that I wanted was like a slow organic tentable movement as if they where under water or without gravity. So I experimented a little bit with dynamics. Now I havent played a lot with them so it was quite difficult to figure the values for mostly everything and even when I followed some tutorials I wasnt getting the results that I wanted, plus it was nearly impossible to see it real time so I had to be back rendering all the time to see the results. 

By the time I was at this point I noticed that this had already taken me out of my schedule to finish things on time, and that it was being more problematic than it was relevant. 

Despite the concept that I already had, I went on and changed for something more easy to handle, so with the help of mudbox I made this as the new "hair-style". My idea was to put a bone-like aureola behind it, but because of time constrains I'll have to see if I have time to add it later on.

Panopticism - writing task

Media networks have increasingly evolved over the last few years. The social demand and the need of people to communicate instantly about their daily life, activities, interest and thoughts has changed the concept of ‘being watched’ to ‘want to be watched’ to an extent. Updating status with the current activity and even the location on social medias such as Facebook and Twitter is clearly not only a way to socialise but also a ‘proof’ that what the person is doing is acceptable.

Remembering the opposition that many people had in time where security cameras where places in public places to help the fight against crime created paranoia among the society about always being watched; the position was clearly generated: you are being watched, but it shouldn't matter if you’re not doing anything wrong. In order to control a society it became necessary to implement a concept of self-behaviour to avoid getting into trouble. This growing need of social acceptance is alarmingly growing and not only that, but the demand of knowing the same about other people around you is transforming society in a sadistic way. People want see more.   

This is one of the posters advertising the film. It is expressing the point of being a sadistic way of the people in power to control certain part of the population while entertaining themselves. A society thirsty  and sadistically curious. 

   

This concept of the relationship between the institution with power and a society that’s being controlled silently gave clear inspiration to the creation of a brilliant transmedia story: The Hunger Games.
Starting as a science fiction novel written by Suzanne Collins, is a story spoken from a 16 year old Katniss Everdeen who lives in a postapocalyptic North America called Panem. The main power source of this new nation is called ‘The Capitol’ which exercises political control over the rest of the nation by making an annual event in which a selected group of young people from the different districts are forced to compete in a televised battle to the death. In this world the people from the capitol, are represented as constantly thirsty society for something new, something entertaining, reflecting the idea of a reality show. The rest of the districts have to live under an oppression that is characteristic of each and one of them depending on the primary activity for development. 

The hunger games represent a reminder of punishment against past rebellions against the Capitol, but even thought is a cruel event, it is consider the main television even of every year.  The arena, despite the fact that every year is completely different, can be considered as a new representation of the Panopticon; an area that is controlled by the Gamemakers and that is constantly watched by hundreds of hidden cameras, broadcasted among the whole nation. The “tributes” or contenders have the notion that this is unavoidable, that they have to kill the other ones and that if they are interesting enough they can get higher ratings and therefore sponsorship that could help them save their lives.

This is the representation of the Gamemakers in the film adaptation. They are sitting around a 24 hour and complete view of the arena while the Hunger Games are taking place. Here they decide what to show to the society and if it gets boring for the audiences, then they'll make sure 'something' happens for their entertainment. 

Within the story you get to see a point of perspective and the transition from a lower class citizen that before she was chosen she used to accept reality as it was. Important part of the story is the transformation of this character in contrast to the realisation and new desire to stand against this power, to start a rebellion.

Among the issues the story tackles, oppression and the effects of war are the strongest ones, and along the way there are numerous morally complex strategies that are well reflected on the film adaptation directed by Gary Ross. 

Panopticism

[Discipline]
1.       Activity, exercise, or a regimen that develops or improves a skill; training.2.       Punishment inflicted by way of correction and training.3.       Behaviour in accord with rules of conduct.

The concept of madness started around the 19^th century having only a few houses around England where only a few “lunatics” would be taken care under special treatment. Before that, there were houses of correction for the unemployed and idle where the idea was to modify their behaviour.

Surveillance, disciplinary power and good behaviour are some concepts that have driven society to many of the mayor human events in history.

An architectural perfect example is the Panopticon; an institutional building designed in the late 18^th century with the only purpose of observing. With circular floor plan and an inspection house in the middle the concept was to have the authority/institution observing at all time from every angle. Being Invisible to the observed at all times, created a state of conscious and permanent of always being watched inflicting self-punishment and keeping a good behaviour. Having no way to escape from the gaze the concept was planned to be implemented for schools, hospitals, day-cares and asylums, but the main function was destined for a prison.

The concept of the Panopticon was designed by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The top image is the abandon building of the prison Presidio Modelo in Cuba, currently a museum. 

This became a new mode of power; understanding that you’re constantly looked at, under surveillance, therefore the term Panopticism.

Now a day the concept of surveillance is part of a daily life, probably with a different approach, but concepts like open working spaces, lecture theatres, street security cameras and even google maps create a self-regulation on the social behaviour. This disciplinary technique is considered as a ‘gentle punishment’ applied to achieve docile bodies; self-monitoring, self-correcting, obedient bodies and over all, hyper efficient.

The modern concept of open offices is under cover by a friendly working environment based on co-working and social interaction, while the main object is to have and easy view of the employees optimising their efficiency by having constant pressure.  

Not being power a capacity that people can have, it’s a relation between different individuals that only exist when it is being exercised, and this exercise relied on the capacity for power to be resisted; ‘where there is power there is resistance’. 

Power to the Pixels exhibition

Before the Christmas break we had a public exhibition for our projects done for Game Art & Machinima.
It was quite cool the idea of having your work shown to the public and more than that just the experience of preparing for it it's quite different than when you do a presentation on a classroom.

The advertisement took place without much time in advance which I think was the reason for it being a bit quite. Another reason I think was the location; despite the fact that is in an area where there's and artistic community, I don't think it was the right one to attract public in general.  
It was cold and I was tired, so probably it wasn't the best of the moods to go out and network, but it certainly was an incentive to start considering in the future as seeing your work on walls sure feels nice.