Scene Lighting

When doing test renders to see what the animation will actually look like, i have had issues trying to get the lighting to be just right and not produce too much or too little shadow and the overal brightness of the scenes. To fix this, i tried different combinations of light sources to make the scene just right. However when doing this, a problem i encountered was that the test render image was much brighter than the saved test render image.

The first image below is a the test render that shows up within maya and is incredibly bright due to the lights that are placed in the scene. This made the colours really bright and was misleading when compared to what the actual scene looks like when one frame is rendered.

 The second picture is what the final rendered image of the scene looked like with the same settings as the the image above. This image however is really dark and many colours are too dark to recognise from the shadows.

This image however is almost perfect in my opionion as the colours are still bright but they arent so bright that they are almost washed out like the first image.  This result was achieved by adding an extra ambient light and placing it above the scene. This apporach i feel gives just enough light to make the darker colours different from each other such as the road and pavement.

Big Chief Redesign

Big chief is a character that i am happy with the concept however i feel that the character model didnt look quite right when viewed in 3D as such i have overhauled the top part of Big Chief to look much better in my opinion.

One of the areas that i didnt think looked quite right was the neck and head area of Big chief. The original model (on the left) i thought the head area was much too large and the hat was much too small which made the character look strange. Another area i thought needed improvement was the face of Big chief. My main issue with Big Chiefs face was that it lacked detail even with colours and made the character look very generic. To fix this i modelled the face based on a sterotypical TV detective with Aviator sunglasses and a large handlebar mustache. I feel this redesign adds a lot of character to character which is essentially a ball shape. When animating Big Chief, the bottom half will roll much like a ball.

Scene 1 City street Storyboard

To better plan my animation i will be creating a series of storyboards for each scene within the animation. These storyboards will give a general outline as to what will happen within each scene and highlight the more important parts of the scene. The animation may vary from the original storyboards however for the most part i plan for them to be the same.

 The scene starts off by watching the main character and several other generic characters walk down a street. The main character then goes down an alleyway at which point the camera zooms out to show the back of Big Chief. The camera then cuts to the alley way to show big chief approaching the main character from behind then the scene. The next scene begins with the main character rebooting in Big chiefs office.

3.13.2018 Big Chief

The second character that I have modelled is Big Chief. Big chief is the police chief of the city and is the robot that enlists the main character for help with the crime in the city. Like i detailed i an earlier post, big chief is inspired by the character Big Weld in the film Robots who is a robot that moves around by a large ball as the lower torso.

When modelling i made a few changes that i think have improved the model for example in the initial design, Big chief was designed to have an american style police hat. When i modelled him however, i decided to model him with a Sheriff style hat instead.

The model has no colour at the moment due to not having decided the colour scene. The current colours on Big Chief are a placeholder for where certain features are on the model. For example, the black is where the "mouth" is and the red is the eye. One element that will be on the model is the ball section. This will have a stripe to show that the bottom half is moving and is not a just a solid colour.

The arms of big chief are going to float around much like Rayman's hands.