Finalise Character design

Finally Idea:

These are the one that I like the most.

Ideas:

Final Ideas

This is my final idea of my robot chess player.  I have given the robot a body instead of just having the arms jumping around on the chessboard. Having the robot body, I found that it would make the animation more interesting. Inside the body, will have motherboard and some wires that made it looks like a robot.

The idea was combined from my initial ideas as you can see from the previous post. When I finalised my idea. I would like to have the robot head as well, as it can tell the audience from the facial expression that I was decided to give the robot a LED face. However, it will be hard to see the face, as I don’t want the camera only have one position from beginning to the end. Therefore, I decided to use the arms only and tell the story. 

Beginning to create my robot chess player...

Ideas of Fantasy Olympics

Character inside a hamster ball and racing on the water.

Moodboards of Fantasy Olympics

These will be one of my decision of my fantasy olympics sport. 

Sketching ideas...

In my brief, it said I have to include at least 6 pages of A4 sketch designs etc... in my finial piece. Therefore, I have done some sketches for my ideas.

In order to make my work creative and unique. I decided to have a "robot chess player" instead of just having the arms. The sketches above show that I would like to have a half body of robot, and there is a chess hiding inside there body. However, the final idea was inspired by friend that my friend recommend that I create the robot as a box, and the arms will hide inside the box. The box will act like a robot, does everything by itself. The decision that I made was using my initial idea (the half body). Although I like the idea that chess and hands hide inside a box, I think my ideas will look more interesting.

So, at the beginning of the animation, I will spend sometime to show how the robot setting up the game, and how to be self- fulfilling. Like the Geri's Game one. The old man playing chess with himself (self-entertaining).  

Moodboards of Robot Chess Player Ideas

Mood board will give me inspiration of ideas in every project. And in this project, there are 3 main parts I have to concern about.

Chess:

Chessboard:

The robot and robot's hand:

Interviewing objects and blueprint

 In today visualisation seminar, we were interviewed objects and talked about the the following questions of the objects.

-What is the object/ surface?

Church money collector, Pastry cutter, barber’s chair of the doll house

-What is it made of?

Wood, wood and metal, bass/ copper

-What is the important feature that stand out for you?

Old wooden and hand made, rusty, small hand made

After we discussed the objects, we had been asked to sketch out our object in a blueprint style.

I was trying to make the model of the jar at home, but it doesn’t work. I guess Roma will show us how to create a model in an accurate size next week.

IK?!

This week in my animation seminar, I had learnt how to rig a robot arm  by creating a controller, and using the animation functions in 3Ds max which are IK solver and reaction manager. The following video is what I had done and learnt from the seminar:

First virtual environment seminar- 3d max with After effect?

Today, I had my first virtual environment seminar, which means I receive another project. It is about design 30 sec a promotional advert for a fantasy Olympic Bid. We have to think of a futuristic sport and design an appropriate character or characters to compete within that sport.

In this project, we will use both 3ds max and After Effect to finish this project. We will look at using it to rig and control the character, props and scenario design within After Effect’s 3D environment space. And we are expecting to use illustrator to design our character. These will bind it with both compositing and 3d animation software.

First visualisation seminar- Making a model of Train.

From today seminar with Roma, I received another project called- “Still Life”.  It is about design and model still life scenes using at least 6 objects.  The design process of this project is we have to observe objects, by looking at the lighting, details and composition. Roma said, “Try to tell a story through the scenes.” In order to get start with this project, I will research some still life paintings and photographs. Also, I will start consider the design elements such as the colour, symmetry, pattern, shape, lighting, shadows and the mood by taking photographs of objects.

During the seminar, we had a simple task of modelling a toy train from a photograph with exact measurements of train.

I think I did well in this task, because I did model a toy train that looks exact the same as the real object. I attempted to put materials on that make it looks realistic.

The followings show the model that I made and a video of a 360 degrees view of the model:

First animation seminar- making an orrey.

Yeah! I’m a second year student of Multimedia VE, and the news that I got from the introduction was we got 7 projects to do within this year. Although there are lots of works, I reckon this year will help me build up a lot of 3dmax skills.

In this year, we have 3 difference fields of VE (Animation, Visualisation and Virtual Environment). These fields will help us to choose which pathway we want to do in the future.

Today, I had my first seminar of animation. The first project that we have to do is to design, build and animate a model of a self- defeating chess playing machine. During the seminar, Andy gave us a practice to start with this project. The practice was we have to make an “orrey”. An orrey is an object that showing how the solar system works. This practice is to give us an experiment with hierarchies and how to connecting objects in animation works. This year, Andy decides to teach us the skills in a flash tutorial instead on paper. I found it was much better of understand how things work.

The following is my finished work of the orrey with some materials added: