Character Turntable Animation

Rooftop Beauty Shot

I have been working on a beauty shot of my rooftop scene, the reason for this are twofold, firstly I want a nice production video to show at our presentation and secondly this allows me to test and learn techniques for the final piece.

Here you can see I am still working out a few things, I needed to separate the layers of buildings in order to create a parralax effect.

Here I've seperated the layers and added lens blur, however I do not yet have the full Z depth pass needed, so it looks a little static. also note the movement of the matte in comparison to the background buildings, which is not perfect but getting there.

And finally here I have a somewhat final shot, there is still plenty of work to be done such as specularity maps, lighting and perhaps particle fog.




Here are a few images from the Z depth pass which, white areas are in focus, darker areas less in focus.

Further Character Creation

The character modelling process has had more thought than I had originally expected from the concept to be put into it, because of the characters' semi-robotic nature I couldn't decide between a more mechanically modeled (and eventually rigged) model, or a more organic mesh whilst keeping the hard surface effect in the armour.

Both options were new to me, as a mechanically influenced character would be a new rigging experience for me, so I tried it out with some basic spheres/boxes to create what would be the the skeletal structure of the character and it was pretty simple, I also created a rough organic layout to the character so that Simon and myself could decide which might be closer to what we were looking for.

After having decided on a more organic model with decidedly android like traits, I realized that the best way to go about achieve the aesthetic we had envision, I would need to model the inner-'Armour' and essentially robot organically and add a more hard-surfaced outer Armour later.

Hard surface modeling wasn't something I have used in the past for character creation and decided to experiment first with a basic helmet shape for our characters.

After having figured out the technicalities and the workflow of the characters and was satisfied with tests; I started work on modeling our characters based on the concept images, the group was happy with the results so this development flowed.

The final result was very close to our concepts and accurate to what the group had expected of them.

Exterior buildings, UVW Maps

Here are some UV maps I've made for the exterior buildings in the scene. These are fairly low res at 1024x1024, but the objects will not be too close to the camera.

Here is a map I made for bump, I will make full normal maps for closer elements in the scene.

This is a repeating panel I made for the front of the building.

This is the map for the cylindrical scraper, being a round object made this one interesting to unwrap!

Rooftop Scene

I've been working on a few things for the rooftop scene, here I've been making a vent

 I then put the fan inside and a backlit plane, we may have a volumetric light in here eventually.

Here is the UV unwrap

And the final map

This shows one of the external sky scrapers I've been working on, here I'm UV unwrapping it in preparation for texturing.

Rooftop Scene: Playing with Z-depth

I've been playing with Z-depth passes and have managed to make a test shot, complete with fog and camera focus.

I'm not sure this method for fog will be good enough for the final shots for several reasons, lighting being a main one. I'm also not sure I like the effect it had on the matte as it looks rather washed out.

Rooftop Scene

I've added a floor texture and bump mapped everything here, the outer wall still needs work.

Here I've started the outer wall, this will need work but the general look is there

My current UV for the floor

Desaturated and given high contrast for a bump map