Texturing

Doing a bit of texturing on the jukebox itself. Using a mix of edited photos and manual painting. Hopefully should work out okay. The above picture is WIP

I know I would be focusing on my dissertation this week, and I still am, but yesterday (Tuesday) I had a chat with Neil. He gave me some good feedback on the animatic. But he wanted to see more art and told me about colourscripts.

Basically blocking out scenes just with colour and shapes nothing too clean just to see how it works. As my drawing skills aren't great he liked the idea a friend suggested of just painting over the top of a render. I may have gone a little far with it and was slow and clean but i think it still works as great concept.

Dissertation

As my draft hand in for the dissertation is Friday and I have done little written work for it, I am focusing on that all this week so no modeling for me :(

Can't wait to get back to it, especially as there is still tons to do!!!

Jukebox UV Mapping

So I have spent all day today, unwrapping the UV's for my jukebox, Its been fairly easy, just time consuming and in the beginning look extremely complicated. I wish i took a screenshot of the before to show you how different it looks but basically it started with a ridiculous number of pieces (I'm talking a good couple of hundred separate shells).

Animation Testing

I've been working on more modeling of the jukebox, and also a quick test animation of the record moving and the turntable starting up to see how the first shot would look.

New studio

I'm starting to work in the studio alot more since moving to the Think Tank. I plan to come here more often than working at home, as it has better computers and nicer, bigger screens and ofcourse less distractions. Quite loving the working environment and professionalism.

I must of spent a good 2 and a bit hours on this section, which is quite unnerving.
I can't exactly work out why it took that long it just did. However other things seem to be quick to do so I guess it balances in some way. Anyway not much show but just thought I'd do a blog post for today.

More on interior

Just a bit more on the interior of the record player part. I think i will do a mock up of the actual scene for this part. It will be really quick to do but should be quite effective.

So one of the records would swing out, then turntable moves up taking the record with it and hits the needle to start playing. Using the below video as some reference.

More details and interior

Just a quick post to show some more details and starting on the interior work such as the records and the needle.

Plan B

So today we got told how important it was to make sure we have something that is finished. Half an environment properly done, including textures, lighting and effects is a lot better then the whole environment with none or rushed secondary work.

So taking this in mind, seeing as my project is extremely ambitious considering i have the environment and characters all to model, texture, light, render etc. I have decided to create my plan B just in case it doesn't go too well.

Essentially I am carrying on as normal so far. But I am strategically making sure I finish the environment first (or extremely close to finishing) So that if I don't have enough time for the characters I can still show the environment off in all its glory but still tie it together with a story and possibly still keep the dead body in the bathroom.

Been working more on the jukebox, Cleaning up a bit more geometry here and there. I've added a few new things such as the extra 'box' parts just below the playlist, either side of what i call the 'Title' part. I will be adding more details as i go, but the main part is finished. Going to work on the insides next. Quite a lot of the detail will be in the texturing and some good bump/normal maps can help bring that out.

Oops...

So I've been a bit behind on my blog, sorry about that. But I have been working despite no updates on the blog.

Over the xmas period I've been carrying on with the production stage and worked more on the diner structure and also the jukebox.



The jukebox so far has been one of the most complicated models I have attempted (and it's not even organic). I've learnt quite a bit while modeling it and utilised different techniques but originally starting from box modeling. I've had to use the append polygon tool excessively in order to get the right results.
I've tried to keep the mesh clean as I go along and I think there are no 5+ sided polygons, however, there seem to be a lot of poles, I don't know if this is as big a problem.