8 Week Project Summary

Week 1&2:

Well Jeff and I started of really well when we were given our brand. We came up with an initial idea based on the slogan we were given by our product design partners. From the slogan "life in the city jungle" and the image that puma is as a brand, we constructed an urban/environmental piece. Our two main focuses for this project was the animation and the environment. Me and Jeff had both had a similar image as to what we wanted the final outcome to look like; and we sketched put a rough plan as to what we wanted to incorporate into the advert. The first layout plan was made in the first week and by the beginning of the second week we had already started to build the environment. The style that we were looking for was a clean cut urban look

with a paint by numbers feel (black and white). We decided to combine two places together to appeal to the slogan we were given; London and the jungle. We had also decided that we would use elements of colour to highlight the environment around the puma. In the middle of the first week Jeff was able to find a basic puma rig which he adapted and was able to model over to make a more developed and more effective puma for our piece.

Week 3&4:

These weeks were dedicated to building the environment, Jeff was working out the placing of where everything needed to go, the camera angle, how many frames it was roughly going to take and he was also modelling. I was modelling the both aspects of the urban and the environmental aspects of the scene. We decided that for our camera we wanted a panning shot so that we didn't let the camera angles take away from the environment and the puma; because we wanted to show it as a journey. In this week we were also playing around with colouring effects that would give us the look that we were going for. We came up with a very effective style which matched both me and Jeff's vision using aspects from the toon shader menu. By the middle of week 4 I broken away from the environment and started looking at the animation.

Week 5&6:

By the end of week 5 we had finished the anamatic and was ready to start the final animation, I had used a book by Mybridge to help me work out the animation. At this point Jeff was finalising the environment scene importing any other objects that either he or I had made and was positioning them into place. Week 6 I was finding the animation process for the puma was going really slow but the outcome seemed to be looking OK. At the beginning of week 6 I modelled and rigged the newspaper bird for Jeff to animate in the scene.

Week 7&8:

These last two weeks were quite stressful; the animation in week 7 was continuing to move at a moderately slow pace but I was confident that I would be able to get it done and finished by week 9. Jeff was also getting along with animating any secondary animation which we wanted to put into the scene like the movement of the taxi, newspaper birds, alligator briefcase. Week 8 I was devastated to find out on the Tuesday of this week that the work had to be given on the Friday. Jeff and I felt like we didn't have enough time to show our work to its full potential. Although we were on schedule as far as wanting to finish the animation by this time there were so many other aspects we wanted to include to enrich our work. We would have wanted to add more colour to certain objects, we wanted to add more layers in after effects to give the scene depth. The last few days had to run perfectly any major mistakes and we would have come unstuck. Luckily for us it didn't fall to pieces at the end. There were only minor mistakes that were resolved with re-rendering scenes. I feel that the outcome of my part in the project is of a satisfactory level, I would really have loved more time in which to show that I do have the skills to do a better animation.

I feel that the advert overall did work out well, the way in which the scene looked was exactly how me and Jeff pictured it, and I feel that the slight colour enhanced the look of the environment. We didn't want the puma to be the full focus because the slogan was actually centered around the environment. I feel we showed an equal amount of both aspects without one over shadowing the other.

Once again its been a pleasure to work with Jeff as we do work well together. I think given the shocking changes we recovered remarkably well.

Adding Colour

Here are a few screen shots of the scene when I added colour to the environment.

Puma Animation

Here are some playblasts of the first few scenes just to show the development stages in the animation, I have also put some final rendered shots from each scene to show the final outcome.

By this time in the project, Jeff had figured out a away to loop my animation and key it correctly in the final scene.

More Modelling

Size ratios

I have now imported the Puma into the environment, but I have to make sure that the size is in proportion to the rest of the surroundings. This actually proved a bit tricky because when I was resizing the puma, the rig was not shrinking along with it. I then decided to re size the puma in its own file to see whether that would work, and lucky or me it did. I have now imported the new re sized puma into our environment.

Animation Tests

This is my test of a running puma, it has come out ok apart from the end. I will have to figure out what has gone wrong, and to make it a succesful loop but for a first try I dont think its that bad.

Because we decided that we were going to have newpapers acting as birds, I did a test in Lambet at first, and then the second test is a uv mapped texture which I believe it has worked really well.

Week1: Modelling plants for environment

Now that we have our idea we have started to model our environment props to incorporate into our London city. The style that we have decided to go for is like a clean cut drawing, maybe a paint by numbers look because some elements of the environment will be in colour.