Animated Life









Name's Samuel.

Currently an animation student at UCLAN, Lancashire. Next? Who knows... Aspiring to be a director, looking forward to working my way up. I'll be the British Tetsuya Nomura...slightly fewer zips maybe? I jest, zips are cool.
Character designing and story writing, that's my game.
I have other arty interests, but this right here, just for animation (degree purposes you see).

I'll tell my stories to the world one day.


Retrospective research

coming right up. Be prepared. 

I’ve been doing mental research that has mostly made it as far a scrap paper so far. It’s all about to go on here with visual input.  


Changes!

So seeing as none of you have actually seen the final film… Hell, I haven’t seen the final film, there’s probably no need to mention this, but I thought I would anyway.

Basically, once again my shoddy modelling skills have let me down a little, which makes a few of the shots look fairly terrible. That means I’ll be cropping a lot of shots to hide various errors, such as:
-Lighting and shadow problems
-Intersecting polygons
-The biped system deciding to ruin perfectly good animation.

It’s all a learning curve.

Basically, watch this space. The film I hand in for my deadline next week might not be the final film. Not to say I’ll be handing in an unfinished film. If all goes well, the plan is to go back through the film after my deadline and go through each and every shot and manually edit out (using Photoshop) any errors I can find. If that fails, I may rebuild the character models and potentially scrap the idea of using hand drawn facial animation. We’ll see. 

I’ve officially animated all the 3D segments of my film (I actually finished that on Monday) and now I’m working on going back through and animating faces. I should point out that it’s going to have a pretty rough look because I haven’t had the time to make character sheets. I suppose combining two different animation disciplines for a solo project has been pretty tough… If I were a better character modeller, I would have built faces, but alas…

It’s incredibly tedious, and I’m not sleeping much. And with a deadline for tomorrow on top of it all… 

This will be me:

That’s right. Mordor.

~Samuel. A~ 


Just a quick update, I’ve updated the real world library’s lighting. The lights I used originally gave the library that lovely warm glow that you saw in earlier scenes, which I though would be perfect for the real world. I mean, it made a great contrast to the alternate library. Long story short, I put Samuel’s character model in there and he turned orange… So, now I’m using some more industrial looking lighting.Okay guys, not going to post for a while, I have a to do list:-Animate 3D segments of my film. -Animate 2D segments of my film (character’s faces) using photoshop. -Finish texturing the character model I made for the woodland creature design brief. -Make some sketches for the wcd brief. -Make some small physical models for the wcd brief.On the subject of the woodland creatures thing, if anyone can tell me if I’ve missed anything majorly important off that list, let me know!PEACE OUT!~Samuel. A~ 

I remember when I had plans to start animating by Thursday at the latest…

I’m thinking Monday now…



PS. Those pictures from last night are not from the completed version. Various textures have been added since.


Success!

The “real” library is complete! Time to edit textures and lighting to grotesque-ify this thing! And I’ll be saving each version separately just to be sure there are no screw ups. Hopefully the alternate library will render faster, seeing as it’ll have fewer objects.

Renders will be coming up later on today hopefully.

~Samuel. A~ 



This film DOES NOT contain scenes of explicit violence and gore.Just a little reference, for those that don’t get it:Just a little homage.Yeah, I’m still working on the library. Which will hopefully be finished by the end of the day. Including texturing. As you can see, all the objects are textured, I just need to texture the walls/floors/ceilings/stairs/etc. Also need to finish building it.I see myself animating by Wednesday, or Thursday at the latest. Sleepless nights ahoy!~Samuel A.~ 

Okay, so I was going to go for a pretty grand looking library, but I think I’m going to have to go for a more simple aesthetic due to time constraints. Here’s my bookshelf with a simple texture (literally a picture of a wooden texture) applied using a UVW box map. The books are flat planes with opacity. I’m going to add more books using different images (variety is going to be necessary here). I really want an opinion here. Do you guys think this is okay, or should I pull lots of sleepless nights over the next week to make my library look grand?I was hoping to be ready to animate by the time we hit the Easter break-up, but I realise that might not be possible. ~Samuel. A~