daniel-lim.co.uk

Still working on it! As you can see in the images above, it’s coming along much better now I’ve cleaned a lot of it up and fixed a number of the problematic loops. There’s also a slightly zoomed in view for a better look at what’s going on. Probably time for bed now, though I should really do some more environment stuff, otherwise this will be all I have to show at my tutorial tomorrow! Erk!

Modelling has begun! I’ve started modeling! Modeling my protagonist’s head to be more specific. It’s coming along pretty well considering I only started it 3 days ago and Marie had two of her friends over from Sweden this weekend, so not a lot of work got done! Doesn’t that sound terrible? Now that I’ve got a scriptwriter onboard, I can concentrate on actually doing the visual element of my piece! Using the image planes I found of Ed Norton, I’ve started to model the head of my protagonist. For those of you worried that he’ll look too much like Ed Norton, don’t worry; my modelling isn’t very good I was a bit aimless to start with (as I’m sure most people are when it comes to head modeling) but I started to build in the all important loops that circle up the cheek from the ear/jaw, round the eye and back down the cheek towards the mouth. There’s a really big jump between the last and the second-to-last images - I had a productive moment and things were just going well. I also started using the poly sculpt tool (now know as the Sculpt Geometry Tool) to even out the loops and generally make things a bit nicer, even if I do lose a little bit of definition, I’ll be adding that back in once the topology is correct. I’m posting now because I’ve hit an impasse where I’m not really sure to start working on next… oh well, back to it I suppose!

Images! People in the CG world don’t care for talk. This is a pain, because that’s all I’ve done for my project… until now! I’ve had a pretty up and down weekend, well week if I’m completely honest. I had lost some of the steam behind my project and I wasn’t feeling that great. I had my tutorial with Phill on Tuesday and took some good stuff away from that, in particular the need for me to go and see someone in the Screenwriting department. So off I trot to Weymouth House, talked to the course leader, David Hanson, who put me in touch with one of the first year lecturers who just happened to know of a 3rd year student who had already expressed an interest in writing for animation - how convenient! Sent out an email very late on Wednesday and sat, waiting for a response. That put a bit of a dampener on my workflow because I was constantly checking my mail, hoping for a reply, semi-panicked etc. You get the idea.

It’s Saturday and there’s still no reply so I try and do some drawing, just to get back into it. This is when I hit rock bottom. I hate it when you realise you can’t draw! What a pain! It was incredibly frustrating, everything looked… well, frankly terrible. In the bin, scrapped. Pile of sh*t. Luckily, Sunday becomes the pay-off, the resurrection if you will. I start looking at some references of Ed Norton (upon whom I will be basing my main character). On the features of the Fight Club, 2-disc special edition, there’s a detailed look at how they did the climatic gunshot sequence. Luckily they show the view from their 5-camera setup, showing Ed’s face from perfect angles for camera plane images! Check it out!

The ever-lovely Marie suggested that I don’t start modelling just yet, so I tried doing a digital painting based on one of the images above, just for practice, maybe to get an idea of colours and stuff like that. Quite surprisingly (this is, after all, my first proper digital painting), it turned out pretty well!

My model will (hopefully) be based on Mr. Norton as he’s the kind of person I was envisaging when I was writing the biography and whatnot. It’s simply a colour test at this stage, I’d really like Hyde to be quite palid, looking like he might suffer from sleep deprivation/insomnia - like he’s almost dead to the world. I think it might serve as a good contrast to the dark apartment. Alternatively, I might make he a little more colourful/alive and make his doppelganger this sort of colour. So! Things were on the up! To top off my day, I got an email back from the scriptwriter (who, henceforth shall be referred to as Scott, since that’s his name) saying that he’d be interested in having a meeting with a view to him becoming “my” scriptwriter! Wahoo! Did someone say ‘reinvigoration’?

Since I’ve not really done anything ‘computery’ yet, I think I’m going to start doing some modelling. Stay tuned asphaltfans!