Communication & Problem Solving

Our group was really good at communicating back and forth on our joint page in which we all shared our current progress and problems as well as discussing where we wanted the project to head next, this was very important and helped overcome problems all across the pipeline, I posted alot of my art development so the team knew exactly where the characters where heading to make sure they were happy with them, Due to time constraints I didnt have a chance to incorporate XGEN fur, Underneath there is an example of me playing with it and it looking quite cool, but when render time came the renders would have just taken too long to use in this project! which is a shame but i'm sure i'l have another chance to use the new feature in Maya! 

AOV'S&AE

You can check out each image to see how I setup the comp, It was my first time using Arnold and its render passes, so I learned alot about the setting up process and how to get EXR's to work and carry across all the information I wanted and execute that in After Effects, The main hurdle I came across was making sure it was colour corrected back properly in after effects, the images kept coming through very dark and needed to treat the renders as already colour corrected as Arnold is setup colour corrected ready unlike some of the other render engines which is great! I see this as a stepping stone in which next time I come to rendering it will go much smoother and I will be able to push my setup and understanding further. 

Further Inspiration & Influence

After I created the initial drawings I went back to look at a little more influence on how previous CG work was created successfully, the specular work on 'Toothless' is subtle but amazing, It was a method that i am definitely thinking in incorporating when i come to modelling my characters, just for the light to hit them and you see a sparkle of the colours that represent them & their flavors, I also wanted quite subtle renders of the characters on plain backdrops, I saw some great examples of the minions, plain characters done incredibly well, one plain of white backdrops with just a little shadow, there are many variations of the minion renders that all work for different reasons, a quick grab of a few of them will help when when I come to thinking about composition and more with my work. 

Expression & Action

Because it was a very short project I had to be quite quick with drawing and checking out expression and poses of our characters that could capture how we were describing them, after talking we decided the small green character is very face based, with his whole body almost being a face with limbs, so it was very important he had dynamic face shapes, the second character was quite dopey and playful, slightly heavy handed due to his shape, and moves like a mixture between a ape and a sloth. 

Character Development

After finishing my first character we knew we wanted a blue to the 2nd character because it related to the 'Monster' company energy free drink, I started again with short based characters but my development started to push towards a more larger figure because i thought it would be nice for one large and one small character, when looking at what is successful about a pair of characters often opposites attract, so it was nice to have the opposites. Once i got the shape to how I liked i then started experimenting again with how we could play with the specular on the monster, so I experimented with different ways the blue could shine over the characters body.

Character Development

Here is the character development of the smaller character of the two 'Green' He is a small little cheeky and playful character with funky shaped eyes and a green specular glow over a dark body, I began my development with silhouettes of alien shaped blobs with green to suggest where the eyes could be, I continued to work on the shapes after choosing what I thought was most successful and what the team thought would be best then experimented with different ways we could incorporate the green from the darker alien/monster.

Initial Research

Hello again everyone! here's my first post looking at how I am going to tackle the project schedule wise and a collection of inspiration and influence to get me thinking on what route i'm going to go down on the project, its a collection of images from various sources looking at advert & stings from CG perspectives. 

We had already discussed that we were going to have two characters so I also looked at iconic partnerships to see what makes them work, with colour being very important I also looked at colours that our piece could be with a mood board, I took influence from the company monster itself, and dingy environments like alleyways and dark streets.