Telling Tales Production Diary - Week 6

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Yeah this week was just filled with Maya modelling and it really pushed my final nerve as well as some personal issues which meant i had to abandon work for a few days across the week so i didnt get as much work done and i cant remember which day i had done the work so this weeks post will be an overview and list of everything done this week.

While modelling the objects i had to think of what was going to be the most suitable way to design and stylise the objects to make them fit in with the scenery and world. so the objects had to be made out of cuboid shapes that were very angular and rigid. The chalk was really easy to model because of this. The inanimate objects were the easiest to model using extrusions from faces to create the shapes and changing the transparency on certain layers to create the right effects. I did run into a few problems when extruding layers because i wanted to get a clean and crisp shadow but due to duplicates in faces and edges it resulted in an unnatural gradient as well as a form of buckling on the models. I was able to fix this by deleting the excess edges and faces.

The objects that were the hardest to model were the organic models, models that were based off of living things. This was because they couldn't be produced in the same mechanical way by keeping them cuboid. But i had to find a way of keeping them to the aestheitic of the animation. With the robot/human body i brought in an image of a moveable mannequin and modelled it accordingly, cutting off corners and other elements to give it a rigid shape. I think this was one of the later models i made so compared to the others it is a lot more poor quality. If it had more of a presence in the animation i would of gone back and remodeled it if it had a stronger presence in the animation but it is on screen very briefly so i chose to leave it although i would of liked to improve it further.

The chicken was interesting to figure out as its head comes off and it has moving components as well thus it was going to require a rig at some point but i didn't know how to do this so i chose to model the head separate from the body with wings that were also like the arms of our characters, detached. The beak was awkward to model as i wanted it so that it could open and close but it made it clip and warp the mesh so i separated them from the main body and left it as is for my partner UV so i could rig it afterwards.

The plant was a unique problem as the leaf shape was the first thing i had to figure out. I went with an arrow shape reminiscent of ivy plants. once i knew how i wanted the leaves i started to duplicate them and assemble them on the same level but i couldn't curve them over the edge of the plant pot unless i put a bend tool in. I did this after combining the leaves together.

During this week myself and my partner were shown Ethel and Ernest by our tutor. Ethel and Ernest was a film that made use of a water colour like aesthetic in a 3d world, similar to what myself and my partner were thinking as we were planning on using UV mapping to add texture and depth to our animation because of how simple and basic it was. While i was away because of personal reasons my partner was focused on painting the water colour UVs as they were the more compatent painter of the two of us, which is why i worked on the models mainly.

During this week maya had a glitch which meant every time my partner tried to UV map the objects i had modelled it crashed, we never did find out why. But there was also flaws in my models with how i extruded from the object because there were times that i had tried to extrude something but made a mistake and hadnt quite deleted i, this meant we had extra faces on edges meaning the uvs got confused. We had to select the whole of the model and merge the vertexes. But my partner had to remodel a lot of my work which is frustrating because it doesnt feel like i left much of an impact on this week with all the mistakes made and being replaced by my partners work which also means im relying on my partner a lot more than intended so its not balanced.