CU/color, Object Animation, Rigid Body Dynamics, and First Pass of Music

This week I made some more progress on the clean up and color, and began getting my hands dirty with Maya in attempt to get the characters interacting with the BG. I've found that it is a lot simpler than I imagined it would be, aside for Seq5_sc33, where the green monster runs into a table of books. Even though I did not have the chance to work in Maya that much, I am glad that I made my backgrounds 3D so that I can at least get more familiar with it. I want to get better at it in the future!

Jesse Doyle is super awesome and has been helping me set up rigid body dynamics to get the books falling off the table when the monster runs into it. It's looking really awesome right now, and I think with just a few more revisions it will be good to go. this will complete my very short session animating in Maya.

Still working on the outside BG look and the windows for the store. My plan is to model a road and add an image plane in the back. I will probably work on it during the spring break.

I also got my first pass of music from Derek Zhao! It's still rough, but I'm super pleased with the direction he's going in.

Lighting Update

Revised lighting for the store is just about done! We added some lights inside the store to brighten it up. The only issues left with the background is the outside environment and the windows. Not quite sure how to do those yet.

Lighting WIP

Here are some lighting tests that I've been working on with Eric Hanson. For some reason, bookshelves make the lighting darker. Need to figure out that problem. Otherwise it is starting to look pretty cool.

Background almost complete....

This week I worked on trying to finalize the background design. I'm feeling relatively pleased with it, although it was not quite what I had initially envisioned. The lighting still needs a ton of work, which I plan on fixing up with Eric Hanson. There are also a few problems I want to work out, for example the posters and the windowpane. I'm also not quite sure about how to deal with the toy shelf, which is just a plane in space. Still, it is close enough. check out some maya software renderings here:

 

I rendered out a shot to see how it looks with a character. I think it looks pretty cool, but at the same time I have an itchy, uncomfortable feeling about it....my aesthetic senses are tingling with discomfort! There is something wrong with it, but I can't quite point it out. perhaps it is too detailed, but at the same time, I  like the detail. In this shot, I desaturated the background, which helped a bit. It think it has something to do with the composition of this shot itself. The vertical datum is right in the center. Well, this shot isn't quite complete still--I don't have a background for the outside street view.

EDIT: I just played around with the composition. I think its starting to work better. Check it out:

Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned in the last post, but I finished all of the Sequence 2 cu/color animation revisions, so I'm relatively back on schedule. hoooray!