Specialism

These are the images of my current progress so far, i currently have all the models and scenes done all that is required is to add them into the scenes and animate them, the backgrounds in a couple of the scenes are animated so that the scene has something happening to bring the scene to life.

Child character:

Macie the female balloon:

Male character:

Trevor the male balloon:

Inside the little girl's bedroom, where Trevor will reunite with the little girl and the female balloon:

Outside the house, where Trevor will fly through the window:

Hut scene where the father will take his daughter to get Trevor:

The first travelling scene, Trevor will begin his adventure here:

Second travel scene this will be where Trevor will meet Macie:

This will be one of the saddest parts of the story when Trevor will lose his friend on the spike on top of the house:

This is my first scene for the story this will be where the little girl will find Trevor, this is one of the scene's i showed to my target audience and they like the look of it. For this project i drew a lot of inspiration from Rollie Pollie Ollie as i like the simplicity of the show using simple 3D shapes to represent the scenes. My story will aim to have a similar art style and i want to carry the story through the use of music.

 As mentioned before Rollie Pollie Ollie is where i got the inspiration for the artistic style of the story, i chose this because i feel there is something nice with the simplicity of the TV show and the younger audiences seem to enjoy it so i would like to make something equally heart warming.

This is going to be the travelling sequence in the story and i aim to move the clouds and have some birds flying around to add life to the world as Trevor is on his journey.

This is going to be a sad scene within the story where the balloon that Trevor meets on the journey will meet there demise on the spike on top of the building.

This is the balloon shack where the girl and her father will find Trevor and this will be where the journey will begin.

Trevor will fly through the window at the end of the story to be reunited with the little girl.

For this bedroom scene i still aim to add things to the background such as a picture of the park to give the bedroom a nicer look.

This is the updated version of the bedroom scene I feel that it still looks a little bare bones and I may add more to the scene, however with the little girl in the scene, Trevor and Macie in the animation sequence I don’t want to draw the attention away from the center points of the animation sequence.

 Bone structures for animation, within the creation of animation characters must first be rigged and skinned to be able to create the motion this process begins through the use of 3 different rigs those are as follows CAT, Biped and Bones. A CAT rig or Character Animation Toolkit was the base method used within 3DSMaxx for animation. The next one we can use is a biped rig this gives you the base of a human body to skin the model this is considered to be one of the easier ways to rig a character and finally we have the bone rig, this is a process of adding the bones to the body which will then need to be skinned making the character move with the body.

 Looking online for the different animation processes within the industry was hard to find as the information seems to be hidden for the companies, however I did find some information on animation pipeline which enabled me to collect some information on the process and as I was looking around online I came across a channel on YouTube called New Frame Plus, this is a channel that take apart animations in games to find things that they could improve on for example the Skyrim mining animation, they try to change this into something more dynamic than the current animation cycle that is used for this process because the animation that is played is very simple and repetitive. I also found a channel called GDC which talk about animation in games from animators who have worked in the industry for many of years, finally I looked at No Clip a channel in which they talk about the whole creation process.   

 Through watching the GDC channel I came across a video talking about the physics for the animation in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. In this video they talk about a rigid body and each one of these have associated joints, a body mass to create the weight, friction, restitution which aids in the bounciness of the body and finally an inertia tensor which helps in the rotation of certain body parts along any axis the higher the inertia tensor is makes the model more stable. Linear damping reduces the linear movement of an object over time and angular damping is the same for the rotation of the object, there are 2 different constraints for animation those are hinge which is mainly used for elbows and knees and the ragdoll constraint which is for the remaining body parts this is used to create the most realistic motion for a human body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-_vuoKgR4

 As my final film is a short story about a little girl and her lost balloon I aim to look at different animation shorts where an inanimate object was used as the center piece of the movie, I have already looked at shorts like Disney’s The Blue Umbrella as this is where my main inspiration comes from. Disney’s Paperman was a nice short story about love and this was made just from the clever use of a paper plane and from watching this I liked how they made the paper plane the center focus of the film with the animation, however they were still able to keep the realistic motion of a paper plane.

 

 During this process I have pitched my animation idea and shown some of my scenes to my target audience this being younger kids of 7+ and from this I saw that they have thoroughly enjoyed what they have seen so far and are looking forward to seeing the final product.