Milo's Book

Here's my final animatic for my first animation pre-production class:

Milo's Book- Animatic from Shreyasi Das on Vimeo.

Not too happy with the sounds, even though it's a scratch track and even though it expresses the moods and ideas well, and even though the teacher loved it.

It's probably because I still can't grasp the notion of rough, unfinished sound. Sound is just so important to me.

It's all hand drawn, because I still haven't learned to use After Effects (that's next quarter) but I put together a layered animation in there - really quickly done - using Final Cut, Photoshop, and the drawings on my index cards :)

Gesture drawings to come soon!

Maya Update Cont'd

And here's a lab assignment that our professor didn't really stress too much on- just wanted us to complete it. It was a tutorial for Maya 6.0. But but but, it was doing it a really complicated manner and ended up with n-gons and more than 6 edges converging to a point, which were left unaddressed. I had a copy of the book with the tutorial CD, and when I opened up their finished work sample, I was thoroughly disappointed. The feet looked like octopodi, the fingers were not knuckle-y..Just...The whole body they modeled looked unrealistic. And unlike other stylized projects, this was meant to be realistic. So I tried to follow as much of the tutorial as possible, but deviated from it often when it started leading to redundant and complicated geometry. I don't know how efficiently I did it, but... here it is.



Anyway, the body I modeled is probably not the most perfect body in the world, but I'm satisfied with it, having done in just a week and a half with the machine project at hand. I wish I had a wireframed image with me right now. I'll have to get one when I get back to school.

And here he is, no longer beheaded!! The head too was a quick assignment. The purpose was to make us learn to model a body through extrusions. The method, not the accuracy. A preparation for our final character project, which would have to be accurate. But of course, it was to be stylized.



Well! I think that's all the modeling I have for now!!

Maya Update!

So here is all the other modeling work that I promised.

The bedroom project was our first "major project". We had a choice between a bedroom and a living room. I chose to make a little girl's stylized bedroom. And by stylized, I mean using less realistic proportions, to show that it's a little girl's world in a normal sized room. I'm really proud of this work. Of course, the light from the lamp could be perfected and made conical. Also, the lighting could have been better done to make a better circular composition- perhaps show less of the ceiling? Turn off the fan light and put in a night light on the the right so there's only the moonlight, the lamplight, and the nightlight?

Perhaps fix the curtain rings, and lessen the scale of the curtain rail?

One of the critiques I had was that the ceiling was too high. It was supposed to be like that, like in Britain? But I can see how it might look odd.

Here's a jpeg showing off my moonlight, which took a long time to reach his stage. Of course, it could always be perfected...


Again, here, the night light on the right would've made it look better, and drawn the eye around the composition.

Here are some random snapshots I took for myself-- not composed.



















AND HERE is my second project- the machine project!!



It's an ancient, wonky, sanskrit typewriter. This jpeg here is a little messed up. A lot actually. I spent a lot of time on the modeling and texturing, and then, for some reason, my Maya file got corrupted and the shadows were rendering awfully or not rendering at all. The highlights are speckly, and all sorts of things. Basically, my textures weren't rendering true.

It was my problem partly. I'm not too happy with my texturing. Yes, it gives the old ancient look to it. But firstly, it isn't accurately what I envisioned. Secondly, it's just too much texturing.
I'm pretty sure most people will not know without me telling them that the main body is made out of rusty bronze and not wood. The textures on the two sides, and the modeling of the lever on the top doesn't look too good to me either. All in all, I'm not happy with this particular rendering.

Here's another one... With the wonkiness more clear! I'm quite pleased with the keys and the sankrit script, and the typebars on top with the subtle wonkiness to them.


And THAT is my favoritest image! :D I like the way the paper fold along the paper feed, how you can see the scale on the platen, the wonky look of the typebars... The ribbon spools look a little out of place and "unrealistic" here though..

Anyhow, it was all well received in class and by the teacher. And I got an overall score of 99% in the class!!!

More to come!!

In India now, and extremely exhausted.

Asymptote

Almost done with the quarter.

So here's what I've been spending a lot of time on and finally finished. Well not finished. You never finish. As someone once said- (artworks) aren't finished, they're just abandoned.


Anyways. I've been devoting equally great amounts of time to all my projects in class, but considering the number of renders I've had to do until finally getting the lighting almost right and solving unexpected merged vertices problems in sneaky corners of the mouths making it look like there's a tiny hourglass lodged in there...and all that great stuff, this deserves to be put up first. Woo.


It's a pretty simple looking character. The clothing is not so elaborate. But I chose to design it that way because I knew the face, the rough look of the hair and the hands would easily take up the time allotted for the assignment (1 week, excluding designing the character) plus a little bit more :)

Here's the stuff I drew in prep for it (I have some satisfactory looking gesture drawings of Anya too but don't have them scanned with me so will post later): I modeled the head separately from the body, which is why the heads aren't so accurate in the first set of turnaround drawings. I realized issues with drawing the front view of a nose based on the side view and vice versa. And getting 3 dimensional eye sockets to work from two 2D drawings. Heh.





I'm still not entirely happy with the backlight. It makes the sleeves look really exposed and washed out during parts of the turnaround,

So her name is Anya. I don't know why her name is Anya. But I felt it was fitting. It's not even a British name, I don't think. But anyway, she's a British schoolgirl. Lofty yet mysterious. Rather, mysterious yet lofty. Yes, there's a difference. She's sort of based on a character (with a few major and a few minor differences of course) in a movie I want to make at some point in my life. The younger version of an older woman if you will. But anyway. I have a background story for Anya. I'm just not in a state of mind (aka. state of awakeness) to pen it down now.

And here....is something I got out of playblast by mistake. But here it is anyway.



Good night.