Although we are currently working on our script for The Knocker Upper, and still planning our competitive scene, a lot of the technical challenges we will be facing remain the same.
Modelling: Our pipeline for most of our modelling, especially the characters will be back and forth between Maya and Zbrush. Zbrush allows us to add extra details such as scarring, some pores, and indents and surface scratches in the inorganic scene objects and houses.
Texturing: Although I have previously used x-normals to bake in AO maps and normals, I have played around in Substance Painter and plan to learn a lot more to mimic the soft textures in ‘Justino’ (2015) and take inspiration from ‘The Boxtrolls’ (2014).
Rigging: I do not have any experience with rigging, but I am willing to learn if we cannot get any good riggers in the classroom to help out. We definitely need amazing facial rigs to achieve great expressions on our characters.
Animating: We really want to push our animation skills by exaggerating our characters expressions and energy to be more cartoony and follow on from the animations in the previous post such as ‘Geri’s Game’ (1990) and ‘A Love Story’ (2016).
Hair: We hope to have realistic hair similar to that in ‘Justino’ (2015) to make our characters look softer but if this doesn’t work out as planned, I think it would be lovely to have a sculpted look, similar to the characters in ‘The Boxtrolls’ (2014). We hope to try out Maya 2017 as XGen interactive hair grooming has apparently gotten a lot easier to use. I also may consider changing geometry into hair.
Breaking Simulations: We may either cut to things already being broken or have a few shots with the simulations e.g. milk bottles breaking, signs breaking, windows breaking. I think it would be really interesting to see this instead of just hearing them so it would be good to research into these in maya.
Rendering: Rachel learnt a lot on her placement with Flickerpix about rendering layers in arnold so it will be great to learn from her to help out with all of this. I will need to be practicing along the way to test my textures.
Special Effects: We need to look into smoke/fog effects either in Maya or looking into it in after effects whilst editing. I think it would look amazing in the starting scenes on the street. We could look into dirt particles too to have the place a bit dusty. It would be stunning with light bouncing off.
Editing: We will be editing our animation in after effects and premiere pro, and hopefully having a couple of weeks at least to do this before feedback.
Sound: As previously mentioned, we hope to have some music similar to that of the early 19th century during the industrial revolution. Rachel knows some people studying music in Queen’s University, and Conann mentioned that he’d be willing to talk to their tutors about collaborating on this years animations. Our sound will be key as we will have no dialogue.
Planning
Rachel was great enough to draw up some timetables for us throughout the year but these will be subject to change once we get stuck into the workload:
Abigail Gelston 