Playing with Cameras

Playing with Cameras

Today I've had a go at rendering the practice robot and putting the animating together in a more organised dramatic way. Anyway one thing I've found is that I am a very harsh cutter and I shoot from shot to shot too quickly, but this is why we practice, so I won't do it when it counts. However I did come up with this shot that I am quite proud of, I like the way the camera moves and the manhole cover slowly comes into shot letting the audience in on the joke while the robot thinks he's safe.

Robot Final Frame

Robot Final - Frame

This is the Frame for my final Robot for the animation project, I'll rig this as soon as I get a chance and I'll then be in a position to do my final animation. But to make my robot look all fancy and everything I'll attach a load of plates and wires to this frame and group them to the right pieces.

So basically if this works I'll have a robot that is build from a lot of different pieces and looks really cool but works in exactly the same way as the robot we built in the seminars and will be very easy to rig. Hopefully it'll all work.

A Robots Assistant

A Robots Assistant

I've decided that I want a really small and simple robot that will accompany my main robot during the animation.

How I'm hoping that this works is that my main big robot is the brawn while this little guy that flys around is the brains, and my entire animation is going to be about how these two interact. And I think that it will work well to show how these will react when a foreign object (the banana) appears.

I'm hoping for something simple anyway a very basic flying spherical object such as Guilty Spark from Halo, or this scout droid from Star Wars. I'll have a couple of animation constraints in there for a few moving parts and an eye constraint but nothing nearly as complicated as my main robot.

What I'm hoping to do with my animation is have it so that together my two robots are pretty unstoppable however they are completely stumped by this strange object and then ultimately destroyed.

Robot

Robot

Just thought I'd post this up, this is the robot that I modelled originally for the animation project however eventually I decided that I wanted to do something different.

However this is the key part I don't dislike it and I am very happy with it so I'm going to rig it and use it as the passenger in my Rollercoaster animation. The reason behind this is that I don't want an empty cart just flying through space and I find robots like this easy to get a lot of funny expressive animation out of, which I hope will help with my Visualisation project.

I might, hopefully, if I have time do a banana trip animation with this guy aswell but I really want to focus on my main projects and get them done. And on that note I should hopefully have atleast the frame of my final robot posted on here by the end of tommorow and maybe his little helper robot aswell who knows.

Banana Slip Practice

Banana Slip Practice
Here's a short video I made in my seminar today of the robot slipping and falling over epically on a banana skin. I'm pretty happy with it, and there we're suprisingly few hic-ups. The only thing wrong with it is that I linked the banana skin to the wrong thing so instead of landing on his face it floated around a bit, so I decided to have it land behind him nice and simply.
I know I keep promising this but I should have some of my own stuff building towards the final piece very, very soon.

Gantt Chart

Gantt Chart

Here is my Gantt Chart planning all the work that I've got to do over the next few weeks. I'm glad I spotted how much work I have to do now, atleast I've got time to do something about it, I've been keeping up to date with everything lately anyway but it's good to see how everythings progressing.

Card Game

Card Game
Ok it's taken a while but I've finally got a pretty good idea for my card game. I've just noticed anyway that I've not posted anything up on my blog about it so I just thought I'd let the world know how it's going.
So I've got to design my own card game with a maximum of 60 cards, it has to be totally unique but at the same time not overly complicated. To be honest I've had a lot of trouble with this project, it's not that I've not wanted to get on with it but it's hard to come up with a totally new idea. My first thoughts was to have like a medieval battle game, players could arange cards in different formations and move them about, but after a while I realised that the only way to do this would be with a board or a grid and we're not allowed, also it'd be too hard to make the game without it being too over complicated.
So I decided against that idea, I might keep it in mind though for next term and the board game. I then came up with the idea of a Final Fantasy style battle system and I've gone with that idea and I really think that it works.

Whats unique about my game though is the way in which players play, each card has a value, stronger cards are worth 3, 4 or even 5 while weaker cards are worth less. The cards chosen by the player must add up to a value of 20. So depending on the player and how they want to play you will always be playing against a different style of play, the two extreme examples are one player chooses 20 weak cards with a value of 1 each while another chooses only a few extremely powerful cards but sacrifices a lot in terms of numbers. It's a very interesting system and I'm very happy with it. I've gone through two prototypes already and I'm pretty sure that the game works now, at the moment I'm going through the stages of balancing the cards out not making any too powerful or weak and so on. I want to get to the stage where there is a way to beat any hand, in other words there is no perfect way to play. I'll explain a lot more about my game later I just don't want to explain everything in text it's kind of hard to understand, I'll get some images up too hopefully and stick my rules up soon.

