Colour

During last week we all had a sit down and looked through some books on colour. We did this to try and figure out what colour style we want our film to have. One of the best books we looked at was Maurice Noble's book "The Noble Approach" It refreshed our minds as we looked at how he builds a colour scheme for the Looney Tunes shorts.

The first aspect of colour Maurice Noble works on first is the colour scheme of the character, and then we can work on fitting the environment colour scheme around the character:

From here we plonked the characters in an environment and began messing around with some more colours:

Pre-production Seminar - Deadlines Approaching

Animated pre-vis due 25th November.......

Some colour and environment tests

Since we have early models of the robot and dog we decided to do some quick colour and environment tests in Maya.

We assigned basic lambert shaders to the models and environment and then just played around with the colours. We then changed the viewport to only show flat lighting and turned on ambient occlusion. The result was actually quite pleasing. We're thinking about keeping the environment as vibrant as possible without being too busy or overwhelming.

Robot Design - Update

We've made some changes to the robot design based on our feedback from the lecturers. We're much happier with the design at the moment. It's proportions will definitely be easier to animate too.


I began by drawing out the silhouette so it'd be easier to concentrate on the proportions of the design. We also wanted to get the size contrast looking nice between the dog and the robot too.

He basically has longer legs than before and a slimmer body, but still keeping that slightly overweight look.

From here I adjusted the model we had in Maya to represent the silhouette:

We also redesigned the robot's mouth so he'd be capable of more expressions. Previously the mouth would pivot open like a bin lid, which looked nice but he couldn't really hit some of the more subtle emotions. We ended up looking at the 2005 film Robots to see exactly how they managed it. Though i'm not a huge fan of the designs the way the mouths worked was pretty cool. 

There's a flexible cheek around the mouth opening which enables the animators to sculpt in some nice mouth shapes:

Using this as reference we redesigned our robot's face:

Using the cheek geo we can hit some nicer graphic shapes with the mouth

The shapes of the robot need some further refining but as a base we're much happier than before!

Pre-Production Review and Feedback

The previous week we had a large review session with our peers and lecturers. The entire process is hugely helpful as it gets a fresh pair of eyes on our film and design concepts.

Among some of the issues pointed out are as follows:


Robot Character Design:

The early concepts where there is a greater size contrast between the dog and the robot is more appealing. It's funnier to see such a large robot be scared by such a small dog. There were also concerns about being able to get a good enough acting performance out of the robot due to it's wide body shape and the number of facial expressions he could potentially make.


Environment Concepts:

It was widely agreed that the environment would make more sense if it was set in a park or a common instead of a redwood forest. The story would make more sense for dog to appear in that type of environment instead of a redwood forest in the middle of nowhere.


The Film Edit:

Overall the film edit is working okay. There are a few things we need to keep in mind as we keep working on it. I'll cover these changes next blog post.