Light it up

So i've was thinking about how to light this fool since we had a very interesting mini lecture at uni about texturing and lighting, mainly the three point set up and Kelvin showed us some new render techniques which looked totally bas ass.

I'm looking for something quite stylized so the lighting doesn't have to be hyper real, i would prefer if it just showed of the style of the models. I quite like the clinical look for the school aswell, i think this would reflect how boring everyone finds it and bring the action to the characters. i have found an example of lighting and rendering I really like, this is a snapshot from the children's TV show Pocoyo.

What i like about this is how real the models look, obviously not anatomically but it looks like you could pick up and play with the models, i would very much like this look for my animation but with background scenes aswel.

This was my first attempt at lighting using two lights.

So yeah, this is pretty bleached, i forgot to play with the intensity and brightness of the lights, heres my first go at 3 point lighting.

Well it's not bleached any more and i quite like the light that's hitting the lockers, looks like it's coming in from a crack in some blinds or summat, heres a go using two directional lights with a slight coloured filter on them.

I really like the shadows on her face on this one but the light on the back wall is waaay to harsh, it's still looking to CGI'd aswel. Just like the rest of this project i could mess around with the lights for weeks so i tried a daylight simulator in the MentalRay render plug-in that i briefly tried before i'd coloured the models, heres how it came out.

Sweet jesus that looks awesome, obviously the floor is bleached out a little but the rest of the colours look so grounded, the model looks really solid and the reflection in her eyes is amazing. This is exactly what i was looking for.

Weight Painting

This subject pissed me off so very much that is does not even deserve a humorous title, painting weights is where you tell the skeleton which joints will affect which parts of the model when i move them. You gotta do this by manually painting in white which areas are affected, this went wrong around 7 million times, mainly because it took me days to figure out that you can't paint negative weights. I'm sure if you're reading this you have no clue what the fook i'm on about, hopefully this'll help.

So the white area is what will bend when i move the related joint, it's definitely as boring as it sounds. The better it's done though the more natural the animation will look.

Riggin' Hell

Oh my f**king god, rigging is the worst thing i've ever done in my life, even as i'm talking to you now things are going wrong with the rigging for this character, this is definitely the most i've learnt in such a small space of time though, also i can see the enormous potential in this skill. This was my first shot at making this lady a skeleton.

You can see here that i already had a problem with shoulder joints that are waaay too big, i know how to fix this though i just don't have a middle mouse button. I did however manage to figure out how to make controllers, you can just about see the rectangle around her left foot, this means that i can control her whole leg just by moving her foot and it bends at the knee like a leg would. If i had all the time in the world i could rig controllers for all the limbs but because she only has a few joints i can just control her by manipulating these.

once i imported the character to the scene though i had a problem scaling her down and then all hell broke loose and i started to cry. Since then i have had to re-rig her several times but that meant i was able to make a few improvements.

I have now gotten the hang of creating a skeleton for a character, like i said i wish i had more time to rig it as well as possible but all these unforeseeable mistakes (apparently we learn from them) made it impossible. I did add a joint in the hands though so now she can bend her fingers and hopefully grab things

Locker and loaded

It almost makes me feel sick that im trying to re-create something that i hated so very much, however i should of thought about that when i decided to make a school based animation. I was looking for a pretty simple design on the school corridor, kinda like the character, quite cubic but with rounded edges.

I was looking for a slightly warped perspective feel which this has but i had trouble rounding off the edges whilst maintaining the hard edges for the locker doors. Decided to go in a different direction.

You cant see it too well here but i replaced the cubic lockers with a long oval one and it looks far more stylized now still in keeping with the soft edges though.

Added some details here to the hallway, i've also made one locker door able to open so the character can interact with it, need to fill that with books and what not, it also needs to contain a "contract" for her to undertake.

What have i created!?

Here we go then, got my final design for my main character down so here's the progression of the modeling, tried my hand at modeling before but never on a character i've spent so long designing also i didn't have a polygon limit so it was fun. Warning though, she looks absolutely terrifying until she has been textured.

What a babe, big fan of the eyes but i had to take measures with the mouth. I told ya she looks like something out of 'The Fly'.

Lookin' pretty broad here so i took her chest and waist down, she does have to be able to beat peeps up but not break them in half.

Pretty much done here, got a few tweeks to make, also i realised her hair should of been in a side parting not a centre parting.

Yo yo yo, here she is, added a bow instead of a hair band, also whacked a flower belt buckle on there. I'm really happy with how she worked out, definitely room for improvement on the hands and feet but i'm working on a pretty tight schedule here so this'll do, may come back to her later.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Unfortunately I pretty much have no idea what a girl looks like so I've had to do some pretty intense research, deciding that people wouldn't be too happy about me going around taking pictures of their young daughters I though i'd look at some previous female cartoon characters from throughout the ages.

I learnt many things from this research, mainly that 'kim possible' is a total babe but also they all have very distinctive head shapes and eyes, usually accompanied by monster eye lashes. There seems to be two trends, either going for the whole overly cute thing like 'hello kitty' or the kind of without gender thing like 'Dora the Explorer'. I think for the purposes of my lady seen as though she's going to be kicking all the arse i should go for the deceptively harmless look. The big eyes and all that jazz, along the same lines as the powerpuff girls but more detailed and hopefully in 3D.

Silhouette n' wild

When being taught how to design characters the one thing you always hear is "can it be recognised just by it's silhouette?". That's apparently how you can tell if you have a memorable character.

I'm not sure I believe this and I'd need some pretty concrete evidence to even begin to consider changing my mind...

Oh, oh I see. Looks like working out the silhouette is the way to go. Still working on my character at the mo, I'll get some pictures up soon, also this story ain't gunna write itself.