Playing with Lighting

Playing with Lighting

Today in our visualisation seminar I had a go at lighting a room, here are two of the set ups thats I liked, the first is a simple daylight system with the light shining in through the window, the second had no exterior lighting however i added lights to the lighting on the ceiling which work really well.

A Bit More Movement

A Bit More Movement

Just a final thought on my still walk before I leave it forever, there was a banana on the scene so I thought I'd stick on a bit of old school animation like scooby doo. Moving the banana on its own and nothing else to give the illusion that the robot is moving.

Robot Animation Test

Robot Animation Test

Today in our seminar I made a short piece of animation and here it is a avery simple walk, it's best watched on repeat anyway, but it works and I'm pretty happy with it. Next I'm going to do a silly walk, I've actually built a robot of my own that I've decided not to use for my final piece so I'll use it as a tester instead, once it's all rigged and everything, should be done soon though. I'll explain why I decided not to use it once it's up.

Rollercoaster - The Moon

Rollercoaster - The Moon

This is the early stages of my modelling for the moon which will be a part of my rollercoaster. I'll add a few more quick renders as I go along but I'm happy with it for the minuite and I'll add a few more details later on just to make it slightly more interesting.

Space the Final Frontier...

Space the Final Frontier...

I've been flicking through my online journal recently and I noticed that I've not really explained much about my plans for the rollercoaster design. So here I go, I've chosen space as my starting point, this is because I like the freedom that this allows, basically I really want to test out modelling a lot of different enviroments and this would be more easily achieved using space as a starting point than underwater.

However although space is infinate apparently, in my designs it doesn't have to be so I'm going to model an orrery that is upside down, basically all the planets are going to be hung in the air and the rollercoaster will interloop between this. Also every planet will have a very different look to it, this will allow me to model a variety of different enviroments for example, the planet closest to the sun will be almost like a desert and the one furthest away will be ice.

As for how I want it to look, I'm going for a very cartoon, very blocky approach to designing it, the problem with sci-fi for me is that everything looks too sleak and shiny. So I think it'd be a different approach to have something that looks very poorly constructed, maybe even made of scrap metal.

I've been playing a lot of Banjo-Kazooie Nut's and Bolt lately and I really like how some of the vehicles look, they're not sleak or well built but they work. I'm going to go for something very similar for my rollercoaster, it's going to look rough and poorly built (in it's appearance, my modelling will be top notch, hopefully) but it works, however it wouldn't pass a safety inspection. To get this across in my animation I'll have a lot of jumps and tight twists with the cart often quite close to falling of the tracks.

The Problem with Robots and How to Use this to My Advantage

The Problem with Robots and How to Use this to My Advantage

Ok I've been designing my robot and it's going quite well, I've pretty much got the basics of what I'm looking for sketched out but I've hit a bit of a brick wall.

What I've found while designing my robot and doing a bit of research is a problem with how mine looks. With all the cool looking robots anyway you can always see parts of the insides

giving you a glimpse of how they work, and it looks awesome. I want to get this into my designs somehow.

The main reason for this is that character design is a real interest of mine and this is the closest I'm going to get to doing it this term, so I want to design the biggest baddest looking robot I possible can. So what I've decided to do it model parts of the insides aswell as the main panels on the outside. This sounds like creating a lot more work than needs to be done, however I can use this to my advantage to make the whole animation process a lot easier and simpler, and I'll also get a much cooler looking robot out of it that not only fits the brief but that I can be proud of.

So what I'm going to do it model it from the inside out starting with a simple frame not 2 different to the simple robot I made in the seminars but with a different shape. I can then rig this quite easily and that's the hard part done. From there I can build around the fram that I've created adding panels and maybe some fancy stuff to make it look cool. So anyway my designs are progressing quite nicely, but I'm now going to continue with this in mind and hopefully finish soon so I can get on with modelling it.

Robot Animation Test

Robot Animation Test
Here is a short clip of a robot I built in Seminars to test out modelling, it's a bit shorter than I intended but it took so long to render that I'm not going to bother adding anything to it. This is just a trial to show how all the controls work. I now need to apply the same principles and animation mechanics to my own designs. Anyway enjoy.