we are well into our trimester, with 4 weeks already gone, we have made some decent progress on our project and have finally entered the modelling stage. our design work is almost complete, with just the approval for the room left, apart from that, we have both main characters and the baby finalised, and here is a look at the little guy-
i picked out two buds from the flowers we are using for our designs and fused them into one baby bud, he is a sweet little thing and i'm excited to model him! i was also able to make the model sheet for my male protagonist as he finally got full approval
i also have a rough coloration for him just to see how the final colour scheme will look like, i am liking it thus far.
i did some research on some things we have to do in the coming days, lie animatics and storyboarding, as well as setting up a room (or a set) for an animated film. the first thing i researched about is making effective and quick storyboards, as we need those to be done ASAP to help figure out the exact events of the film. i found this guy on Youtube that covers a bunch of media topics an done of them is how to improve your storyboards. in his video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPrkxj2MyZI titled "How to draw A-grade storyboards (even if you can't draw!) | Media studies tutorial" he shows 2 different paths to take when making storyboards, a visual one and a more descriptive one. the visual approach is where the sketch explains everything going on in the scene (apart from the sound effects and occasionally the lighting) and it requires some artistic talent, whereas the second approach is more dependent on written descriptions and just a simple sketch, which is more for people who lack in art. since we are just two members, we split our film evenly to storyboard, but just in case one of us couldn't complete that task, we can have good enough storyboards from the other member to carry out our work later on.
the second topic i researched on is laying out a room for a short film, since we are making a hotel lobby and we want it to look believable, i tracked down an interior designer and checked out his workflow on how to build a room. the artist/designer goes by the handle "4dvisual" on Youtube and has a series of videos explaining his process of creating a room using 3DSmax and Vray https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA88MgoV10xvxteVouKGPOUZJ7arxFeVZ the series consists of about 12 videos and each video is dedicated to a separate aspect of the room, from layout to lighting. one useful thing he does at the very beginning when laying out the room is he used a floor plan, which is super helpful and will definitely come in handy when we start laying out the lobby.
we will have to make a floor plan and a concept art piece of the lobby to have a pre-visualization of how it is meant to look, for that, i also recently purchased a book title "the art of Overwatch" which has the concept art of the maps and the prop concepts as well. i think this book will be a great investment for future projects as it also contain character concepts and variations before the final character was decided, it helps to have a look into a professional pipeline and see how they function! here is a great blog that reviews the book and shows some sneak peaks of it's content https://www.parkablogs.com/content/book-review-art-of-overwatch
this is all i have done this week, it has been a little slow but i am packed with tips and tricks for the upcoming steps in our production, hope next week is more productive!