Call the secretary of education, coz you just got schooled

For some reason I've become slightly obsessed with wanting to make the next great school based cartoon comedy, I know the age range stops at 14 but i think if it's smart enough I can make it funny for all of the ages. I'd like to get some pretty contemporary humour in there if i can whilst also making it visually funny.

I think we can all agree Superbad is freakin hilarious and i'd love to make something with a similar tone, would be a pretty big challenge considering it's about 85% dick jokes though. I do remember liking American pie at a very young age so appealing to that audience shouldn't be a problem I'l just have to concentrate on the characters relationships instead of boobs (although Disney didn't have a problem with Jessica Rabbit).

Also while waiting in line for some tasty KFC the other day me and my friends noticed the cutest little Chinese girl in the entire world and Mr Chris Moore unforgettably uttered "wouldn't it be cool to adopt her then raise her to be an assassin", why yes, yes it would Mr Moore. I didn't think about it again until a few days ago but when i did i couldn't help think what an amazing cartoon that would make.

Now im pretty sure some of the scenes in Kick-ass are not appropriate for the young ones but maybe a similar character that accepts hitman style contacts out on bullies from the other kids but instead of brutally murdering them she just takes em' down a peg with some comedy violence or some humiliating traps. Sweet.

Gettin my character design on

Was having trouble coming up with an idea that was realy grabbing me, we did some foundation style Illustration vomit to see if we could find any good design chunks in there but it didn't turn out too successful.

I liked a few of the faces but because of the speed we were drawing them it was clearly stuff i'd drawn before only much worse. When I got home i tried to think of some random characters that would appeal to children (and me) without having any story in mind, this realy isn't the right way to do it at all but I guess im just a maverick.

I like the Robot guy and the blatent Ratatouille rip off but can't think of any great back story for them, especialy not one that would get the kiddies pumped. Might try and use them as side characters but gotta come up with something more along the lines of the research i've done, think about school, best cartoons are set in school. Come on man!

Now, What makes a kick ass kids show?

There have been some seriously awesome kids cartoon shows over the past few decades and everyone has memories of their favourites, i could list the ones i loved for hours such as 'Biker Mice From Mars', 'Road Runner' and even 'Ramsey's Brothel Nightmares'.

Unfortunately when doing research like this there is an enemy that constantly misleads me whilst trying to preserve the innocence of my childhood, his name is nostalgia. It's hard to remember which cartoons were actually good and which were purely dancing pretty shapes and colours that appealed to my inner idiot.

After much reflection and asking other like minded individuals (by that I mean losers) i've come up with a few outstanding examples of cartoons that stand the test of time and are still hilarious no matter how old you get.

Recess!!

Recess was and still is incredible, the focus on the 'Laws of the playground' was such an accurate depiction of how as kids we'd make big things out of little problems that at the time seemed like life changing decisions and experiences. Also the different social groups were amazing and beautifully showed the food chain that forms in every playground, what made this program so relatable though was how it was fronted by a group of misfits that didn't assign to any of the groups but still had to play by the unwritten rules. This is probably the group that most of us were in so we can remember having to do something when we were young that we didn't understand but had to because the older kids said so, come to think of it that happens no matter how much you age.

I would love to come up with something with similar themes that bridges the gap between childish and adult issues whilst also being funny as shit.

Spongebob!

The amazing thing about Spongebob is that I am now officially a grown man and this is still one of the funniest shows out there, and not just cartoon. I know not everyone gets it but one of the things that appeals to me is that it's just fun for funs sake, no morals of the story, no hidden messages just retarded fun full of funny voices and ridiculous faces. They keep pushing the exaggeration of the characters so much that it's like a hit of heroine or summat when you finally see a new contortion of Mr Squarepants' face and it always makes me piss myself. It's one of the most visually stimulating cartoons around and also seems to have the widest age range.

There are so many influential toons i've missed out such as almost everyone from the golden age of cartoon network like Dexter's Lab and Johnny Bravo that seemed to master combining contemporary art styles with equally as contemporary humour. Then action packed numbers such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, i don't think there's a man alive under 30 that doesn't have a favourite hero in a half shell (Michelangelo obviously).

Im gunna strive to create something that can be relatable to by kids and adults alike but always remembering that the main thing is that it has to be funny and true to real life experiences whilst being fantastical and visually appealing. Piece of piss.

Whoa, what is this place?

Jesus it's been a while, i was doing this lame sound project and you know, making a video game so sorry for the neglect. But what's this? a new project that requires character design, live action tests and real animation. Better get this shit blogged.

So we are now working with live briefs from real companies which is similar to working with a live bomb in the fact that I only have a short amount of time before it blows up in my face. Therefor for the next month and a half im gunna be trying to cut the most awesome wire i can. They are all competitions and we have to follow specific criteria to please each of them, heres a list of the fat cats and what they want from us.


SEGA - Need a piece of work to celebrate the 20th birthday of Sonic, even though only about three of that boys life deserve any sort of congratulations.


FAIRTRADE - Basically come up with a new short to advertise and gain more awareness for fairtrade products, sounds lame but these guys have
had some pretty good adverts so far


DISNEY - Yeah that's right, Disney. They want us to design and animate a brand new character aimed at children aged 9-14 for a series.


BBC - Summat to do with Iplayer, need to make an interactive interface I think. Basically that aint happening


MASTERS OF CLOCK MAKING - I think that's their
name but these guys want a short film that increases interest in the concept of time and somehow demonstrates how it works???





It's got to be Disney right, not only do i love designing new characters but i have the mental age of a 9-14 year old so this should be easy. Was thinking about doing the Sega one but i would have to use Sonic so that's character design out the window. Back soon.