23rd
I've got an extra week to submit to Pitch THIS! and each company is allowed to pitch two ideas, so I'm going to send in Mad Bad tomorrow, boom done, and then quickly, like two days max, whip my NN games doc into an animated pitch bible. The story is almost there, the art is close but could use a boost, and the characters need fleshing out. It's going to be a small pitch bible, but why not? It would also make a good submission to the interactive story development fund of NZFC. I need to follow up with Nick about those dates... he did call Saturday to let me know he hasn't forgotten. Very nice touch, very impressed.
I think it would be good to keep with my collage technique over 3D backgrounds. That might mean rendering out some scenes of the house and foyer and pasting in some collaged figures. Or probably, better, putting together the 2D art I have and making it moody looking like the 3D.
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| make this pinker and it will do for Lulu's dress |
26th
I looked over my screen grabs from the video game that I took last year. They all have the UX? or is it UI? border in them plus any number of lighting, music or direction icons in them. Never mind Lulu's big old head at the right side of the screen. This is a good time to get proper renders of the environment into my portfolio so I'm importing everything into one file and decorating the place up. The sky is a bit piecemeal but I can leave that as is until I see Reuben or Rachel to get another lesson on putting images onto the inside of dome lights or spheres to make it look like a proper sky. Because I'm not racing the clock to get the set basically dressed I can REALLY get it dressed. The roof peaks have been fit to brick and the tree chandelier has been repurposed to create a forest of empty branched trees out front. The brick front has been covered with ivy and maybe I can finally achieve the firefly look around the foyer chandelier. Very exciting! Once I get the shots I want, I will add in Lulu and Todd as photo collage puppets. The elements are all there, I just need to massage and place them. And truthfully, create some new art, too. It needs to be exciting!
27th
I've finished dressing the inside and outside sets and split them into two scenes to speed things up.
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| dressed set, screen grab |
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| overexposed lit set, rendered in arnold |
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underexposed lit set, rendered in arnold
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Lighting is such a pain in the ass. Even after copying lights from the warehouse scene that Rachel set up, replicating the results is next to impossible. Boo! I will keep trying, but... I understand why lighting in CGI is it's own discipline.
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| area light of varying intensities from the tree chandelier. |
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| Here's what it looks like when it's inside the clock. |
28th
I added Todd and Lulu to the front concept art. I'm on the fence about collage- do I have time for that, or should I just paint into each scene? I'll do a test tonight to decide. The Arnold renders are grainy which could create good separation between backgrounds and characters or just look odd.
Pitch Bible so far:
This is the first time I've combined my photo collage characters with the 3D rendered environment and I like it! A little bit of line work on the background helps bring the whole thing together.
30th
More concept art. Because I had trouble with Arnold (Rachel is showing me how to fix it) I've had to manipulate the 3D renderings to bring up details like the red in the door.
Work in Progress: Todd stumbling against the coat rack and discovering Lady Greigh's glasses as Lulu prepares to clean the mirror. After this is finished, that leaves one more to do: Lulu and Todd reacting to the menacing reflection of The Butler in the mirror. I'm nearly out of time. As of 9.15 tomorrow night, it will be 5.15am in Canada on the 31st, the deadline. So I have all day and tomorrow night to put the final strokes on. I have far less concept art in this one than I do in the Mad Bad pitch, but that's hardly surprising. This should be sufficient to get the idea across and after the deadline I can work on illustrating The Butler, the Red Smoke, and maybe the visitors for the pitch bible I submit to NZFC's interactive development fund.
Rachel showed me how to clean up my maya scene. I thought I only had to delete history, freeze transformations and optimize the scene but there was heaps more to do. Anything, like the clock, with animation on it won't freeze. And there were SO MANY files with bad names that had to be merged with the parent file in the nameplace editor under windows- general editors. And anything with too much geometry, like the vines, needed to be added to a layer that could be turned off to make it possible to move around the scene quickly. I will need to go into the outside of the NN mansion and do this and fix up the IW ASAP. 5 days until we go to Auckland for the game conference! I need to be a to do list...
31st
Done and I'm so DONE.
This is where I gave up even though I had all day to do it and didn't start until 4. When I apply for funding, I will add the second half of this episode and another illustration.
