Model Students and Pre-Visuals

Alas we have entered the modelling stage! Behold the glorious whats done/whats not board and full schedule.

Ritchie, Amit and Yannis are taking on the goats, mariachi's and the troll/ogre, while the rest of us will be modelling the rest of the assets (Ritchie pulled together a complete list of assets)

Kaitlin, Natasha, Bimpe and Cristina (the environment team as they shall be known) have been thinking a lot about the intricate designs that we think will really help our animation stand out from other low poly pieces. There's been some research into some of the designs we want to achieve on some of the assets like the rocks.

Natasha's also pulled together a moodboard for inspiration of style and textures from the sweets in the piñata.

Bimpe's done a bit of research into the bridge for design and modelling purposes.

Follow Bimpe's board Bridges on Pinterest.

Sushma's been working on pulling together our sound-list - we know this is very important to the theme and atmosphere of our story so we're keen to make sure that this doesn't get left till the end

But most importantly... Amit's worked on the pre-vis! The tweaks we made to the storyboard/animatic have really made a difference we think!

Animatics and Decapitated Pinata's

We have a second draft of the animatic, taking into account the rest of the groups feedback on the first one.


The staring scene between the final goat and the orge as been removed as after seeing it played out, we felt it was one too many and dragged on a bit. We've also included another reaction shot from the mariachi's showing them run away. 
Lastly after a bit of acting (so Bimpe and Natasha could understand) we added in an extra shot of the final goat after bursting so you can actually see what's happened to him and his reaction in one frame!

Natasha and Kaitlin giving an example of the finer nuances of decapitated pinata's

We're moving on to modelling this week, so Cristina, Yannis and Natasha are pulling together the model sheets for the goats, mariachi's and the ogre. The art team had a chat to discuss some finer details.
As the model sheets are being designed by different people we needed to make sure that everyone was on the same page in terms of style and detail, as we don't want are models to look like they don't belong to the same world. We've been deciding things like whether the eye should be a simple dot or have a bit more detail especially for the ogre. The artists will present both sets on the model sheets, and we'll also do some 3D testing to make a decision and see which works best. If we go with the dots then we need to make sure that the brow (on the ogre especially) is extremely animated so we can get across their expressions

Ogre Model Sheet with DOT eye

Ogre Model Sheet with more detailed eye

Kaitlin ran us through the schedule again so we could start to get more granular with the details and confirm roles as we head into production.  Ritchie has also pulled together our asset list so we can make sure we're not missing anything!

Week 3: Storyboarding and Sounding

Over the weekend Bimpe and Natasha worked on editing the storyboard and pulling together the animatic.

Again we looked at The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for helping to rework the scenes and the camera angles, and felt that the final scenes in particular (with the ogre and the giant goat) could work as spaghetti western gold!


The Art of Editing in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly from Max Tohline on Vimeo.

Yannis recorded some rough (and awesome) narration for us to help with timing the scenes in the animatic.

Here's the first draft of our animatic:



We've also been doing some colour checks - comping together the environment with the characters to sense test the colours