Chuchu animation playblast

Did the jumps with dogs in mind =)

Animatics

This is the animatics for the first part of the story. This part will be the so called "fall back plan". If time permits, will continue with the second part which is the collapse of the building.

Texture Test

Using color mixer and light surface to achieve a effect close to what I am looking for.

Color test

Chuchu eye mockup

 LED eyes

Puss in Boots eyes

Obviously the LED eyes looks much better. It may be further animated to mimic the "scan line" and blink effect 

Lighting and material test

Problem: double shadowing.
Proposed solution: paint shadow mask for the environment and project into 3D space. use the matchmove information and export the shadow channel out. Use Chuchu's shadow channel minus the environment shadow channel.

HDR and Panorama 04

Used Stitcher instead of Photoshop. Also tried to map it on a sphere in Nuke and looks perfect. =)

HDR and Panorama 03

Shot another round of photos this morning. This is the final exr after touching up

HDR and Panorama02

Since we cannot afford those expensive equipment, a few DIY tools are made to improve accuracy. 

Such as this angle meter:

After stitching the exr files together:

Still needs a lot of touch up though. But it looks fairly decent.

HDR and Panoramas

I experimented with a view stitching program include Pos Panorama Pro and find it is very easy to stitching things in 1 direction (either horizontally for vertically) but not 2. There are some of my experiments with a free image stitching software:

It is a rather painful process. Firstly, I do not have a DSLR and needs to take more pictures to compensate that. Secondly, I do not have a tool to measure the rotation of the camera. To be save, more pictures are taken. The test above is by stitching 20 photos(!!!). And I also need to take 30 degree up & 60 degree up and 30 degree down & 60 degree down. This makes up to 100*4 exposure = 400 picures!!!!

That makes my end up buying a fisheye for my poor little camera. I get it from Sim Lim for 150 bucks. And this reduced the amount of works I need to do by 5-folds. =P

I dead another test about the HDR workflow tonight. There are some new finding.

1. Do stitching after merge HDR it is impossible to stitch those over/under exposed images together(no feature for the computer to match). 
2. You can unwrap the fisheye image in PS and make it a action for batch processing. You need to crop out the sphere, and ensure your image is square before applying a lens correction
3. There is no single-click lens correction for my fisheye in PS. I used a 8mm lens correction plus some custom adjustment.

after stitching:

Did not adjust the exposure but you get the idea. The image have irregular edges at top and bottom. That seems to be normal after reading this site:Creating HDR Panoramas. So I am not alone. All I need to do is some post processing work described by Farbspiel.

Incidentally, I found a very very very (xn) useful site: HDR tips from Professor Kirt Witte . It talks about how to setup and take HDR images so as to get the best results. 

When Chuchu open up his mouse...

The original thoughts is make chuchu's cover opens up as a whole when he starts eating. However, it looks pretty clique and ugly. (refer to the character design post below)

therefore it maybe better to cut his cover into pieces and move then individually...like this:

here are some thoughts on how the cover should be divided.

Character Design

here is the final character design I draw after many mocks (cannot find the mock files. might have been 

accidentally deleted.)

 still investigating how to structure his inner parts.

wanted to find inspiration from fractal pattern

here goes some of my reference images

current modeling stage 

Shotsheet

Production Schedule

As the actually time spent on each component may vary, this is only a guideline rather than a strict schedule.

Long long story board

And here goes the shorter version (Will do the long version only if I have time). The plan doing it one scene after another.  Something and a mix of waterfall and iterative pipeline.