Daniel Hammond

 I started trying to scribble out some ideas for how my character might look but I think most of them are pretty bad. My focus hasn't been great today, I also think I need to decide whether or not my chef will be male or female to make the whole design process a little easier. I know I want the character to look tired. But, I need to put more thought into what I think their other physical traits would be, because currently my only direction is 'chef' but that's far too broad.

 Running off my prior idea involving the chef running away from the food that suddenly comes to life through a port and using a cement mixer to stop the food chasing them. I thought that it was maybe a little bit far to use a chef magician or something like that to make the idea make sense. So I figured it might be good to drop hints in the animatic and whatnot about lateness, and hint toward the idea that maybe the chef has worked on the dish for a while, then hallucinates due to tiredness. I thought I could pull this idea off by using a clock on the wall in the kitchen and making it nighttime outside where they run away and maybe even give the character bags under their eyes. I still haven't drawn anything yet, so all these ideas are purely in my head and of course still up for development. However, this is the best way I've come up with to string together my random elements. I think this idea has potential though. Considering it's going to be a short concise story.

 I've put together some influence boards just before I start drawing or developing my written ideas further.

 After some brainstorming before I think it would actually be quite fun to maybe animate a chef magician running from the food they made as it comes to life and chases them through the port. This idea allows me to have the chef run from the meals and I can incorporate a cement mixer fairly easily by having the chef use the cement mixer as a means of trapping the food and escaping.  This idea is also much more compatible with the 2 minute animation factor as the other ideas I thought of were either, too boring, too weird or too long. But, I'll see if after making some influence boards this changes at all. However, currently this is my favourite idea.

 

 

 Today in session we learnt how to reduce background noise and edit sound clips in Adobe Audition to do things like adding effects and taking noises out of the sounds frequencies with the paintbrush and time selection tools.

 Chef on port selling meals in a market, construction workers close to their stool, Chef accidently takes from cement mixer for a sandwich or meal of some kind. Chef kicked from workplace in port, for using a cement mixer to make food. Chef comes up with incredible new recipe, government think it's dangerous and chef is chased through port by assassin, gets assassin covered in cement. Chef kicked from city workplace and moves to the sea to relax, but the area of the beach he moves to isn't what was advertised, it's a busy port and supply area with landmass being filled with cement. Chef discovers that cement adhesive would enhance many of their recipes so they try to steal some from construction workers close to home (port) because the trip to the shop would take too long. They are eager. Construction workers gives Chef a hard time.  A local port attraction, the bungee jumping chef, some kids put cement mixer at the dropping point of bungee jump, can't avoid it and gets...

Environment: Port Character: Chef Prop: Cement Mixer

 

 Final render: Original Concept Art: Pipeline:

 Lighting tests for the final edit and render. I rendered them all with the pixel size reversed (1080 width by 1920 height by accident). 

 I don't really understand why but the buildings I textured have UV's displayed on them still, I don't think it will matter as those buildings won't really be the focus. However, it's really weird, I deleted the UV layer and flattened the image in Photoshop so I really don't get why they all still show up.

 Finished modelling and texturing the hero building for the scene.

 I've made a lot of progress, modelling the hero building of the scene for the project. I figured as it is in the background I will use Maya's normal preset materials and paint any paint on when I do the final edit. Tomorrow, I just have to add the pipes to the scene which won't take long, then I texture the bits I've got to texture on the buildings and edit it all together in one cohesive scene. Do a few lighting tests, write about it with a reflective statement on thursday and put together the Art of document and the projects done. I used the following video link to figure out how to do glowing objects though, it didn't really work, I think I did it wrong. I'll correct it tomorrow. Tutorial Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=CijESEporUo&ab_channel=OneMinuteMaya

 Finished modelling building_4 for the final scene, I was going to texture and UV the outer shell of the building. However, I think I messed up somewhere in the modelling process as the outer shell is made up of individual faces rather than one whole object. I still really like the way it looks but, but its annoying that I can't seem to find a way to bring all the faces together. I don't understand what I could have done to cause the issue, I looked it up and I couldn't find anything, I tried to sew them, didn't work, I tried to combine them and that didn't work because in classic maya it views the object as one whole shape. I could remodel the outer shell. However, now I'm not sure I have enough time to do that. So, I'm going to continue moving forward as planned and if I have an issue with the building in the final scene, with the way it is and I have time, which is possible. I'll go back and remodel the outer shell. It won't take long anyway, it...

