Title Logo Mock up

just a quick logo idea to use at my pitch tommorow.

Pirate Captain Video Blog & Pics

Hi all,

This is a quick videoblog I put up for you and below it some still renders etc.

The track _ Hikari

This is a link to the music I have used as inspiration for this short film, here's the youtube vid of it. What I'll be looking at once the project nears completion is to look at the rights for it or commission someone to make a similar track. I imagine the rights will be a good few hundred just for non commercial use but we'll see what happens closer to the time.

As you listen this is the vision I have for the project, opens with camera moving towards a column of clouds at 0.24 it tilts up as Eran and Liana break through the clouds playfully whipping through the sky on their vehicles at 0.52 they reach their airship the Nebulosus, they fly around it and we're introduced to the other heroes who are working on the airship. At 1.21 the enemy Nacreous pirates emerge from dark storm clouds ahead. At 1.49 the battle sequence begins. It ends with Eran leaping off from his aircutter and being rescued by another hero. The final shot is of the hero characters stood on top of the Nebulosus as the Nacreous Pirate ship sinks beneath the clouds.

So as you can tell there's a lot do. So I better get on with it!

Nacreous Pirate Captain

The next challenging character is the enemy captain, he is going to be armoured up with a helmet that opens and closes and that will take some modelling, so I did a few sketches and figured out how I wanted the helmet to open. Next thing I did was put together a 3d sketch. A quick model that allows me to see if the helmet would work and to check the silhoeutte looks right. Heres the sketches and the 3d blocking.

Tesfaye Model Sheets

Tesfaye is a gunner on the Nebulosus he will be a humanoid creature covered mostly in fur a mix between an ape and a thundercat in some ways. I felt I would begin pre-production by designing the more challenging characters to allow me enough time to model and texture them in high enough quality.

Next up I need to paint these with some colour ideas.

The Project

SKY HEROES

FINAL PROJECT PROPOSAL

Inspired by a track called Hikari composed by Yoko Shimomura, taken from the video game Kingdom Hearts by Square Enix, I have begun development of a short 3 minute animation called Sky Heroes. The project will resemble a game cinematic sequence following a young ace pilot ERAN as he fights the evil Nacreous Pirates. The film opens with Eran and a girl, a possible love interest, LIANA, playing in the clouds on their aircutters. They reach a break in the cloud and their airship The Nebulosus, we are introduced to a few more characters before the Nacreous Pirates emerge from a storm cloud ahead, they open fire and an airbattle ensues. The battle ends with Eran flying his aircutter into the enemy airship, he leaps off at the last minute and is rescued by a comrade. All the main characters then stand on the deck of The Nebulosus as the Pirate ship sinks below the clouds.

The film will last 3.35 minutes and it is planned to be rendered with Furryball 2.0. The renderer allows for GPU accelerated rendering and is 50x faster than mental ray because it utilizes the many cores of a Graphics card rather than the computers RAM. This project will be set above and in the clouds, this will save me time so that I wont need to model terrain, I will be able to focus on the characters, props and effects. The use of the new renderer will allow me to explore the use of volumetric clouds and lighting, possibly imported from Vue because of its high quality sky domes and clouds. The characters will be developed in Zbrush then proxy models will be animated in Maya and displacement maps applied to them during rendering to create detailed realistic characters. One of the characters Tesfaye, a gunner on the Nebulosus will be a humanoid creature who will have dynamic fur. Furryball 2.0 is capable of rendering fur in realtime on a quadro graphics card and is another strong reason for me choosing it as the renderer.  The pirates will have fighter jets that Eran must go up against, they will all use the same model as unlike the main characters they will all be wearing helmets, because of the scope of this project it is very important that I develop the pirate jets with several levels of detail so that the secondary animations do not eat up too much rendering time especially as they are going to be motion blurred and out of focus when in the background.

For character animation I may investigate the use of the Kinect for motion capture of the larger body gestures and then animate by hand the smaller movements such as the head, face and hands. It is now possible to sculpt blendshapes directly in Zbrush so this will also be an area worth researching for facial animations.

Another important question to research is how to produce film quality texture maps, I have found in the past that any uv tile smaller than 4080x4080 has seemed to lack the high quality detail I was hoping for but at the same time if too many objects have large texture maps then the rendering grinds to a halt and Maya crashes. This is an issue I need to address before the texturing begins.

Sound design for this project may well be outside my skill range and in that case I will look for an audio engineer to produce a stereo mix for the final render. To speed things up I would probably provide the engineer with a playblast version of the short so that the audio design can begin while the animation is rendering.  I currently have no plans to have dialogue in the film this avoids the need to record and sync ADR to facial movements.

Depending on the time scale for rendering,  it may be possible to render the film in stereo 3D and then display it as an analyglyph. During the final year show I could distribute the cheap red/cyan glasses to the audience. As all CGI films and some games are now produced in stereo 3D it would make sense to show that I am able to use the latest techniques effectively. Of course this is an optional goal and one I will only take on if there is time allowing.

For this project I will be updating an online blog regularly at skyhereos.blogspot.com the blog will help me keep a track of my progress, working processes and my reference material. I will begin Pre-Production with a scriptment, a cross between a script and a treatment, character designs, concept art, a storyboard and then previsualization using animatics and then a previs edit using very basic models in maya. Production will include modelling, texturing, lighting camera and rendering. The final Post-Production stage will be the final edit, compositing of layers and the audio mix. I have all ready produced a detailed Production Schedule that breaks down the tasks involved, counts down the days remaining for each task and highlights overdue tasks. Each task has a clear set of deliverables so that I am fully aware of what has to be achieved for each stage of production. I have given myself a huge challenge with this project and being organised is going to ensure that the challenge is manageable and completed before the deadline.

Sky Heroes

Hi guys, heres the blog for my final project at university. Im going to be updating this with my sketches and vids over the next few days so youll be able to see how Im getting on with it all.