The finished film!

We would like to present our final animation - hooray!

Here is the stereo 3D version:

And here is the 2D version, for those without the correct glasses:

For a time we thought we wouldn't be able to have toon lines, ambient occlusion or even a depth pass, the rendering was acting so strangely, but we found solutions at the last minute and were able to composite something very close to the deadline!

It feels good to have this completed.

We also produced a festival kit containing technical details, a full list of credits and some info about the team. You can download that here.

Production update - nearing completion!

Over the past six weeks, All Is Fair In Love And Playtime has been in full production. We are now excitingly (and maybe scarily) near the end, and looking forward to having a finished film.

Once the rigs were at a ready-enough stage, we began to follow our detailed production shotlist to work through the animation. Though our plan had been pushed down to only two weeks in which to complete the animation, even working on it every day it took four weeks - still quite a good time considering we had two people animating a one-minute film with three characters and lots of body mechanics.

Here are a couple of examples of how far our animation came over a month:

Initial blocking for the fight scene:

The finished fight scene:

Inbetweens for Simon trying to impress Loretta:

The finished shot:

You can see that as we animated the rigs were updated; they had textures and details added, as well as small fixes.

We are currently sorting out render settings, so next should be the finished film!

Animation reference edit

A while back we filmed some reference footage, and since animation is now underway I thought I would edit some of the best pieces together to fit the timing of the animatic. As well as making some shots of reference easier to find, it also means we can get a better grasp for how movements will fit into the minute length of the film.

The Loretta rig, skirt and ponytail and all that girly stuff

This is a quick look at the controls on the Loretta rig. Loretta is slightly more complex than the two boys because of the skirt and ponytail.

Animating and reference

 

Work in progress blocking out the third shot of the sequence.

Park Appartus

Animation checklist

As rigs are being completed the next - and very important! - stage of production is animation. I have already started a little bit of blocking for one shot, but not enough to show yet. But for when things are underway we have a checklist to ensure no shot or character gets missed out, and to allow everyone to see what stage the animation is at. This is also useful as two of us are animating, so we can see each other's progress as we go.

Andy hasn't yet been assigned to shots; the ones I have been assigned are largely down to the Al rig being the most complete, so I may as well start on as many shots with Al in as possible while Andy continues to finish the rigs.

-Caitlin :)

Near final character models

These are the near final characters, the next stage is texturing and I have to make finishing touches to the hair of each character.

 

This character is bald right now, because his hair has more complicated topology, so it's taking a bit longer.

Stereoscopy demonstration!

For the animatic, we decided to save time and use Maya's native stereo camera setup. For the final animation however, I will be building a camera rig of my own that will allow for complicated camera movements without compromising the stereoscopic effect.  

WIP Background Models

Here are some unfinished BG models of the park, more park apparatus will be made just to fill out the environment a bit more. Obviously the main jungle gym still needs to be modelled by someone.

 Made a start on the swing set here. Just duplicating the seat and chains and it's pretty much done.

Obviously more work needs to be done here in terms of branches and shaping the tree trunk itself.

I believe there was one more addition to the roundabout and that would be finished as well.

Final Model Sheets

Concept Art

Here are some of the concept work I produced for this project for the three characters: Alphonse, Simon, Loretta

Work in Progress!!

Production time has hit for the Inky Squid team, and while some of us are busy modelling, others are planning animation thumbnails and creating shot lists. But before we can block out the animation we need to rig the characters!

This is the current work in progress for the character rigs. So far the basic functionality is now in place for the animators to take the characters and begin step blocking the initial poses for the animation.

The idea is as time goes on, the rigs will be slowly improved, and as they are referenced into the scenes, they will update in the animations without us losing any work. Neat!

The next stages will be to add the facial rigs to each character. Also Loretta needs special attention because she's a girl and does girl things like wears a skirt and has a pony tail. So there is still plenty of work left to do to the rigs, but for now they're in great shape to begin animation.

The models placed on the rigs will not be the models rendered at the end, instead the skins will be replaced during the rendering phase to put nice shiny textured models that make the kids look a fair bit.. healthier. But by having lower resolution models on the rigs means that when we animate, Maya won't slow down because of having to deal with loads of extra polygons and shaders.

Character Update - Alphonse

I started on Alphonse in maya then moved into 3D coat, re using some of the previous models features I was able to get a much quicker turnaround on the character, he is not far from done now.

Character turnarounds

Alphonse

Simon

Loretta

Simon Character Update

It's been a while since I updated with the character progress. Here is the near finished version of Simon. He has taken a while to get to this point, just a few things such as finger tips and ears, also his hair and eyes to do. Now I have this base mesh the turn around for the next few characters will be much faster.

I have done three passes for this these being:

1. The main beauty pass, with just toon colour, lights and shadows.
2. The Ambient Occlusion
3. The contour line pass

with just these three passes all together I'm getting a nice look to the piece, compared to the beauty on it's own.

Here is the breakdown on some primitive objects:

A month of working out story...!

It's been a while since an update on here because we've been busy rethinking our ideas. Once we were back at uni we learned our piece had to be exactly one minute long. After acting out our ideas so far to see what the timing would be like, we found the story was simply too rushed, so we then spent the next weeks coming up with entirely new ideas - but ideas that would still let us use the character Jack had started modelling.

Our original idea involved two boys playing in their garden, imagining themselves in amazing scenes like a western saloon and medieval castle. While we loved the idea of showing the difference between the real world and the imaginary world that children see, we simply couldn't cut it down to one minute without sacrificing too much of what made it charming in the first place.

Our new idea still involves two boys, but this time they are fighting over a toy plane in a playground when a pretty girl sat on the jungle gym playing with a toy truck grabs their attention. They boys continue fighting, but this time in an attempt to traverse the jungle gym and reach the girl first. But when the younger boy prevails and reaches her, it transpires that he was only interested in the toy truck.

You can read the full script by clicking the 'script' tab at the top of the page.

We are currently finishing off concepts and storyboards, gathering screenshots and videos in preparation for Thursday's progress presentation, and creating a 3D environment for an animatic.

I have also spent some time redesigning the blog to match our new logo colours. Everything looks a lot more bold and consistent now.

Before:

Now:

-Caitlin

Character Model - Update 03

I decided to take the model I made in Maya and voxelize it in 3D Coat as there were some issues with anatomical proportions on the face. It was easier to fix them in 3D coat as that's what the next stage would have been anyway. After import and a bit of editing I had this model:

I had moved around some of the features to make them more like how we wanted the character, then I started adding more details, which were more detailed ears, eyelids, and eyes. I did this in 3D Coat's surface as it is easier to add little details. Here what I have so far:

 

Just need to finalize details on the body and add hands and hair, and then I can retopo and paint textures for him.

-Jack

Initial Logo Design

These were some of the first things I drew when we decided to design a logo.

The big image on the right I really liked

but I continued with other ideas

Here I was messing with the idea that the logo could just be a squid's head and the text.
I tried using 'negative space' which would later be a part of the main logo.

-David

Character Model - Update 02

Just spent a few hours detailing the head - most of the time I spent around the eye area, which I still need to change.

I know he looks a bit creepy right now, and there is some weird deformation around the cheek area, but I will get to that when I next work on him. Also the ear needs work - I'm thinkiing I might re-do it if I can't get it looking correct.

Overall I think he is coming along nicely.

-Jack