Industry Exercises 3

Find an external client - E4

E Stings 2011

This competition has a set brief and the final output will have to be to broadcast standards for its prossible display on E4

E4 Competition

Working as part of a team which includes myself, Josh, Richard and Harry

My role within the group being mainly modelling and texturing.

The concept being a one armed bandit with a character interacting with it.

 I started modelling toy like fruit machine based on this image on the first day of the idea but when given feedback from the group it lacked simpleness and overall appeal.

It came down to Josh to concept a simpler one-armed bandit

here is his rough storyboard:

 

I created this model in reference to josh's concept, this didn't take long to model and is just a basic block out 

I took the scene further to mimic josh's storyboard, I set up a camera, a 3 point light setup and simple render using a plane with surface shader 'use background'. The colour is found in the cameras attributes under environment colour. we discussed colour briefly and agreed that a light purple would be appropriate for the background as E4 uses purple in alot of their stings.

This is the first preview of what the end result should look like. Everything is open to change and nothing is fixed at this point. The model needs some work as it is pretty blocky and lacks some of the cartoonyness represented in josh's concept. Small details like extra bevelling of edges and adding a slight taper to the main block of the model will help in acheiving this. It needs texturing.

I took the cylinders and layed out the u-vs for texturing. For a test I quickly drew some fruit and the word win, this will not be the final texture, I am not overly confident in my drawing ability and with discussion amongst myself and josh the word 'jackpot' might be more appropriate.

 

Here the textures are applied. This was mainly for me to understand uv-mapping workflow, laying out uvs, exporting a snapshot, opening in photoshop, drawing and importing back into maya.

Further tweaking 

 

This shot shows the development following a group discussion. Josh took the photoshop file containing the texture for the cylinders and improved them dramatically, he also added a cow and E4 logo to the targa file. I then re-applied the texture and gave the box itself some racing stripes.

I modelled this splat for the end of the animation, starting with a cube and tweaking it.

I added a simple 3 point light setup to the scene and turned on raytracing shadows for the main keylight. 

 

 

Cameras and timing

Based on joshs storyboard I made the roughest playblast to get a feel for the animation

These are not representative of the final animation. I animated the reels spinning but in the first video the zoom out from the cow to the E4 logo will be changed.

The character...

I had a small involvement in the character, basically trying to get the rig to work on it but to little avail. There were too many issues with the model itself and therefore the rigging couldn't save it. Josh purchased RapidRig and we all had a go setting it up however the painting weights side to it was too much and we were running out of time and had to resort to using a pre-made rig from creativecrash.com.

Sound

We had sat down as a group to choose the appropriate E4 soundbite and I added jackpot noises for when the reels land on the E4 logos, this was done using a cash register draw opening (sound effect taken from www.sounddogs.com) which I editied in Adobe soundbooth.

Overall

This project certainly had its many ups and downs. Lack of clear job roles was an issue and the scale of making a CG peice could have done with better time management.

as a team we worked fairly well, communication could have been better.

For the competition itself I feel a 2D peice would have been more appropriate and manageable.