Thursday 30 December 2010

Significant Changes

In this post I will go though my model and explain a few changes and point out why I made them.
While looking at other peoples post I noticed images that are very useful to my own work. I got permission to use these but since some of them are images form other websites I don't know how to really reference them.
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The images below are strong references to the image above.


These images were from Russell Pointers blog page


Image on the left is from Sarah's blog page. The one on the right is from the Internet.



The image below was also from Russell Pointers blog. I took a lot of interest in this, I haven't seen anything like this before and I plane to incorporate it with in the work.

update coming soon.

3d Camera Shots

This post is mostly looking at the cameras and animation that will be used in the final animation.

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I should have really had uploaded a lot more 3d by now but I've been working on trying to explain how it should look both to my group and in a way to myself.



First shot was basic. No animation or texturing.
This is saved for the 3d animatic that still waiting to be finished.



Shows the up to date version of the gears. Animation added but only keyframes.


Showing the same shot as the previous video but from just a normal perspective. I left the cameras in to show their paths.

Monday 6 December 2010

Concept Work

The concept art for the environment project
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I done the sketches in my A3 sketchbook so I had to scan in different parts and put them back together in photoshop.


First full sketch of the windmill.


Skeches of the inside of the windmill

Sunday 5 December 2010

Finish off Research

The last post on research would be about Leonardo Da Vinci and Windmills themselves.
Sorry for putting this off for so long I have been keeping busy with the practical work.
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Leonardo Da Vinci

The style and complexity with such simple materials of wood, cloth and rope.



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Windmills




Monday 22 November 2010

Storyboards and Sound

Hi there, it's been a while. I've been working closley with my group and haven't had time updating but here something nice that I think you will enjoy. We're got the storyboards done as well as the animatic.
As always tell me if there are any spelling mistakes
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Drawing took a few hours and the animatic took just as much. Russell helped export it correctly.


I drew up the storyboards and Russell cut them up


Song Is turce by Andrew L Mendelson.

Again this is just to get an idea of were we need detail and moment for the final peace.

Monday 8 November 2010

Day out in London.

Spent today at a few London Museums; the Science Museum, the V&A and another one that I can't remember the name of.

I'll add more text later but right now i'm annoyed because only 15 out of about 60 images were not blurred. Stupid camera.

Enjoy what i've got while I rage and think of what to do next.








click to view full size

Sunday 7 November 2010

Research post 2

In this post I will be looking at Bioshock and Pixar's 'Mosters inc'.
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Bioshock
In Bioshock (a video game) we see a more insane and darker side of steampunk. The game tells how people are trapped under the sea in the city of rapture and that forced into fighting each other for survival has made them ugly and mutated. The city hadn’t fared better it’s self; under kept, large chunks had collapsed or flooded.
I own a copy of the ‘Bioshock 2 special edition’ art book. In the book it has the lead environment artist ‘Hogarth De La Plante’ talking about the work and what they had to consider when drawing and deigning the city and game levels.

“We were trying to find a way early on in the game to tell the player about the objectivist ideology behind rapture, but have it be interesting. We came up with the idea of this place being like pirates of the Caribbean for kids. It’s telling kids in the really didactic way about Ryan’s [one of the characters in the game] ideologies but we also learn about the city too”. - Page 75 – Hogarth de la Plante.

So the team behind Bioshock got some of its inspiration from outside the normal gaming field.
The fact that they looked at a Disney ride for inspiration is intriguing; I am hoping to look at Pixar’s ‘Monsters inc.’ for the method in which they collect screams.




The video addresses the characters more than the environment but still get the idea of the sort of work that goes in to a project like this.



Image of the full bioshock special edition.


some of the pages taken form the art book of bioshock 2

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Mosters inc


i want to look at the canisters in mosters inc. they collect screams like fuel and it reminded me of large battery's

the canisters can be used as rechargeable personal battery's. For example, steampunk vehicles, machinery would take a battery that would be plugged in fully but something like a flash light would have a long cored protruding from the canister that is strapped to a persons back.

Saturday 6 November 2010

Research intro

My first stab at research for Digital environment if you see any miss spelling or grammar errors please let me know.

Each of these subjects or people will or are influences to my work later in the term.
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Steampunk

Steampunk is defined as an fictional and alternate world in which steam power is still widely used—usually in conjunction with 19th century and Victorian eras. But it has been known apply itself to other settings, such as deep space. It incorporates elements of either science fiction and/or fantasy but normally entails how the combustion engine was never invented and technology moved on with steam and clockwork, right up to modern or future days.

This kind of styled technology may include such fictional machines found in the works of H. G. Wells, an English author from the late 18th to the early 19th best known for the classic science fiction stories The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds.

H G wells’ novels were influenced by his political view and used mostly in his early career as a writer. He sought a better way to organize society, and wrote a number of books known as ‘Utopian novels’ were he imaged all sorts of different worlds similar to our own but with different outcomes and technologies.

In the 1960’s film adaptation of ‘The Time machine’, the equipment and look of the time machine matched much of what I was looking for to use in the design of the windmill. The use of copper, leather, polished wood, colorful lights, lack of protection to the passenger and lack of any real energy source powerful enough to achieve time travel does now seem to take away any emersions we might hold towards a similar story today. But to H. G. Wells this is what he had imaged it to look like. A completely different form from modem day ideas of time; because of his lack of understanding time, space and light, he had given us a completely new style to any other pop culture time machine alongside the likes of the Delorean (Back to the Future) or the Tardis (Doctor Who).



image was taken from movies.ign.com



We can also find early Steampunk in the works of Jules Verne (a French author who helped pioneer the science-fiction genre) Some of his best known novels are A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870) and Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)

‘20 thousand leagues under the sea’ features The Nautilus, a submarine. This was something that really hadn’t been technologically explored before, and having the vessel disguised as a monster just made the idea even more intimidating.
There are a many different versions of ‘20 thousand leagues’, with just as many interpretations of the Nautilus and its captain, Nemo. The Description of the submarine Verne envisioned is given to us in the novel by Nemo himself:


“Here, M. Aronnax, are the several dimensions of the boat you are in. It is an elongated cylinder with conical ends. It is very like a cigar in shape, a shape already adopted in London in several constructions of the same sort. The length of this cylinder, from stem to stern, is exactly 70 meters, and its maximum breadth is eight meters. It is not built on a ratio of ten to one like your long-voyage steamers, but its lines are sufficiently long, and its curves prolonged enough, to allow the water to slide off easily, and oppose no obstacle to its passage. These two dimensions enable you to obtain by a simple calculation the surface and cubic contents of the Nautilus. Its area measures 1011.45 square meters; and its contents 1,500.2 cubic meters; that is to say, when completely immersed it displaces 1500.2 cubic meters of water, or 1500.2 metric tons.”

With such a clear description of how the Nautilus looks and works it’s still interesting to see other peoples takes on it. Some one of my favorite versions has to be the Nautilus from ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ both the book and the movie version.
I don’t recommend reading the novel but the design for the Nautilus is easily more interesting then the movies incorporating a giant working squid over the body.

image taken from gleeson0.demon.co.uk