November 2017: Modified Showreel

I've been especially busy on the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra project this past month. Work has been coming thick and fast but we are over the crest and things are falling into place.

In preparation for the project's conclusion I made some tweaks to my public animation showreel,  I felt like it needed a little more information and flow for clarity, to assist it in working better. These modifications include a few different sequences and details on the project the titles relate to and where I worked when it was created.

Showreel 2017

  As time goes by and the summer passes I feel it's about time to unveil a showreel composed of my best work up to the end of 2017. There's still some personal question of where to go but lately I have been drawn to character and creature animation. There remains a soft spot for the modeling side which I plan to brush up on.
  I don't have many examples of facial animation, having only really picked it up in my last couple of projects, but I plan to rectify that alongside a whole heap of ideas. I have my whole life ahead of me, time now to make the best of it.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Return to Refinement

     After a long time procrastinating I decided I needed to crack on and load up what I have done so far with my refinement. Currently in the pipeline is the title card as seen below. My current idea is that this scrolling text will appear (A sequence to last 5 seconds), with the grinding industrial sound of the mosquito's interior in the background. Once the text is completely unveiled, the  bulk of it will fade to leave the title words "Infiltrate Exploit Spread" before moving on to the sequence itself.

 

     This sequence is also helping me re-familiarise myself with Adobe Flash. At the time of this post, most of the sequence is compiled. But there remains all the other text to appear - which thankfully will not be as dense as this. Just some brief information to help viewers understand what is going on.

   

Huabanliuyu: 3D rendering complete

    Well it's almost done. Most of the assets are there, the last thing I'd say it needs is the background which hopefully shouldn't take too long. That however, might also need some work to accomodate for the higher amount of sky visible in the scene compared to the still image. Fortunately I have more confidence in a crisp image thanks to the painting skills I developed over the course of the year.

Infiltrate Exploit Spread: Mosquito Motion Refinement.

    I did some editing on the Mosquito's animations. I'm not sure what happened during encoding to compress the video at the sides the video like this but I suppose it's not too bad as the essentials of what I want ot convey in the video remain in there. The 1920x1080 resolution is still on my computer so at least I have the undistorted version on record.

Infiltrate Exlpoit Spread: Depth of Field and Reflection Tests

    Trying out depth of field and reflection in Maya to bring focus to the Sporozoite. The only thing I'm not so keen on is the black outline around out-of-focus blood cells although this might be to do with the relative darkness of the environment they're inside.

Admittedly, in an atempt to alter focus for the tunnel and the blood cells, these two pictures ended up quite similar to each other.

    This was the origina lreflection level, but I wasn't so sure due to the intensity of the ligth on the right-hand side. The images above this one are the same image with the transparency of the layer toned down to 60%

Render Techniques Testing

    After some trial and error I think I have cracked how to cleanly separate the two pieces of my current composition so that I can render out the blood cells moving while also putting the background on a separate layer so I can give off the illusion the cells are passing behind something not there.

First test purely using a basic "use background" shader, didn't go so well.

Tweaking the render settings so that it would be visible and traced but not produce shadows.

A combined image that includes the picture above and a shot of the tunnel.

    Seeing how the tunnel turned out I do think I need ot tweak the lighting a little to add a hint of colour and vibrance.