 Today I finished finished modelling and laying the UVs out for two more buildings for the final scene, so now I have two more to go. Which given my pace at the moment will be finished tomorrow 100% and hopefully I can start texturing later in the day. I don't think texturing my buildings will take long or at least I'm hoping they won't, the only real textures I have to draw are brick, wood and steel but some of my UVs are a little weird in terms of shape. I didn't really expect that so many of the super square buildings would have rounded UVs. So, it's possible I may have messed up a step along the way.

 Today I added texture to my matte painting that I completed last week, in Chrissie's lesson. I'm quite pleased with the result and glad I finally learnt colour grading techniques because it's something I've always needed to know but always avoided. The process of adding textures was quite fun too, all the masks got a little confusing at times but, that's only because I kept not naming layers, then suddenly there was a ton of nameless layers. So I need to remember to name those in future for sure.

 I finished modelling and laying out UVs for the first of the five buildings in my scene. Some of my UVs were a little strange hopefully I can still texture the parts I need to texture well enough. The building looks pretty basic I think but once the other 3 regular buildings are made and duplicated accordingly across the scene I think it might go unnoticed. Since the focus is heavily on the hero buildings. I like it though, the pipes were really irritating and slow to place since there was so much adjusting and my orthographs don't work all that well but, I got the hang of it toward the end and picked up some momentum.

 I've almost finished modelling the first building in the scene, not laid out UV's yet. However, the buildings shell in completely modelled now it's just a case of placing the pipes appropriately. then I'll UV it and move on to the next building on the list. Everything seems to be going okay so far and I have not run into any problems modelling this building yet. I think this model looks pretty basic, but once I have the pipes in place and some areas of the model are smoothed as they should be, I'm hoping it will look a little cooler.

 I modelled some pipes to use for my buildings later on when I come to modelling them, which has been really handy, still takes a while to put them in place though. I tried to lay out UV's for them so I could later apply a rust texture to them but when the UV's were unfolded they were in a million pieces. I looked up why this was happening to try find a solution but I wasn't able to find anything. For now I've places a preset copper texture on them and have edited the roughness and colour. If I still haven't worked out how to correct them by the time I'm doing the final render I will just paint over them in Photoshop. Although, I'd rather not do that. However, given the shot I'm using as reference, the pipe textures on the buildings might be small and not noticeable anyway so it might not be an issue.

 I finished this animation off today, I was having fun doing it so I did more than I thought I would I wanted to make the limbs and colouring and whatnot better and correct a few mouth shapes and timing. But, I'd be here all day and I need to model my buildings for the main project as deadlines next week friday. I'm enjoying 2D animation, though I'm not that good yet, so by the end of January I would like to try and have a fight scene or something with cool effects and movements animated in my own time. Also I'm pretty sure I missed one action for the girl to make in the animation because I thought she was meant to swing her arms towards the end of the clip but, I'm fairly sure I forgot to add it. Regardless, I still think the animation was decent, it's probably the best lip syncing I've ever done before and I think I figured out a trick to colour animations quickly for  next time I'm in animate, because colouring this took about an hour. 

 I've done a little more for this animation today, finished the lip sync and drew some bodies for the characters, so now tomorrow morning I will animate them reacting and moving and have the afternoon for modelling some buildings in Maya for the main project. Or the other way round.

 I wasn't able to do all that much today as my tablet crashed on me and was literally unusable. I think it just overheated though as, I was drawing with it earlier. Regardless today I managed to fill out the Excel sheet dictating sounds and actions for the animation. I spent the rest of my day working on the other project and hope to start and finish this animation on Wednesday. The website linked below I used to help me with some questions I had about speaking and timing. Which was quite useful and hopefully I did a good job on the Excel sheet so the animation goes smoothly on Wednesday. Though, I found it really weird trying to break up whole words into sounds and frames; hopefully I did a good job.  https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/film-games/proven-tips-animating-believable-lip-sync

 I have drawn all the orthographes I will need to start modelling my scene in Maya. I had to redesign and alter a fair amount whilst drawing these. As thinking about this buildings 3 dimensionally brought forth a lot of issues with my drawings that I hadn't considered before. I'm pretty happy I finally finished these off though they were really boring and I kept getting distracted. However, now I can start modelling in Maya and progressing to finally finishing the project off.