2/3's of our Colour Script

For those of you who don't know what this is, it is a colour script. It is basically rough (very rough) painting of colour and lighting over the top of our storyboards. We do this primarily for two reasons.

• To give us an idea of where the lights should be coming from and the general colours and saturation of the image.
• Because it looks damn pretty.
• And a few other reasons.

You may notice that I'm not a particularly good painter, but I think I vastly improved over the course of doing these. I trialed several different techniques  which I wont go into due to that fact that I still didn't know what I was doing, really and managed to cut down the time it took to do each one. The first one took me 40 minutes. The last one about 10. I also didn't do them in sequentially or in any particular order though.

Anyway this represents about the first 2/3rds of the film. The last 1/3rd shall remain a mystery until the movie is finished.

What's this? News? Well I never...

Hey Alcoholics,

Long time no post. I would like to apologise (sincerely, I am sorry) for the complete lack of updates on our behalf. The person responsible has been fired (joking, else I'd have to fire myself). Anyway, there is a rather good reason for the lack of posts and it is as follows:

Story didn't work.

Ok, so I'll break that down a little more. We had an idea. We got people exited with our idea. We produced a crapload of art and assets and moved as quickly as we could to get some renders to show people how cool our idea was. We came across a couple of little niggly plot holes and patched them up real quick and kept the train rolling. More holes, more dirty patch jobs etc. Anyway, we had an epic on our hands with some rather big story problems. So we went back to the script. We rewrote.

And then we went back to our (actually non existant) storyboards and we drew.

and then we animated.

And then we lit, rendered and composited.

And now I am happy to present to you SC14_SH01_giantSquidly.

That about exhausts the updates for the moment though.

Cheers

Gruffleglenn and its History

I may have mentioned at some time that this film started off inside a single room. There was no exterior. At some point along the line we decided to include a window and a few shots outside the window in order to make the film seem bigger. Outside the window was to look something like this.

Outside Als Window

Then, later on we decided to have a shot of the city, that's purpose was to show the passage of time and act as a bit of an establishing shot. Which was going to look a bit like this.

Original concept for the City of Gruffleglenn

And after a bit of revision, like this.

Updated concept for the City of Overhang

Next, we wanted to show some of the town and surrounding land. Just to make this feel a bit like a living breathing town so we decided on having a map of the kingdom in there at some point. This is not the original map, it went through a couple of revisions by its self, but this is pretty well a final one.

Map of the Kingdom of Overhang

Then it was someones smart idea to actually start on the map, zoom into the city and then into Als window.

This was a bit of an effort, but we ended up doing it nonetheless (although it's not quite finished yet). So we basically start on the map, push into Gruffleglenn, at some point going through a layer of clouds and emerging onto the farmland in the outskirts of town, then into the city itself to witness the sunrise over the ocean. Very epic and dramatic.

Journey through the clouds

The Farmland sans lighting or clouds

Then we wanted to show a bit more of the city (and also reuse the original outside the window bit because we kind of liked it), so we have a couple of shots that show different areas of the city also. Like the Dirty Carpets Inn, the markets and hightown, where Al lives. (this is the heavily WIP section)

The Dirty Carpets Inn

The Market

Gruffleglenn Hightown

And that is how the city of Gruffleglenn came to be. The official story taken from local lore actually goes something like:

McGruffle, the caber toss champion from Othercity gets lost on the way to a tournament and stumbles upon the most beautiful bay he has ever seen. Hypnotized from its beauty and approaching death from starvation, he curses the gods, who cause an avalanche, destroying the bay, leaving only nasty cliff faces. Many years later, Duke Yung I is passing though and decides to set up camp for the night. He never left and Gruffleglenn just sort of grew from there. As for McGruffle, many say that the deathly skinny hermit that can be seen on occasion bears a striking resemblance, and is rather good at caber tossing.

New (and final) Characters, I swear

Ok, so those of you who follow our facebook page may have seen these guys already, but there was very little information other than the pictures there. so without further ado...

As you can see, there are three characters in the above picture. Meat, Spud and Grimy Grimm(wald). Whilst they are not major characters, we've sort of fallen in love with them and the time may come for them to have a movie on their own.

And their blurb, straight from the Gruffleglenn Bi-Decade-ly Census:

Meat
The younger brother of Spud. He's a bit clumsy, but what he lacks in grace can easily be made up for by his stupidity. He works for the Gruffleglenn City Watch, and is responsible for a great many cock-ups on thier part. Owns a pet cockatrice which he feeds scraps taken from other peoples dinner tables.


Spud
Is a thug. He stands over 2 metres tall. Possibly has mixed giant heritage. He and his brother Meat both work for the Gruffleglenn City Watch where their main responsibilities are drinking, gambling and beating people up. Some have remarked on his features bearing a similarity to Gruff, never to his face though.


Grimy Grimm (Grimwald)
Though officially listed as an undertaker in the Gruffleglenn Bi-Decade-ly Census, he does not maintain a shopfront, nor has he for the past thirty censi. In fact he is remarkably difficult to find. It is said that one does not find Grimy Grimm, Grimy Grimm finds one.

And some concept art and an accidental render that turned out pretty cool (the silhouette).

We were rather happy with the concept art for Grimy Grimm, and I think that the models similarity reflects that. The main differences being a slightly bigger head and a Sporran, rather than a pouch.

