A JB Webb-Benjamin Animation

Ladies and gentlemen now that all of our dissertations are finally signed and sealed and that part of our lives are now over for the time being it would be prudent, to say the least, to gather and direct our energies back to this animation. We are MASSIVELY behind now in terms of production timeline and needless to say this is unacceptable. We need to push forwards and push hard to get this project back on track, and quickly. As it is we’re going to miss our formative assessment milestone. Here are a couple of new renders I’ve created to start to get those creative juices flowing again. Be inspired…

I’ve resurrected an old plugin I worked on some time ago – LightBoard v1.0! It’s a basic MEL script that allows control of all lights in the scene. As everyone knows when you’re working on a workspace in Maya lighting can get a bid cumbersome especially when they’re all scattered around the scene, this little interface allows you to control them from one interface! You can download the plugin from our downloads page.

Due to finishing my dissertation ahead of most of my team members I’ve forged ahead and started texturing and lighting the main environment. These textures are by no means the final texture choices, its just for example rendering. I’ve used my custom depth of field camera for the render and had to tweak all of the environmental lighting. I’m still searching for a better way of smoothing the shadows and removing that fuzzy effect from the depth of field.

These are some HD renders submitted for the new uni prospectus of one of my old projects. It is an X-Box 360 themed level which is being updated, detailed and ported to the Unreal Development Kit 2.0. This level will be ported as a realtime level and demoed at the end of year show running on a PC and X-Box 360. Enjoy and tell me what you think!

After much discussion between myself, Mu Li and Neil Pinnock it has been decided to massively alter the beginning of the animation. It has also been decided to remove the Artist from the animation storyline completely, not only does this have the advantage of not now requiring a high resolution humanoid model to be required but it also frees the story from an essentially too little used character. We are also now incorporating a complete day-to-night time lapse sequence which will be one of the most technically demanding sequences of the entire animation. In terms of sound design Laura Davies, our Sound Engineer, has been aprised of the new changes and the changes in audio requirement. Due to some of the camera moves in the animation 2.1 stereoscopic sound is now too basic so virtual 5.1 is now required to get the effect required.

Everyone in the team will be allocated, individually, their required animation tasks by myself and Mu Li over the up and coming week.

The full body and facial rig is now complete courtesy of our Lead Rigger, Michael Quirke. Tests have already been conducted and everything appears to operate fine including full FK/IK components on the arms and legs. The facial rig is also fully functional now with a four expression control system to control the build blend shapes. The rig is already available to all riggers and animators via the downloads section of this site.

Mu Li has been doing some excellent work on the new room layout and it looks amazing. Lots of new detail, and lots of new assets, which I will be detailling into high resolution. To give everyone a little sneak peek into the new environment I rendered this shot using my new aDOF_Camera Rig.

Mu Li has been working hard on the final room layout and after much tweaking, rescaling, adjustment and generally making my original layout a hell of a lot better looking, he and I decided on not only a new layout but also some new required assets, for example a Bed, TV, Stand and Console. The Artist’s Monitor was originally modelled on the 2006 LG 22″ Widescreen model but has now been downscaled to 21″ and matches the scale of the surrounding assets.

I have started to experimenting with SubSurface Scattering on the Dummy model. I really like how by adding just a little SubSurface Scatter we get an additional layer of definition around the edges of the model. So from here on in when Ashley has finished with texturing we will be adding SubSurface Scatter to the final shaders.

I’ve designed a new and awesome looking logo ident. It is based on the crystalline reflective properties of  diamonds and the accompanying intro ident animation will be dynamic and follow this underlying theme.