A Quick Update

Kind of significant since I didn't post on Friday.

So, on Friday we were sorted into our new groups and given our next group project. The idea is more or less the same - produce a short animation using live footage as a base to composite onto. This time though we have to make 3 10-second MTV idents. It's like 3 times more work than the last project, only not really since altogether we're only producing 30 seconds as opposed to one minute. So it's sort of half the work as last project. Only not really, because each ident needs its own script and storyboard and concept and they must work together and failure to complete them in time is FAILURE AT LIFE.

So, I've been grouped with Emma, Ashleigh, Lein and Zoe, and we've come up with some fairly fun little ident ideas. The storyboards for which you can see here! ( http://ashleighedmonds.blogspot.com/2011/12/storyboards-for-mtv-project.html ) It involves us each making a little monster/creature in 3D to composite into our live footage, and there may also be elements of 2D animation and perhaps even some 2.5D pictures to embellish the scenes.

Just gotten back to doing mine and had some of those mysterious randomly-striking and completely evil PC-Mac compatibility gremlins attack, so all my experimental texturing has had to go. But here's the basic mesh I managed to pillage:

Basic model (no NURBS):

3/4 viewish thing with HyperNURBS:

And a side view for good measure:

Yes, it is an egg with arms, legs and a tail. I was originally going to have very very simple blobs for arms and legs a la Pokemon (take a look at most of the newer Pokemon, actually. I think the artists forgot how to draw toes!) but although it looks cute on paper it kind of looked shoddy and half arsed in 3D. So I bulked up the arms and legs a tad and gave him thumbs for gripping the rope/lead as he does in one of the idents.

-Stopped typing blog, promptly forgot about it, then rediscovered it-

Done rigging my model now too, but it's borky in places... the arms spin around uncontrollably if I move them back too far and the tail has managed to twist all of its controllers the wrong way even though I aligned all the bones beforehand... typical Cinema 4D is typical.