The concept of the thug we found rather cool, but ultimately too disgusting. We wanted the thugs to be a bit silly, not to upstage the main villain Gruff McDuff.

So, if we take this slightly older image (below) and add it to the newer one (the first image from the post) we come up with a grand total of 8 characters. Namely: Alky Al, Pidgy, Squidly, Laurence, Gruff, Meat, Spud and Grimy Grim(wald).

When we add to this the amount of different sets: Als Laboratory/Room, the Stables, the Dirty Carpets Inn and the city of Gruffleglenn (which actually is rather massively humongous) we end up with something extremely epic.

Our goal at the start was 1 character, 1 set, no fancy FX or flowing cloth, 2-3 minutes in length. Ummmmm. I guess we're just suckers for punishment.

Anyway, more on the sets next time.

Pidgy Rigging Video

It's been a long time between posts due to things not being quite mature enough to show, but we will have a couple of posts over the next couple of days. To start off with, here is a video showing the progress on the rig for Pidgy.

Pidgy WIP Demo from Courtenay Cooper on Vimeo.

Pidgy is a rig I built for the short film 'The Alcoholemist'. The rig at this point is animation ready, but I still need to skin the final mesh and add in blendshapes (for the neck puff etc) and fix up the weighting on the wings. Also going to add in a few custom controls for specific shots in the film, such as a complete squash feature, and a couple of soft modification controls. I also need to add a bend, twist and lean control for the non-finger feathers. But until we're up to finalling animation in shots, this will be enough.

Alchemist Textures and Gruffs Grinder

So it's been a couple of weeks since the last post but we now have a pretty well completely textured Alchemist. The reason he is both clothed and unclothed is that he spends a bit of time prancing about in his underwear. Unfortunately there were a few issues that escaped my attention, the eyes on the unclothed Al aren't blue, and there is a few instances of the body poking through the clothing.

Alchemist Textures v2 from Matthew Scott Graham on Vimeo.

So that makes now two characters textured (Al and Squidly) once character mostly textured (Gruff) and 5 characters to go (Meat, Spud, Pidgy, Laurence and Grimm). Though at least three of them are yet to be modelled. Also here is a prop that will be used by Gruff for sharpening an axe. The bottom of it will be off screen, so there's no pedals or anything.

grinderAnim from Matthew Scott Graham on Vimeo.

There will be more props to come over the coming days.

Two new Vids

Have been a little bit lax updating the blog recently, as I've decided that the facebook page will get the short and sweet 'pretty pictures' type posts and the blog will get more in depth ones. Anyhow, two new vids which I'll explain below.

Lute Rig Demo from Courtenay Cooper on Vimeo.

This is a demo of how the Lutebox works. The Lutebox (a sort of medieval jukebox) is a somewhat magical invention that is a little anachronistic. That's OK though, as it's not a terribly serious film.

It was invented by Al one night in a drunken frenzy using techniques that he had learned from beyond the mists of time. Basically cobbled together out of some junk he had on hand, it is powered by steam or smoke turning the turbine which through a series of belts, gears and pistons enter a black box which animate a trio of armoured hands which in turn play a lute. (On a side note, I believe that lutes actually have 8 strings. I presume that four of them broke and Al never bothered replacing them.)

The Alcoholemist Title v3 from Matthew Scott Graham on Vimeo.

This is a WIP of our title sequence. The background is only a temporary stand-in. So basically what is happening is the title will fade up on the soon to be revealed background, stay for a bit then there will be a bit of a gold flash as the title melts away in dust and sparks and fade off screen.

This is acheived by using particles in Maya which hold the shape of the text and are then affected by various fields, including gravity, turbulence and a vortex. I will expand on this later when I get one that is close to final.

Gruff texturing WIP

Here is the current texturing/shading progress on the barkeep Gruff. As you can see there is a couple of issues with texture seams, particularly around the arms/shoulders. Should be fixed very soon. Still to add, spec/reflection maps for the skin, scars, tattoos and maybe some stitching and other small details.

The main concern right now is whether to keep the texturing on the characters fairly simple in order to help pull them off the background, or use other tricks to achieve the same affect whilst not having too much difference between characters and sets.

Textured in 3D-Coat and Photoshop, rendered in Renderman with a simple 3 point light setup. A lot of the shaders are using procedural bump maps which I quite like the look of too.

Map of the Kingdom of Overhang

What we have here, is a Map of the Kingdom of Overhang. I followed fairly closely to the original concept, the main differences being that it is flipped horizontally due to preference and flow into another shot and the colour grade is quite a bit different.

map concept art

The map is a matte painting which has been projected onto 3D geometry (the 3rd pic is the geometry). It is not quite finished as of yet, but is getting pretty close. In the pic to the left, the gray stuff is the land/water, the green squares are trees that have an alpha channel in the texture and the red is the labels and sun rays.

You may notice that everything is on a heavy slant, that is to help fake the 2D effect in 3D.

3d geometry for the map

We had a request for the extended version of the gruph animation test, so here it is, the deleted scene you weren't meant to see.

Gruph never wanted this shown, but after a heated discussion, 2 fist fights, alot of alcohol and an oddly placed jumping castle, we were able to convince him to release it to the internet....so naturally we did so before he regained conciousness.

facial rig is still under construction, so was left mostly un-animated
sound from mgm logo and toy story 2
animated in aprox 5-6 hours
Gruph roar animation test Deleted Scenes from Alexander 'Hewie' Hewitt on Vimeo.