Final Concept Unhatched & Maya Base Mesh

Whoop! Today I finished the final concepts for the Unhatched Project, I showed them to Tom & Guy and they loved them. They said the colour scheme was good and they loved the face.

I changed the face slightly, making the basic shapes to the head, eyes and beak slightly more realistic, whilst keeping the huge cartoon eyes and humanistic iris and pupil. The colours were a slight challenge, I loosely followed the scheme of a blue tit, whilst simplifying it. I also thought about making the colours lighter, brighter and more appealing to children. Tom & Guy approved and below is a shaded version. I used a purple tone shade, as it is soft and worked well with the colours. This is possibly something the guys might want to consider with the incandescence of the model.

Finally, before I can move on to Zbrushing the model for the Raven Project, I have to have a base mesh to work with, So I knocked this out in Maya. It's a really basic mesh, but I was trying to get the proportions of the limbs and body etc right before I took it into ZBrush.

Raven Reference

Sophie found and made us some lovely reference images for the Raven Model. We decided to change the eye colour of the raven from black to a brownish orange, so to give the bird a bit more character.

The great thing about these reference images are that they are in the sort of pose i would have thought of modeling our ravens. The only difference being I would have the wings extended. The bad thing about these references are that they lack proper images for the wings.

UnHatched Concepts & ZBRUSH Tutorials found.

So I knocked up some concepts for the Unhatched movie a while back. I showed them to Tom & Guy whom liked them very much. I told them to look them over and give me some info to continue with.

The above images were me taking a more simple cartoon approach to the character of the mother bird. I wanted to go with big eyes as they are very expressive and if i couldn't have them, there needed to be eyebrows. The below image is my taking of a more realistic approach, this is personally my favourite, however as much as tom like the image, I don't think he wanted to take it in the direction of an owl.
These were my playing with other bird species but as mentioned above, Tom wanted to keep the bird simple and stick with a more common breed, so as not to distract from the story.
In the end, tom suggested following up the Sparrow sketch, as it was simple and fitted the style he wanted to go with. He told me to look at including some colour, and Guy wanted some blues and yellows to appear in the scheme. So with this information, I can go forward with the design prosess.
Sometimes I have to take a step back and laugh at my own stupidity, I was literally at breaking point searching and finding slightly out of date tutorials for ZBrush. They were either for earlier versions of the software (which made them almost useless as the interface has changed quite a bit with this version), or the type of tutorial that doesn't really talk a beginner through the basics.

AND THEN

Well of course, I didn't actually occur to me check out the Pixologic website. I assumed that the producers of such a beautiful piece of software would make you subscribe and register your software and make you pay billions before they let you in on any of the softwares secrets. However, I was wrong, so, so, so wrong.

http://www.pixologic.com/zclassroom/homeroom/

The above link proved me and all my misconceptions wrong. There are some lovely tutorials on the website, for beginners and beyond. Showing you how to use certain tools. It was a lovely eye opener to the software and talks you through the many different ways in which you can model using zbrush.

ZBRUSH!

Managed to get hold of a copy of the latest Zbrush. It was a pain to find but it is definitely out there. As with playing about with any new software, its a pain getting the hang of all the controls. At the moment I'm having horrid trouble moving around the work space. Tutorials are needed, so I will be raiding the internet high and low from now on.

Modeling Begins.

So today I started playing about with maya trying to block out some organic raven shapes. Here are some progress shots starting all the way from a cube.

Pretty Cube-ish not much to add.
Started creating some shapes by extruding and scaling the faces. Creating a basic structure for the body of the bird.
Pulling out some wings taking into consideration bird anatomy.
Working on the neck but realizing that the shape isn't organic enough. It is very frustrating working without reference and unfortunately there aren't any raven refs to be found. :s

After inserting a few more edge loops and tweaking the mesh, I decided that modeling this bird in Maya was going to be far too complicated and would look far too inorganic. There wouldn't be any bumps or notches or anything that makes us original.

It is time to consider changing software. So I shall be looking into zbrush.

Starting up with the Ravens

Working with Sophie and my fellow Ravens has been dreamy, the project is very interesting and even though we have a set concept, there is still so much room to be creative. Sophie took us through all the Ravens that live in the tower and we all came together to brainstorm whom we would like to focus on, and what steps we should be taking first.

Emma also knocked out some lovely concepts and we looked through them, discussing how to take them forward into the photo realistic model.

I also heard the legend of the ravens, the script I shall be animating an introduction to. It is as follows;

It is not known when the ravens first came to the Tower of London, but their presence there is surrounded in myth.

For Legend has it that should the ravens ever leave the Tower, the white tower itself will crumble and the monarchy will fall.

Update

So it is indeed time for a completely overdue update on my third year. So without further delay... lets get this ball rolling.

So my pitch went well, and the feedback was mostly positive, So I am mostly happy with what I produced over the summer. However I do agree with Mike in wanting to see more concept as I myself would have loved to of produced more. However, working over the summer left me with little time and sadly my pitch suffered. Little Red Revenge was sadly not picked, and even though we had the opportunity to take our concepts further and create a 30 second short, I do not feel I could have done LRR justice with that time frame.

But not to worry, as some rather lovely pitches WERE chosen for the 3rd year films and I am excited to say I have chosen 2 projects to work on over the year. Below are the projects and my role.

EDIT: I have been asked to work briefly on another short found below.

The Raven Project: I shall be working on this short producing a photo realistic Raven model to be animated, I shall also be producing a 2D Animated introduction for the short.

Unhatched: I shall be producing character concepts for the short Unhatched.

Heroes 1.0: *NEW CHALLENGER* Kofi has asked me to produce some quick character concepts for his pint sized super hero short.

So now that that is covered... best get started! :D