Decisions on what to be included in the final presentation

As exams is coming up and I need to set aside a lot of time for school projects, I may not able to finish everything I promised inside the previz. So the plan is I will focus on only three shots, which is 

1. POV from the robot. 

2. Robot walking on the ground 

3. A close up of the robot's eyes when he is blinking(or something else)

The good news is I have finished the 1st shot completely. For the 2nd shot I am in the rendering and comp state. and 3rd one should be a really really simple shot so I do not need to spend a lot of time working on this. 

That's today's update. =)

Shot0 in the making

Humm...Have not really cultivated the habit of recording all my process, so my post is a bit on and off. 

So there goes the latest update of what I am working on right now.

I mentioned that I am going to add a shot of Chuchu's looking out from his eyes. With the help from my BF, we came out with this mock up:

And for the last 2 weeks I was working on all the small little elements and animations. For now, all those little animated elements are done, and I need to comp them together to achieve an effect that is similar or even better than the above mock up. 

The scanning effect is done, and I am currently working on the 2 panels above the bird.  

I did the panels by matching move the camera and create a 3D scene. Those panels are cards inside the 3D scene. I added noise function to make them flowing in air. 

However the lines collecting the panel with the bird is not so straight forward. My current plan is to replace the graphics on the panel with something easy to track and use that track info for one side of my line, ends at the panel. The other end need to be manually animated. It seems no other way round. =/

 Here is my current comp graph for shot0. I believe comping shot1 will be much more simpler though.

HUD in the making

Was doing some sort of charts with Flash. And it is really time consuming to plan draw and animate. Sigh...

More and more HUD-scanning and some graphics elements

Example of some graphics element that may be used, I made it in Flash:

 Here is a simple scan effect. Basically, I modeled out the whole scene and rendered out a depth path.

The value of z is used in a expression to assign values to each pixels.

Here is the detail of the expression:

variables: 

head(user variable, used for feathering of the head), 

depth(user variable, use to control the scan depth), 

tail(user variable, used for feathering of the tail), 

r(red channel RGBA)

expression: r<=depth? lerp(0,1,(r-depth+tail)/tail):lerp(0,1,(depth+head-r)/head)

Chuchu HUD Test02

The problem for this test is there is little sense of volume, and also I animated the particles going around the model, it is not obvious when Chuchu is turning. (Especially when the rotation direction of the whole model is the same with the rotation direction of the particles)

Chuchu's Font

I designed the font on my way home today. I intend to give a squarish look to the font.

 Some of then can be easily guessed from the shape, such as "I". 

After I create the font, I uses the font to "encode" a paragraph on Wiki, and this is the result:

Houdini Modeling and Particle Effect

Since I uses "creep" node to achieve the particle effect, I need to provide NURBS model instead of polygon. Unlick Chuchu's body which I can use ray projection to project a spherical NURBS surface on to the model, I have to do a rough model of the leg in Houdini.