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.
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.
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.
I finally got stuck in today and modeled up my fly model, I have tried texturing it but I felt that It was somewhat lacking realism when I tried it before, So I’m going to try and get photo references to use for the skin and wings and eyes. I’ve started to rig it but I’m having a bit of a problem with the legs as they are very skinny, but I’m sure I can over come this. I’ll soon start on my spider model and then start texturing everything, then it’s quite simple to animate it. I had hoped to post a video showing how I modeled it but Final Cut keeps quitting on me whenever I try to render it out
One of the problems I am having at the moment is trying to balance my work for uni across the days, because of work I only have monday and the days I’m at uni to sort it all out, so I end up focusing on something for the whole week. As a result I haven’t touched my Design for Simulation project in a while(I’ll be doing that tommorrow I hope, unless I decide to stay up all night, which tbh is looking like a really good idea 
)
Heres a render of my beautiful creation made entirely in Cinema 4D
the fly model untextured
I decided to not go in today as I wanted to get to grips with z-brush (which I refuse to pronounce zee-brush, it’s zed-brush!!!) as I plan to use it to make my CGA models shit hot.
Now I know this app is sacred among CGI artists but my god does Zed-Brush have issues with the viewport, its so hard to just switch from a side view to a front view, I also had issues with the x mirror option. But I shall continue using it in the hope I might get the hang of it. Then I will be awesome at it and my CGA animation will look awesome
Talking of which I really need to pull my finger out, I haven’t even started texturing my models yet and havent modelled some of them
But first I have to work on my interactive mannequin idea
I’m well proud of myself, I managed to stick to something(though that might just be the relentless helping me.) Either way, all links to my Animatic will no longer work as I have changed the folders name, given it a make over and made it look like a proper website (or at least a roughly thrown together one). Anyways you should
Nature Photography. I went to Kew Gardens to take some reference photos for the temple I’m using as the basis for my CGA animation today.
The weather was starting to show that winter is almost upon us but it still had that autumn feel to it. I was listening to playlist populated by Felt Mountain era Goldfrapp, Portishead and Bauhaus and I had the feeling that time was standing still. And I was in a low lit building which hadn’t been cleaned in a while. It was bliss, fly corpses and spiderwebs decorated the windows while some live residents hid out in the corners. And I had my Macro lens.
I’ve uploaded 6 images into the Photography folder of my site (found here) for you to look at. but tbh it was more about the experience
GULP!… Andy’s not happy with me, I had a good start doing my animatic but all I had to show this week was the same thing (be it with a few gaps where I need to add some stuff) but with music. I’ve got most of the extended sequences sorted out and I’m now trying out some dynamics, to make the web react to a fly hitting it, which makes me think if I can animate an object and the web will react to the animation or if I have to actually have to keyframe it all. Have to face that when it happens I suppose.
So I’ve fired up Cinema 4D to do these tests and yet again I’m finding problems with Alpha maps and shadows, I have a web drawn out on a plane but when it renders you can see the planes shadow. Hopefully I’ll work it out cos that could get annoying.
I need to take some more pics of spiders, Maybe I’ll head back to Kew and just photo the place up(I’m basing my animation on a dead fly on a window seal at Kew Gardens that I took a picture of..
Dead Fly at Kew Gardens