Our project idea changed time to time through the course of the module. The original idea was to have a table and our group standing around it; on the table was going to be moom rigs fighting goon rigs in a call of duty sort of battlefield with tanks and explosions. We actually loved this idea BUT we thought it was way to ambitious especially with our track record of starting projects late. With this in mind we whittled it down to a colosseum with a moom gladiator and a goon gladiator battling it out with us watching like omnipotent beings. Although again we thought it was to ambitious.
In the end we settled on the idea of having Dave reading a book and having his imagination appearing on the table. For this I helped film certain angles and moving a table as a dolly to make smoother shots. Here is the story board curtesy of Sarah:
We had to film quite a few time due to lighting problems and marker problems, but here are some pictures of us at "work":
These photos were taken from the first time we filmed which was successful until the motion tracker marks couldn't be seen by maya.
As well as helping out with the filming I also created a pre-vis of what the animation sequence could be (bare in mind it is a very rough idea):
This is the very rough version of what the imagination sequence could be. I tried to mix as much creativeness and random bits together to form a really creative and fun mind.
After showing this we split up our project into jobs for each of us to do. I decided to model the clouds, the UFO and the squid, Callum took responsibility to do the city, Dave did the dinosaur, Sarah textured everything, Niko did the crane and some motion tracking and Josh composited and did motion tracking.
For the squid I modelled it in maya and aimed to make it simple looking and not very threatening as it is a imagination sequence so nothing violent was going to happen. Here is a picture of it:
Along with modelling it I had to animate it, so I looked into rigging the tentacles because they were the only things moving. I tested out my rig on a cylinder and had really good results:
The problem with this rig was that it didn't twist and plus the rig didn't work on my model. The rigs handles got to confusing on which tentacles they were attached to, plus instead of deforming the tentacle itself when you moved a handle it would twist and deform the model as a whole.
In the end i gave up and decided to use a rig called "Octomail" which I downloaded fro free off of creativecrash.com. The rig was easy to use and animate so I was able to have my octopus moving about on top of a building.
BUT sadly this wasn't used in the end due to problems with maya changing the files frame rate on its own and not accepting it into the composite maya file. We are still not sure how this happened.
This is the final outcome of our post production project:
The title of it is "Imagine" and was pieced together by Josh Coldham. Looking at the final result the project could've been handled better by our group. Our idea was sound but we were lazy about doing it well.
