Stepped animation

Blocking is a “Pose-to-pose” style animation, it would typically be used to help the animator get a general idea of what the timing will be like within the piece. When creating an animation, it’s recommended that you work on the key poses first. Then fill in the blanks after. Below is my attempt at it.

 

When creating my animation I used the following videos as reference.

Concepts

Based on what I was talking about yesterday, here are some of the conceptual designs I came up with.

(An attempt at warm and cool tones above. Getting there… I think…)

After coming up with some drawings and sketches we eventually decided to continue with the hourglass turning idea. We decided that, when the God turns the hourglass on its side, two towers will rise up from under the ground and meet in the middle of the glass. These towers will have a track spiralling around them for the characters to race on, and a temple with a dome in the center.

The general idea of this game is that both sides will race to the dome in the center. Whoever makes it to the dome survives. When the winning team enter the dome’s safety, the hourglass is returned to its upright position and everything collapses and is then reset. The winning team gets to survive.

There are obstacles in place so the game isn’t too easy. As the players ascend higher and higher on the spiral, the more dangerous the obstacles become. Over on Cassie’s blog, she has drawn up a chart indicating the levels of danger.

When we talk about having levels of danger, we talked about having something simple like quick sand as the first obstacle and then death rays (literal death rays) at the end.

Game Ideas

Today we decided to meet up to come up with ideas for the culture and games within our world. We hadn’t properly discussed it yet so we’re only starting the project today. Seeing as our world is divided, (top and bottom) we had to come up with someway of having the two sides come together. I had the idea that maybe the hourglass could be turned on its side and there would be a doorway in the center of the hourglass for both sides to cross over to interact with each other. From here we discussed whether or not the game would be competitive or co-operative. For example, would it be an arena or a simple board game sort of thing.

Once the pieces started coming together we looked at having the game from the God’s point of view. Maybe the God could be playing this game and the creatures are the pawns. Etc.

We looked at various video games, board games and historical references such as:

Puzzle/Board Games

• Pressure Point – This general theme of this game is that you will be asked a question, and you must answer it in under 10 seconds. We decided to look at this one because (as the title suggests) it is based around the theme of being under pressure. And this is an element we want in our game.

Structure Based Games

• Jenga – In this game there are rectangular blocks stacked up as a tower. Three by three. Each player takes turns removing one block each turn and stacking them back onto the top. Whoever causes the tower to fall loses.
• Tumbling Monkeys – We looked at this one for the collapsing aspect of the game. The way this game works is that each player will remove one stick each per turn. Every time a stick is removed, the monkeys hanging in the tree are far more likely to fall. The player the causes the most/or all monkeys to fall loses.
• Various 3D puzzles

Video Games

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – We decided to look at this game for its use of travelling back and forward through time in order to make changes. For example, to progress in the future part of the game, you would go back in time to make changes to the past in order to progress in the future.
• The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask – We also looked at this game in the series because it also utilizes the time travel theme. In this game, the moon is falling down and the protagonist has three days to save the world. When the protagonist is running out of time they can go back in time to the start of the three day cycle. But everything they changed in the future is undone. So it takes planning and strategy. These are elements we are considering incorporating seeing as our world is built around the theme of time.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time – This game also takes advantage of the time travel theme by allowing you to rewind time.

Biblical References

• The Tower of Babel – This is a story from the book of Genesis, the story explains how people used to think heaven was quite close to earth, and that if they built a tower high enough they could climb into heaven and become equal with God. God descended down and looked upon the tower, and wasn’t happy with the arrogance of the people so God made the people speak many different languages to spread confusion among them. This way the tower wouldn’t get built due to the mass confusion and this is why it has been named “The Tower of Babel”.  Babel – “A confused noise made by a number of voices”. 

These are some of the key elements and ideas we looked into.

 

Lighting and Tonality

This weeks lesson started with Michael asking us to look into comic book artists Neal Adams and Mort Drucker’s work as it will be beneficial for next week’s ink lesson. Below is some examples of their work.

Neal Adams: Image Source

Mort Drucker: Image Source

Okay so now onto the actual lesson! This lesson began with some warm up poses, followed by some tonal studies of different parts of the body.

Hourglass World

We’ve switched projects again! For the last time this semester too. Over these next two weeks we will be focusing on building culture and games for the hourglass world inhabitants.

Seeing as our world revolves around the theme of Time and Destruction, we have decided to look into puzzle, and destruction based games, and creating the game based on the God’s perspective. I mean, i’d imagine the world ending around you would be fairly miserable… That’s why we are basing our game around the God’s amusement. He would see the destruction as a time passer. He would destroy the world and start a new one just to ease his boredom. We will be looking into various time based puzzle games, video games and films that are based around time manipulation. I’m really looking forward to working on this project!

This time i’m working with Cassie, Claire and Kirstin.

Presenting our Trailer

So today we presented our Crystal Egg World trailer. Must say we’re fairly pleased about how it turned out as we all worked pretty hard on it. We worked well as a team!

We also had our projects switched around, now we’re working on building history and culture in our world through a game. We have to make some sort of sport or a game that the inhabitants will play. We need to think about how this game came to be and how it will be played.

Finally finished!

That was a pretty busy one but we’ve finally got it done and out of the way. Today we were working on finishing up the title sequence and putting the rest of the trailer together.

A few days ago we stopped of at the continental market and found a stand selling crystals and stones. We thought we’d pick one up for research and photo opportunities for the project. Today we brought it in, along with the pre-made crystals the previous group made and took photos. We got a sheet of acetate and drew on it with different coloured whiteboard markers, then placed a torch underneath to project the colour. We then placed the crystals on top of the light to illuminate the crystals. Below are the results!

I also tried applying the textures I made to the models Rebecca and Phoebe made, but for whatever reason they wouldn’t hold on to the model so any time we imported it, it would just come out gray. From here because of timing we had to make the decision to make it one solid colour, giving the world a monochromatic feel. It would have been nice to have the textures but the scenes do look pretty good with the solid colours.

Once we had it pieced together I attempted to merge Caitlin’s music piece with my own and succeeded! It was pretty coincidental that Caitlin’s piece ended on the note that mine began on, so it was pretty simple to merge the two.

Texturing

Today i worked on texturing the character’s Rebecca and Phoebe made, I exported them from Sculptris and saved them as .obj’s and then imported them into photoshop. From there I could paint directly onto the model.

After seeing Rebecca and Phoebe’s models, we decided that Maya might be the best suited direction for this assignment. Phoebe has been experimenting more with animating camera movements in Maya and seems to have got it down to a tee. I think we could easily accomplish what we’re looking for if we continue with Maya! We also think this because the stop motion animation we tried out didn’t turn out quite the way we wanted. It was only an experiment though so we’re not to bothered.

Sculptris

Recently Phoebe and Rebecca have been experimenting a lot with Sculptris and Maya and we’re beginning to think that this might be the direction we will be taking the animation. I began to play about with sculptris as well and this is what I came up with.

Moving arm animation

Today Alec looked at our Moving Arm animation, as always he gave us feedback on how to improve on it which was pretty helpful as i’m starting to figure out Maya.

When creating this animation, I re-read over what Secondary Action secondary action is.

“A Secondary Action is an action that results directly from another action.” Source: https://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/secondar.html