Progress Update

It's been quite a busy week for me - University wise amongst other things. With that said however, I still managed to churn out some work for my Hell piece despite not posting much in the past few days.



Here you can see, I finally managed to sculpt the rocks in my scene (the same rocks I see when I close my eyes at night), and I must say, I'm pretty happy with the way turned out (at least most of them) and would like to thank Tom Beg and Jon Stewart for their advice on creating rocks.



In this grab, you can see the props finally put into the scene. The scene may look 'gappy' but this is because a lot of the characters fill up these spaces, most importantly the hanging characters fill up a lot of the center line. There are all the props that have been posted in there as long as some new ones.



This image shows some of the new props, as well as the smaller details lost in the viewport shot. I didn't realize that after scaling, how much of the actual detail I actually lost in my models, so I will definitely be keeping this in mind when modelling the characters.



This shows the wireframe of the scene just for a little extra insight as to what actually makes it up. If anyone has any suggestions on few more environmental features I could include, feel free to pitch them this way, as I think a few more small trinkets could work in the scenes favor. The white material currently applied to the objects, Is to help me test my lighting in the next few days. If it works with that material it will work with my etching shader.




Moving on, I decided to sketch up some VERY basic orthographic shots for my main soul character. As you can see, its only a line drawing as it is all I need for the purpose of Maya modelling. It is based on the 'Malnourished' characters I incorporated in my original concepts, and as they received some quite good reactions from people, I decided to carry on with it.



Here's just a more spruced up version I made in Photoshop. I've really kept the detail down to a minimum for two reasons:
1. I didn't want to spend hours on this turnaround as it's not my concept art, that has been done! It is merely just for me to look at and model from.
2. When scaled to fit my scene, these characters will be very small - Remember a few posts back, me likening the final animation to an ant farm. So adding in fingers and toes and fine details would be counter productive.




Also this week, I was delighted to find that people at voiceover.co.uk had been kind to yet another CGAA student and provided me with the most perfect voice over. The beginning of my animation is introduced by a spooky/sexy/whispering woman then - WOOSH! straight into my living etching.

The line is a quote from the Gospel as spoken by Jesus Christ, and is very fitting for my piece, as this kind of line was said in sermons during Medieval mass (see older posts for more info).


All in all, I'm starting to feel well on my way. This week, I will be modelling my character and getting a start on the rig as well as finishing toying around with the shader for each object (possibly having to bake it on in some cases as recommended by Alan) and the scene lighting.