Home Delivery v2 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
Heres v2 of Home Delivery which has a few improvement that Andy and Mark told me to make to it. I’ve added wind and made the fly bigger, I’ve added some fade outs to make it kind of sleepy. I still have to create the opening and closing sequences but that shouldn’t be too hard. Enjoy!
So now I have got somewhere with my paedobot stuff I can start doing my CGA, I’ve spent the whole week rendering out my sequences and now I can start putting them together, I went to college today and showed Andy my new and improved Home Delivery and he liked it, though he suggested I make the background a sky colour, but that’ll just involve masking so nothing tooo big.
Home Delivery Panel 1 with wind from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
So the plants that I used when making Home Delivery were imported from Vue e’spirit as complete models. There’s only one problem with this approach, which is the fact that when it comes to trying to make wind animations, it doesn’t work. I’ve given it a try, but without being able to only make the leaves cloth it’s not the best I could have done it. anyway here’s a short clip of my attempt of a wind animation.
Windtest from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
w00t! I finally uploaded Home Delivery to Vimeo for everyone to watch. It’s been a long 2 weeks of modeling, rigging,rendering and post production but I’ve finally got it out of the way. I’m quite happy with it though there are a few things I would have liked to have done but couldn’t have due to time limits. All the models and textures (apart from the plants which I exported from Vue e’spirit) were made inside Cinema 4D using photographs I had taken when on a trip to kew gardens as a reference. Once I had modeled it all up I put it all in one giant scene added the plants from Vue e’spirit in (this really made my mac pro groan) and got to animating the fly’s movement, and then after that the spider’s. Using a picture I had taken of the sky on the day I had taken the other pictures I made a sky object and set up the HDR lighting, I also added 2 lights into the scene to help with lighting issues. Once everything was in place I rendered out TIFF images of the camera positions I was using at 1280 x 720. I then used the sketch and toon render settings to add a light blue background to the renders. Using this setting I rendered just the fly moving across the screen. After these clips where rendered I put it all into After Effects where I did a colour range key to take out the background on the fly clips, added any overlays (such as the tree branches in the first shot) that were needed and exported it all out at 1280×720. I then used Final Cut Pro to edit the clips together (this was important as I had to match the shots to my animatic) and to add the music in the background.
But enough technical mumbo jumbo just watch the clip 
( I suggest watching it over at Vimeo as that way you can see it in HD)
Home Delivery v1 from Colin Wren on Vimeo.
So I realized today that my scene is too complex to render as one big movie file, so I’m going to have to render out stills of the background and then animate the main object separately and use After Effects to put it all together, this saves me a hell of a lot of time and if all goes well animating it tomorrow I should have it finished in no time at all. This is a short post so I’ll just put up the pics of my scenes to compensate for it 
panel 7
panel 6
panel 5
panel 2
panel 1
I have some great advice for anybody looking to make some awesome plants, download the free trial for vue espirit. I did and it’s awesome, I don’t know how to use it properly so I just exported the plants and used Cinema 4D to make my little garden. As I type I have finished the environment the Home Delivery will be set in, and I rendered out a beautiful shot of the opening scene (though it took 30 mins to render!) which will be at the end of the post. The file is killing my Mac Pro but I think once I have all the elements in and have the primary animation path sorted out I can then split the main file into the different camera angles then delete the stuff I don’t need for that particular shot, also I haven’t baked the lights yet so that will definitely cut down render time. I doubt I’ll be able to get it done tommorrow but I think after that is sorted I’m about 3/4 of the way there, so I should have it finished by the end of the week. MEGA HAPPY!
Despite the fact that in 15 mins I have to leave to go to Leanna’s dad’s for xmas I have some good news, I have finished texturing up my temple and my spider, I way ahead of schedule at the moment, so I’m a happy bunny, I think tommorrow before I go to Leanna’s tommorrow I’ll try and get the whole enviroment sorted out. Then it’s just a case of importing it all in and animatimating it
temple
w00t I finally quit spoons and have just finished my spider model and it’s all rigged, which didn’t take too long (so I don’t understand why people moan about the process.) I have yet to texture it, so I just shoved a simple shader on it and put it in a scene with my fly. It looks sexy
my fly and spider models
Finally finished texturing my fly model, I still think the wings could do with some work, but for my distance shots this model will do. The body is just near-black all over apart from the eyes which are light red (should add highlights on the spec map at some point). I then made a specular map which has light green,purple,and reds blended in to give it that awesome fly-y look. The bump map is just a simple eyebrow brush all over.
The wings are a bit cartoony, I had originally planned to use an existing picture from the web but I decided against that as it wasn’t a good picture. I’ll probably go back and do them properly with splines so I can make sure everything looks awesome.
I did a test render and tried to match it up to a photo I had taken of my desk.
A final comp of my fly model made in photoshop
I woke up at like 2 today so I missed my lesson (yet again…. 
) but my issue of 3D World 112 came(though bizarrely there was a giant hole in the packaging it came in, I hope there wasn’t any free software for me in there, damn thieving postman!) and they are doing an issue on animals and it contained an excellent tutorial on texturing a lizard using bodypaint and photoshop. Needless to say I shall be following that tutorial later tomorrow when I get a chance. As I would have been doing Cinema 4D stuff in class I decided to rig my fly model and do a bit of a test animation (see video). One problem with rigging my fly is that the legs are small and because I used a weird image to model it from I’m left with some very dodgy leg problems but I seem to have solved that by removing any IK I had and animating everything by rotating the bones. I also realised I put too many joints into the legs but I seem to have got round any of those issues. Either way I know what I shall be doing once I have sorted out my Double Project images, as I haven’t started modelling my spider yet, though I can’t see it being any harder then the fly.
Fly Test from Colin Wren on Vimeo.