Day 1
Today was the generation of ideas for the theme that we wanted to convey. Since it was "Safety at work", we decided to spend a day at school and at home, scouring the internet for ideas. In my case, after much thought, I wanted to do a sequence which highlighted the importance of wearing hearing protection and carrying weapons properly on a shooting range. Even though this wasn't a common occupation, the hazards were real. Hence, I retained this idea whilst waiting for my fellow group members to complete their research.
Day 2
Today was the day where all of us came together to finalize the concept of the story and draw out the storyboard. From about 5 ideas brought forward, we eventually settled on 1, which was mine. This was because all of us liked the storyline and the fact that it was something unique that still attributed itself to the them of "Safety at work." I volunteered to do the storyboard so that we could give a layout of the shots and do the previz in order to get a beter sense of the animation.
These are the pages of our storyboard. I was the storyboarding artist.
Day 3
Ruth did the Previz for our story.
Day 6
We also decided to change the hunter to a bear as we felt that a bear would appeal more to the audience than a human.
Instead of having the bear carry a box of ammo, we decided to make him lift the Bazooka in the wrong way. Due to this, he falls down. This was to emphasize the fact that it was imperative to carry weapons with two hands rather than one.
I also started modelling the entire scene, First, I started with a basic layout of he scene using simple geometry to get the feel of where the story takes place.
After this was done, i started doing the more detailed modelling, such as adding in more faces to the walls or making thre metal bars that are above the shooting each cubicle. I also had to model the guns and the bazooka, including adding a fair bit of detail into them.
This is the view of the scene after it was completely modelled.
Wireframe mode.
The weapons that I modelled.
This is the rifle that I referenced from to internet to do my models. After I finished modelling one gun, I duplicated it it 3 times and scaled down them up or down accordingly so that the sizes of the guns would be different.
The rifles
The scoreboard.
Day 7
I started researching on the blend shapes which I could incorporate onto the models. Since we needed facial expressions to portray the way the characters were feeling, I had to find a nice an cool way of animating facial expression. I eventually settled on using "Blend Shapes" to create the smile, frown or even, laughter of the character.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1VnLG6fmfA
I started with a basic expression.
I started selecting the vertices that i wanted to influence.
I pulled the vertices down until they formed a nice shape of the mouth.
I duplicated the face.
This time, i selected the two vertices at either ends of the mouth and pulle them up to create a smile.
I duplicated the model again and this time, i selected the two vertices and moved them down to create a frown.
The 3 faces in wireframe mode.
The 3 faces.
I selected all 3 faces applied "Blendshapes."
Create Blend Shapes
These 3 options are here because I named each face accordingly in the out-liner.
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Normal
Sad
These are the various expressions that I created in order to test out the blend shapes. I had to make sure that the emotions would work on a simple model before i could actually apply it to the bear model. I was able to create these test expressions quickly because they had fewer vertices than the bear had. However, the true test was whether I could replicate the same thing on the bear model and actually get a good result out of it.
Day 8
Today was the day where i applied the "Blendshapes" technique onto the real model.
As seen above, all the images above were about me testing the rig so that the bear could be easily manipulated when it came to animation. Wei Jie was the one who did the rig. He first added joints to the bear and "Smooth-skinned" it. He also painted the weights on the model so that certain parts of the model will react to the individual joints that they were connected to. Wei Jie finished painting the weights and sent the model to me. I quickly proceeded to create the controls for the body, arms and legs and constrained the joints to the the controls. I tested the rig, by moving those controls and hitting a 0 value on all transformations so that the character would fly back to it's default position.
Once that was done, I added in the "Blend shapes" for the bear by duplicating it thrice.
This is the normal facial expression of the bear.
The smile was a liitle bit tricky, but i managed to get it right.
For all the facial expression, I faced a big challenge because unlike the test, where I used a simple model to animate the emotions, this task was much more difficult on the bear due to the sheer number of vertices. Hence, I had to be extra careful when I was modelling the expressions because there was a chance that the vertices would not be equally selected.
Day 9
Today, I came back to school to do some minor adjustments for the model and to prepare for animation.
Day 10
Today, I came back to do the some minor changes to the model. Wei Jie checked the model to see if there was anything wrong before we started animating. I animated shots 6, 7 and 10.
Shot 6
The rabbit turns to see the bear come into the shooting range.
Shot 7
The bear walks innto the shooting range. For the animation of the bear, I faced some problems with the vertices. Whenever I rotated the bear, stray vertices would pop out from the front and back of the bear. I realized that the reason why there were stray vertices flying was because we made the mistake of rigging the model before we scaled it down to it's proper size. We should have actually fitted the model into the CG scene before we rigged the character. However, I was able to overcome this problem to animate the bear.
Shot 10
The camera zooms in to show the warning poster.
Day 11
Today, we did some final tweaks to the animation before we pitched it in for rendering. We checked each shot to see if we had consistency in telling the story. After this, we started rendering out our shots.
Day 12
The rendering is still being done.
Day 13
The renders were completed today. We started to put the shots together into a sequence and edit out the shots. Wei Jie was the film editor. After the shots were edited, we rendered out our quicktime movie and prepared ourselves for the presentation.
