Honours Production Blog

End of year thoughts

2007-12-11T13:42:00.000-08:00

We have been taking a little break from the film for the past weeks. I think its a good thing. We are happy that the film was quite well-recieved by the audiences from the Screening Night, Industry Night and the Awards Night organized by the University. Its not completed yet but its about 90% done. We still have some re-rendering to do and some little changes to be made. Also, due to some festivals requirements, we cant post the film online. But we will definately do it after that.

I cant believe that we are at the end of the year now and that we have actually completed our honours degree. We have got our marks back and its all good. Our graduation is on this weekend and its all happening too fast. I think i have learnt alot this year and i would really like to thank Matthew for being such a patient, multi-talented, smart, hardworking and humble partner to work with. Whichever studio that hires him is a lucky one : )

updateage

2007-11-07T00:03:00.000-08:00

Long time no post. Weve finally completed our thesis' and handed them in and also the film for assessment. The film itself is nearing completion but we still have quite a bit to render and lots more tweaking. Jane helped us out with some funky music and sound effects which are great and work well with the film visuals. Im pretty pleased with what we have achieved, considering the 6-7 month timeframe we had to work with, after the first idea was dropped in the first few weeks of the course. Heres some piccy action

This is a sample render from the film, titled 'Norma chilling at her desk'. We didnt anticipate such long render times after our initial tests but i guess its all part of the process. After a bit of tweaking weve managed to get some renders down to aroun 8- 10 min/frame which is a huge improvement over what we were initially facing.

Sick of uni

2007-10-04T22:43:00.000-07:00

Matt has been doing animation for the past weeks. And we have been testing out SSS shader for Ted's skin together with the HDRI environment renders. We are facing some problems in the rendering layers. The SSS shader doesnt seems to work in the render layers...
I have also changed the look of Electris (Norma's avatar), and Ted's avatar. Will set up all the game scenes for animation soon.

3D animatic (Rough version)

2007-09-26T19:29:00.000-07:00

A 3D animatic of the film. Some shots missing though.

Render test

2007-09-20T19:23:00.000-07:00

I've been doing some render tests for the office and fixing up Norma's glasses while Matt is animating. Her glasses are supposed to magnify her eyes for a more stylistic look. The eye textures in the render below is not the updated one yet.

We went to the Ed Hook's acting workshop last weekend. He de-constructed our film and offered some good suggestions on the story and characters. He is pretty friendly and cool. We recieved some good feedback from the audiences too.

2d animatic

2007-09-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

This is a 2d animatic from some time ago but thought wed post it on here. 3d animatic coming soon

Game Environments update

2007-09-13T19:04:00.000-07:00

Publish Post

Some updates. Been finishing up all modelling and texturing work and testing HDRI renderings.

New Post

2007-09-05T23:56:00.000-07:00

I have started animating finally, and so far its going somewhat on track. Over the next few weeks, with the written components of the course as well as trying to finish the film, things will be hectic. The facial setup so far is holding up pretty well. There are a few things which i wish i had done differently but overall im happy with the approach. I just wish i could expoit the possibilities of the rig with the animation. Animation is a whole other thing and u really need to invest alot of effort to get good results and improve. Hopefully since it is the focus of my honours year i will be able to spend as much time possible doing it.

Karen has been busy creating the game environments. It is looking good and hopefully we can start to get animating some game scenes soon. The style of movement is going to differ as much as possible. I feel the style of the character designs differs enough to seperate them as difference worlds, but they still have a quality that can unite them in the film.

Anyways back to it.. another update soon

Male Game avatars

2007-08-30T19:13:00.000-07:00

Did some variations of the male game avatars. And the electronic ID Staff passes for the characters. Matt has recorded some video references started animating some scenes.

Update on female game models

2007-08-22T21:40:00.000-07:00

I have did some variations of the female game avatars while Matt has been re-working on the script

Game models update

2007-08-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

Hello! Ive been working on the game models this week. These 3D avatatars are for the main characters. They still need a bit of work, after that i will be texturing them real soon. Matt has been working on the animatic too, trying out several alternate structure/endings.

Characters textures

2007-08-09T19:40:00.000-07:00

Hello! Here are some updates on the characters' textures. While im doing texturing, Matt has been working on the 3D animatic this week.

More Shtuff...

2007-08-02T18:54:00.001-07:00

We have been busy with character creation and setup over the last few weeks. So far the three office characters have been modelled and rigged and karen is in the process of texturing and refinements. At the moment I am doing pre viz/layout/ so we can get a good idea of the pacing and timing of the whole film.

A screenshot of the animatic

Karen has done a great job on the modelling of the characters. She also made a plasticine maquette of the main character Ted, as part of her honours research and also to help in the modelling process.

Isnt it cool and totally awesome?!

I have been busy with the facial rigging over the last few weeks. They are rigged with a combination of blendshape deformers and soft mods. These are controlled with the facial GUI seen below. The characters are rigged with a direct manipulation facial setup so there is a lot of flexibility with the expressions. Screengrab.

Here is a little compilation page of Ted with some concept drawings as well. He is still wip and the textures and colours will change as we are still working on his look.

Here are the other characters still in need of some textures and colour which are steadily in progress in the very tiny but capable hands of lovely Karen

Here is one of a huge pile of colour scripts, it took us ages to choose cos there are so many awesome ones that we have done. Period.

We have really only done one.

Below is an environment render of Normas Cubicle. Its looking fiiine and is actually based on karen actual desk. This is not true, my desk doesnt look like that- Karen. Yes it does - Matt

WIP Mr Schleg

2007-05-15T22:12:00.000-07:00

Hello! Heres some more WIP screenshots on Ted. His model is almost done now, i just need more adjustments of edge loops on him and some other minor changes before Mr Seeto starts his rigging. I have done a very rough rigging job on him last weekend to revise my rigging knowledge and also to test out how well this mesh can deform, so as to further revise the edgeloops of Ted. Matt has been researching and doing tests on cluster based and bone driven based facial rig. Everything is going quite well at this point.

WIP Environment & Ted

2007-05-08T20:20:00.000-07:00

I have been doing some work on the environment last week. I have also started modelling Ted with Matt's image planes.

animatics and cool stuff

2007-05-08T20:17:00.000-07:00

Howdy all, work on the film is slowly progressing. At the moment we are trying to get down the story through animatics. Weve done a couple of storyboards and in the past week have taken these ideas into the digtal realm with flash. It is a really quick and easy way off getting ideas down and seeing how it works in time. currently wee got a few ideas for the ending and have done a few alternate animatics trying to get the pacing and story worked out. Hopefully we can get everyting worked out in terms of timing with the 2d animatic so that everything is planned out for when we do the actual shots in 3d.

The character designs are also coming along and karen has already started on modelling Ted the main character. The other characters are still in the process of getting the design down but ill be working on them in the next week

WIP environment

2007-04-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

While Matt has been working on character concept designs and animatic, Ive been doing some modelling for the environment.

First post

2007-04-29T21:40:00.000-07:00

We are animation honours students working on our 3D short film. This is a production diary documenting the pre-production, production and post-production of our studio practice. Karen will be focusing on the modelling of characters and environments while Matthew will be concentrating on the animation part. Our film idea is based on an interesting take on our current internet culture.

Synopsis
A man bored with his office job and lack of a social life, decides to join Virtual Life, an online community where users control a character through a virtual existence. Users are able to meet and socialize with other characters from all over the world, all simulated inside a virtual city. There he meets an attractive female avatar, and strikes up an internet romance, while never having to leave his computer. All is going well, until they reveal their true identity and discover they are actually work colleagues sitting in directly opposite cubicles.