Chimney Sculpture

Taken from the inspiration from Gaudi’s chimney sculpture I began model some thing similar in Maya.
I thought it could either be used as a chimney or I tried it out as maybe a lamppost with a light in the top.

Exterior drawing of city

Below I have drawn up some ideas of how roughly the city could look like, and then from my drawing I began modelling in Maya to get a 3D idea of how it would look.

I want the city to have a very claustrophobic feel to it with all the building very close together, but the industrial side to it. I.e. warehouse, gas silos, chimneys, etc…

This what done in maya from the sketches.

more ideas

After coming back from Barcelona the other people in my group got thinking on an idea of basing it from what they had seen in Dennis Severs house. From the DVD that I watched from inside the house, it has got great atmosphere from low light given off by the candles, and the sounds which are created when you move around the house. The house is like going into a time capsule and coming out in the 18th century.
From the others members of the group they said it plays a lot on your sense of smells, sounds and sights that are seen within in the house.

If we can get the same sense of the atmosphere as Dennis Severs house into our work it would really bring the animation to life.
The main themes we can pull out from the house would be the candle lights to produce low levels of light to give it lots of mood in the room, the cracking of a fire maybe, sounds of other people in the house.
The way we going to have the character interact in the house was, the character climbing thought the window and when knocks over an object to have like a chain reaction effect, causing more devastation inside.

They way we the camera is going to follow the character thought the scene have got the concept of the mystery video part from a Question of sport. The camera only sees little glimpses or parts of the figure running away or an outlined reflection of him, its not only till the end that we see who the character is. By doing it this way we can create mystery and suspense in the animation.

Here are a few links to get an idea of what I mean.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk_hmtchqCc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnIM1Pjh28k

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1H333y3MSo

Gas Silo

This just to test out how to animate to gas silo for the background in our animation.

Schedule

Just a quick Schedule so that we can plan out what we are going to do.

The mountain trek

Well this had to be one of the best days out, to climb to the top of Tibidabo Mountain.

We dubbed this church and called it the DisneyLand castle! haha

At 512 meters it is the tallest mountain in the Serra de Collserola. Rising sharply to the north-west, this can be seen all over barcelona with its spectacular views over the city and the surrounding coastline.

This was taken on one of the 100 year old rides in the amusement park ! ahhhhhh scary !

The view all the way down to the coastline

Sagrada Família

Outside the Sagrada Família


Looking up at the towers.

Tha main entrance to the Sagrada Família

This was the veiw from one of the slits in the towers aross barcelona.

The VERY narrow spiral staircase

The veiw from the very top

The spiral staircase leading downwards !

My picture of La Pedrera

Antoni Gaudi

Here is just a little information on Antoni Gaudi from a leftlet from going to La pedrera.

Ambient Occlusion Shader

I came a across an idea that we could possible use, using ambient occlusion shader in building etc... I thought the style and effect came out very well.

Here are sum tests that I done

Barcelona

I got back from Barcelona on Thursday afternoon and was very tried, I just couldn’t wait till got back home.

Barcelona is such a vibrant city with such amassing building designed by Gaudi, graffiti art down alleyways, on shop shutters and on walls in the city. It is a bit like London but very different to the way the city is laid out. Like London it has like Trafalgar square with a big moment with loins around it, a gherkin building and from France it has an Arc de Triomf. Barcelona city is built upon a grid system in which all the roads are straight and parallel to each other unlike London. There are many smells in and round the city ranging from nice tapas restaurants to unknown smells. Yuck!

On the first full day we had there, we walked miles all over the city visiting most of the places to be including, Barcelona cathedral, La Pedrera, Sagrada Família, Torre de Collserola, The Arc de Triomf and many more.

The Sagrada Família is the best place to visit and you couldn’t come to Barcelona with out seeing it. There is soo much detail in the building, the writing, the statues and the shape of the building. Once inside there are massive stain glassed windows to allow light in and you can see the whole internal structure. From the out side looking up at the towers it doesn’t really look that high, but we queued up, to go up one of the towers where they have very tight spiral staircase while looking out of the little slits in the tower before reaching the top. This was for the faint hearted as people would get vertigo easy! Once you descend you can look all the way to the bottom down the spiral stairs.

On one of the days when got the metro to the base of the mountain and climbed to church at the very top were we could over look the whole city right the way to the sea! The view was so amazing to see and defiantly worth the climb. Next to the church was a little theme park with a few rides which was built in 1908. A few of us went on one ride to go even higher, but was quite scary as we didn’t feel very safe!

While being in Barcelona I have taken over 300 pictures and loads of textures that can be used in our projects.

Week 2

After the first week of rattling our brains for ideas we decided to go with the scenes looking dark, gloomily feeling to them with an uneasy atmosphere. We all said that we didn’t want to make it cartoony so were making to look realistic.

Below is just an idea of a character in the woods being chased, very fast pace and intense chase.
Looking at the Honda cog advert and a Japanese Incredible Machines with marbles, and a 30mins film called “The way things go." by Peter Fischli and David Weis. This is an ingenious in the way objects interacted with each over leading on to the next, chemicals reactions, fire and explosions.

Within our group we sat down to look at parts of 3 films, called, Children of Men, Ghost in the Shell 2 and Equilibrium. I haven’t seen any of these films yet so I may not be right in what is going on in the scenes that am taking about.

• http://www.childrenofmen.net/




• http://www.gofishpictures.com/GITS2/main.html




• http://www.equilibriumfans.com/index.htm

We had a look at bits of these films to look at the environments

In the Children of men film we look at the part where they are running from the rebels and save the only born child, running across the gun fire, rubble and ruined building. This film was to visualise the destruction of the building and how the characters moved around in the environment to get a sense of isolation and fear.

In Ghost in the shell 2, it was near the festival part of the film where the camera is panning around looking at the futuristic city and every think that is going people dancing and being festive.

I starred to look at different music videos that had an sort of environment and the one that stuck out in my mind was Gorillaz “Feel Good Inc” the part that am on about is with Noodle, playing an acoustic guitar, flies outside on the small floating island which is apparently kept aloft by a windmill. The inspiration for that scene was from Hayao Miyazaki “Castle in the Sky”

Here are some pictures of Hayao Miyazaki “Castle in the Sky”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01C4RPEinM4

http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=30&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&q=Castle%20in%20the%20Sky&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

Passion Pictures have been responsible for much of the production of the visual element of the animated rock band Gorillaz in the video “Feel Good Inc”

I like the idea of the floating islands in the “Feel good inc” video by Gorillaz so just done some sketches which could have an environment all based on floating islands in the clouds.

Week 1

In the first week I was soo glad to be back in college to meet all the other people in the class and more importantly to get back in the swing of working again! With in the first week our production group was formed which am please to be in as I know we have a strong group (well I hope). Since getting the brief of Digital Environments, our ideas and possibilities were endless. This was not so good as our ideas varied to hyper realistic to cartoon styles, so we had to brain storm some ideas and which ways they can be taken and which were possible to do with in the time frame.

Welcome

Well I am new to this bogging thing so who knows if it’s going to be right or wrong? Ha-ha. I will try to summarise what has gone on with in the last couple of weeks to up get back up to date.