Torran Rodgers, BA (Hons) Computer Animation Arts, UCA Rochester

  Collaboration Animatic Two I added the extra frames to the animatic, and re-uploaded it to the group blog. These are small changes but overall they improve the animation.

  Character Design: Environments After a few discussions with Justin it has become apparent that a key to the style of UPA is the artistic importance of the backgrounds in UPA's animations. Many look like painting's in there own right following the artistic genre's of modernist times. Mainly surrealism and Minimalism. Because of this where the character is could be seen as just as important as the character design itself. Location Ideas Landscape thumbnails Colour Thumbnails

  Character Design: UPA Shark After research and preliminary sketches I managed to settle of the design for my shark following the conceits that come along with the style of UPA animation.  After these sketches I had a good idea of the character, I then had to decide how much of the character was going to be see through following the upa style. My Final Character looks a lot like this with a solid colour as a body and his extremities being draw over and clear on screen.

  Maya Class: Moom Ease In and Out In this session we added ease in and out into our weight Lifting animation, learning how to apply these principles to3D animation and how it should look in the graph editor.

  Maya Class: Moom spline and the graph editor In this class we used the spline function and the graph editor to turn our stepped animation into a smooth 3D animation. Once we use the spline to do this we then go into the graph editor to make the motions closer to arcs, thus creating smoother and more believable motion in our 3D models.

  Meg's Art Jam: Week 2

  Maya Session: Posing for animation Posing Moom to create an animation of him weight lifting, this is the first stepped stage of animating.

  Collaboration: layout/Initial Environments I started doing the initial layout and environment modelling for my collaboration project. each environment is for a different scene and comedy sketch. Space Mayan Temple Field/Electricity Caveman/Fire

  Collaboration Animatics the first animatic made from the storyboard molly and Alex drew. U used these to create a sense of timing as well as showing how the audio cues are important for the animation. without sound With sound

  Tool Kit 2 : Displacement In this tutorial I learnt how to use the 2 variations of displacement maps. Firstly how to generate them using Mudbox and then after how to use them within Arnold. The first version is a black and white displacement map that can only effect the height of the generated topology. The second was a Vector displacement map that used colour data as well, this meant that you could generate overhangs with the displacement map. Displacement. original topology. Vector Displacment.

Maya Class: Relaxed Posing While learning to pose moom we where asked to look at relaxed poses in class. these are mu attempts at posing them along with the photo I used as reference.

Collaboration Script Fire 2 I was responsible for righting the Fire script, this is the second draft of this script and I think its better then the previous version of this script. Exterior: Cave, evening: Presenter: The time is 15 million BC and where here to witness the first creation of fire by the Uuurg family, lets get a closer look. presenter stands to the side and the camera zooms in on a caveman family. As they slight a small fire outside. and start to sit around. Presenter: They've done it now as long as the conditions stay right they should be warm throughout to night. Rain starts. Presenter: Ah Cuts to exterior: Hut Night Presenter: As you can see they decided to move the fire undercover... wait is that really going to work. Fire Catches onto the building  Presenter: Ah I figured as much. fire continues to spread to the surrounding foliage as the camera zooms out and pans onto the Presenter looking worried. the presenter signals to cut the video and a tech...

  Film Review: Lion King Hero: Simba is the hero of our story and fits the archetype of a hero so well when thinking about the hero's journey. Shadow: Scar is the shadow in the lion king sowing ill will and deception in the start of the movie to set up the events of the film. Herald:  Rafiki calls Simba to action and shows him a way to get in contact with his father. He helps the hero find there way and shows Simba the path when he's lost. The Threshold Guardian: I think the threshold guardians are the hyenas in the lion king. i think this is because they are present and the threat when Simba and Nala go into the darklands, crossing the threshold into defiance against Mufasa. Trickster: Timon as he plan's to use Simba for safety as he is a lion and can scare off other predators.  Mentor/father: Mufasa if Simba's father and mentor, a father figure who is teaching him to be king even after his death at the start of the movie. Allies: Timon, Pumba and Nala are the main all...

  Collaboration Scripts 1 Fire: 1 Location: Cave, Evening Mid shot of Cave men, one in hitting rocks together while the other's are huddled together for warmth. Narrator: The first scientific discovery man kind made is believed to be the discovery of fire. after striking 2 rocks together embers ignite dry fuel to create fire. Lets see the moment this family discovered fire. Young caveman girl hits rocks together and sparks fly and land on her brothers club. Causing a fire to start, surprised all the cavemen jump back and away. Upon realising the fires creates heat they huddle around the flames for warmth. Curious the young boy cave man pokes the fire with a stick catching it on fire. All the cave men are surprised, the dad take the stick away form him, and lifts his clothes on fire. he starts happy with it and stats making more spots on his clothes. Soon after he starts panicking an as the fire engulfs him causing him and his family to panic. Transition from the 3D environment to a...

  Collaboration : Character Design  Character concepts for out Short Animation. Our characters so far our Cavemen, our Historian and an Astronaut.  

  A Bug's Life: The Hero's Journey Review After learning about the hero's journey, I have re-watched a bugs life in an attempt to break it down into the frame work of the hero's journey. The Ordinary world: The ordinary world is the ant colony being oppressed by the grass hopper's. The way of life where they are threatened and bullied into collecting food for the grass hoppers while also collecting food for themselves. The call to adventure: Flik see's a world where the ants can harvest food fast enough that they can feed the grass hoppers while also collecting enough food for themselves. This is in an attempt to relieve the stress that the ants feel when collecting food. The call to adventure is often linked to the themes of the movie. However the main theme is ridding the ants of the grass hoppers instead of this call to just sate the grass hoppers. Refusal of the call: Flik gives up on these ideas and agrees to act like everyone else and collect food in the s...

  Character Design Research After the first character design session I researched other interpretations of cartoon sharks as well as UPA characters to better understand how they look and what my character could look like. The main take away of this early research is how little the character design for the shark is in the grand scheme of achieving the look of a UPA animation. The important parts are Colour ,Layout and the economy of space in the scene. Focusing on achieving dramatic almost surrealist images with the characters being a focal point of these minimalist designs. After speaking with Justin we have decided that understanding the layout of the scene is more important then the design of the character themselves. The main reason being the designs are build to be economical and will develop more as I gain a better understanding of what I need them to be doing in my scene.

  Character Design Research: UPA Animation After initial research on the UPA animation prompt I found a series of informational videos on UPA. The second video in this 3 part series discussed what made UPA Animations so individual and recognisable to the animations that surrounded them at the time. This gave me a fairly good understanding of how I will approached designing my character. And why making choices in its design will bring it closer to the UPA Style. The idea's of UPA branch from a few key ideas being creativity, ideology and financial necessity. The people at UPA found cheap ways of showing there characters and there art form not shying away from showing the audience what there watching is animation animation, an ideology that would be the core of this style. Animation as Art is the principled idea for UPA. each frame was animation not trying to be realistic instead a picture reminiscent of great painters and comic strip artists. When it came to designing there animat...

  Character Design : Session 1 I was given my set of criteria for my character design for this unit. I got a Shark, Diva in the UPA animation style. That is set in a 50's MGM Dance Musical, having a musical night out on the town while dancing. The first part of the session was researching a object, before designing it to look like it belongs to someone and seeing that character in the object. During this first session I researched my conceit, this being UPA animation while doing some drawing of sharks. Mainly I was trying to understand the style of UPA and trying to apply it to the character I was given in the class and my character as a shark. Attempt 1. Second attempt. Second attempt.

  Tool Kit 2: Caustics This tutorial taught us how the tutorial up to this point can be used to create bigger more complicated effects such as caustics under water. Also it showed us how to create caustic animations from a generator and how that can be used to create a great effect in Maya. From using the atmosphere volume to the use of a gobo other light setting, the effect shows that when you layer effects the result gets more detailed and potential more realistic if thought and planning is given to how to create and what outcome you want to make.

  Tool Kit 2: Motion Blur In this tutorial we got taught a few ways to create motion blur when developing our projects. One in camera within Maya and the other after we rendered our footage in After Effects. The tools Maya gives you in the rendering of motion blur seem useful for creating motion blur accurate to the motion in the scene, something the post production way struggles with. This was really useful and something I could see myself using in the future.

  Tool Kit 2: Stand Ins Stand in's seem like a really powerful tool when creating large scene. The replication of interictally modelled assets at no cost to the viewport window seems extremely useful. It would make it easier to animate in or continue to contract large scene with highly detailed assets. I'm excited to leverage this in creating scene in the future and to be able to do it in a way that would lower the strain on my pc means we can push it to an extreme that is further then without this system.

  Tool Kit 2: AOV's The tutorial was really useful when thought about in terms of future projects and video projects. Understanding what these maps are and how you can use these in post production has inspired me to think more about what I'm getting out of my Maya renders. And the fact that you can set these up to come out along with your beauty render, and not needing to re render the footage is really good information to know, and something I will defiantly be using in the future. The use of After Effects to composite EXR footage is something I'm really interested to know more about after finishing this tutorial. It seems like a powerful pipeline step that could easily be under or over used if not thought out properly. Diffuse. ID. Specular. Beauty. Final composition.

  Tool Kit 2: Sub Surface Scattering This tutorial went trough the different textures that make up a material focusing on the use of Sub Surface scattering, before we added an AO pass in post using Photoshop, to add to the realism of our piece. The set up for the material is good information and as you go through the tutorial you understand how each layer adds to the realism of a material in Maya. I had small problems with the strength of my displacement map and not being sure if its effect where taking effect and not destroying the modelling work that was done for the character.  Render. Composition.

  Tool Kit 2: Fog & Atmosphere In this tutorial we went through the 2 different was of creating fog in Maya. the first being aiFog and the second being aiAtmospherevolume. These create different effects and work differently. The first i used was aiFog a seemingly simpler system then the second after finishing the tutorial. Having few controls mainly, distance,  height and colour these have limited uses however can still be used to create good effects. The second way aiAtmospherevolume seems like a more sophisticated way of controlling the visual look of fog in your scene, having control of how strong the fog is, have much it darkens the scene as well as how lights in your scene appear through the fog. These give you huge control of the scene before the need to composite in a different piece of software. Height. Distance. Colour. Colour + background colour. aiatmosphere On. Density. Attenuation. Anisotropy. Colour Light. Final Render.