Fish eagle rigging

I now needed to rig the fish eagle.  As I was not sure how many joints to place in its wings, I used this video as a reference.

When I rigged the fish eagle, there were quite a few issues such as the wings moving with the tail and the feet moving with the wings and tail, but I resolved these by putting quite a lot of work into the painting weights.

Wednesday 1st December!!!!! Group Meeting!!!

Hi guys i am writing to tell you all that i am calling a group meeting on wednesday 1st December. Modelling should be finished by then and then we will be starting the next stage of creating our layout of our environment. I want everyone in and that includes Perri (make sure you dont read the date wrong WEDNESDAY 1ST DECEMBER).

Also Perri we were not able to do our formative because you did not arrive so i expect an apologie to the group in person on wednesday :) I also presume there is no problem with the modelling due to the fact i have not heard from you so i expect to see that wednesday.

cheers Gary

Scenery Texturing

Here are the models that I have fully textured, using Shaded Brightness Two Tone and Three Tone textures.

With the mountain texture, I had a go at creating the sense of light leaving the surface, through key framing the ramp shade of the texture.

Ocean shader test

Here is another ocean shader test I just did, in order to complement the style that we are going for.  This still looks quite realistic, but I have increased the diffuse to increase the vibrancy.

A few tests with enviroment

Yo guys alex put the environmental modelling on the a drive account so i decided to do a few tests and see how they work with the characters so here is a few images.

Lion model complete

Here is the lion model that I have just rigged and textured.

It is now available in the Adrive account, under the folder 'Finished models', along with the Rhino and Wildebeest.

Quick rhino animation and cel shading test!!!

This is a quick animation test for the rhino and exloring the use of cel shading. its a quick one but i wanted to show that things are working and what is possible in just a few minutes.

Wildebeest textures

Here are some various textures that I have applied to the wildebeest.  These are all Shaded Brightness Two/Three Tone textures.

And here is a test animation to see how an animated model looks with cell shading.

Wildebeest is done!

As far as the rigging is concerned anyway.  I have managed to fully rig the wildebeest with very little trouble.

This is largely because I raised the problems I was having with the elephant and rhino rigs with the tutor, namely how the whole geometry of these rigs was influenced by the leg joints.  He showed me a tool called the Paint Skin Weights tool which is used to control the influence each joint has on certain areas of the geometry.  This is done by painting areas that are supposed to have little influence from certain joints black; and areas that have a lot of influence from joints white.

I used this tool on the Wildebeest straight after I had rigged and applied a Smooth Bind.  I have also applied this to the Rhinoceros.  I still need to do the elephant!

savannah grass

the first try for the shot with the loins in the grass

Texturing experiments with Rhino

I've done a few experiments with the texturing; we are still trying to decide between the "cartoon effect" of cell shaded textures of if we want to have some realistic texturing as well.

Here are some images of a rhino with Shaded Brightness Two Tone textures; I played around with different shades of black, grey and blue.


And here is a rhino, which has been textured with a Photoshop file, based on the skin of a rhino.

I still need to brush up UV Mapping, but I have a tutorial tomorrow; but here are some clear styles that we can play with.

Fully rigged rhino

I have fully rigged the rhino that was modelled by Perri, it looks good but I am considering replacing the FK handles in the legs with IK handles to make animating the movement easier.

The next stage is to experiment with the texturing of this beast.

Kyrie-Missa Luba

Hey guys, here's a piece that our teacher showed me and my digital environments group and it's something we might uses for our final film, anyway see what you think. It's African music entitled "Kyrie", enjoy.

Concept Art

These are carved statues from the British Museum that I drew because I had this idea that we could make the trees in our made up Africa be made up of African carvings like these ones that's very similar to the 'Tree of Life' that they have at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park, although that tree is made up of animal carvings, I thought we could do the same but with African carvings.

This is an image from all the other images I took from pictures of African artwork from the internet that I tried to duplicated here, same with the one down below. I had another idea which you'll see in my drawings later on, which is incorporating African patterns into the landscape.

These African pieces here, some of them were ideas I had for what the animals or the Maasai tribe might look like in our film, if you notice the leopard statue and the human figurines.

This as you can tell is the African map but underneath it is, well first of all what you need to know is that again if you need reminding is that we're not making actually Africa, we're making something similar to Africa. So I took this idea to make an African map of our own and one that could be shaped like an animal, but my group thought that idea was a bit to extreme, so the idea of this and the design below of the Island shaped like an elephant's head and the one above shaped like a lion's were both scrapped.

This is the design for what our trees will look like taken from a sculpture we saw at the British Museum.

These drawings here were based off of cave paintings we saw at the London Zoo, and I was told that my group wanted to make the animals in our film look a bit like silhouettes or shadow puppets, I had this idea that they could look like these cave paintings of animals but the animals from African cave paintings which is what I tried to make these look like.

These are three designs of a Warthog, one in the middle is based on the real life version, the one on the top left corner is a silhouetted version and the other one in the bottom right corner is a silhouetted version from an African painting. I drew these three to see which one our character sculpture Perri would use or see if she could take the one in the middle and make it into something of her own design. In the end though we never used a warthog, we only wanted to use a few animals and those that defined Africa, and we didn't really think the warthog was one of those.

This is a meerkat, that we scrapped in the end.

This is the African wild dog which we also didn't use.

These are fennec foxes, which we also didn't use.

In the end these were the animals we will be using, these are drawings I made of the real animals that I would give to Perri and then she we model them into her own. This is a zebra.

This is a lioness.

This is a ganu or the wildebeest as it's mostly known as.

This is a crocodile.

Fish Eagle.

And finally the elephant.

This is the first concept drawing I made of the opening shot where we have a line of wildebeest with the sun rising up behind them. This was based on something I saw in a local paper of a photograph of a line wildebeest on a grassland at night that you could just see quite clearly. I thought we should use that for our opening shot so it wouldn't look the famous opening to "The Lion King".

This is a bird's eye shot for our African world.

This is from the idea I had of the trees having African carvings on them, so this is an idea of what that would look like.

This is putting the African symbols on not just trees but rocks as well, but the idea is that they appear that much, they would be slightly there otherwise it would all look like 'I just can't wait to be king' from "The Lion King".

This is an idea for what a member of the Maasai tribe would look based off of what they look like in an African painting. Also above is the branch of an African tree with a carving of a African figure based off of the idea of making the trees have African carvings on them as I said before.

This is a shot from the storyboards where we have the crocodiles lurking in the water spying on a herd of wildebeest that you can see in up ahead. Also if you notice the African carvings on the boulder which a croc is sitting on, gives you an idea of what we've got in mind.

This is an idea for African patterns appearing on grass.

This is an idea of a possible ending shot of two members of a Maasai Tribe next to our African tree, with the moon in the background and again there's African symbols in the moon rocks to keep the feel that this could all look like an African painting brought to life.

This is another bird's eye shot of wildebeest running and if you look at the mountain on the left, there's a massive African painting right onto the centre of it, based on an idea I had that the African painting could somehow be expanded so that it would fit onto the side of the mountain.