MDDN 241 - Turntable

My turntable animation for project 2a

MDDN 241 - Character and Environment Concepts

The character in my animation was based off the objects plasticine, a koosh ball, and a mask. The materiality came from plasticine in that the character looks mouldable and doesn’t really have a set shape, he grows arms at will. The motion of a koosh ball was incorporated by the character rolling around with his arms flailing everywhere. The mask represents identity in the animation and is a strong theme with every character either having or eventually getting a mask.
The character’s personality starts off being rather bland and lifeless, then once he sculpts the mask he starts showing emotions such as fear at the angel mask and apprehension as he moves to touch the sphere. When he materialises after touching the sphere he’s going to act completely shocked, possibly dropping the mask and breaking it.

And here we have the orthographic and movement concept images for my character. 

Also here are the concepts of the environment, beginning with a draft render and with sketches of the specifics.

MDDN 241 - Storyboard

The final storyboard for my animation.

I only give a brief outline of what shots I'm going to use as I know that's going to be heavily dictated by the movement of the models.

MDDN 241 - Mild Success

Limbs. Lots of limbs.

If this wasn't for a design project this would be seriously creepy...

No wait, it's still creepy...

Finally got the "ball o' limbs" modelled properly, and I've decided to ditch the idea of just having a silhouette to define the character - it's just too hard to see and overall I think it looks better with shading. I did play around with using a grey outline but after a few test renders I seriously prefer it without.

As a side-effect of deciding to properly shade the limbs I had to smooth the models to eliminate the jagged edges on the shading. This was also one of the reasons I had to drop the outlining on the model as the higher polygon count meant that I couldn't convert the outline into a format that mental ray would recognise due to polygon limits. 

(before and after shots of the smoothing below)

Once character modelling was done I thought I'd give the environment a shot. Creating a few simple hills took no time at all. Getting the shading and colours right, however, took some time.

After quite a bit of playing around I decided upon the following colour scheme for the animation. It's dark enough to accentuate the masks but still has enough colour to be bold and vibrant.