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.

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.

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