Environment: Building a Restaurant

My next task for the short film was to work on the buildings for the city. I had two designs in mind: one generic building we could recolor and line the streets with, and the restaurant. The restaurant is significant because it's where the story starts and ends so it should get to be unique.

I made a generic base to model them from, a polygon with 3 faces to each side.

The generic building

The restaurant.

The restaurant was considered more important so I spent time texturing it first. I liked the look of building in the picture below, it felt kind of elegant to me and the restaurant is supposed to be a classy establishment where Rags sees the Lady in Red.

Exterior

Bottom front. The window is transparent.

I tried to texture transparency onto the window; at the moment it is completely invisible, but I think there may be a way to solve it that doesn't involve revamping the whole model. The transparency is done by using black, white and presumably shades of grey.

The transparency map. It is not very impressive at the moment.

The white of the map are the opaque parts and the black is transparent. So here, the black rectangle is the part that is the window pane. I think if I find the right shade of grey, I can get a transparent piece that is still slightly visible instead of an empty frame.

The interior

More interior. Here is the door from the inside.

The interior is actually a box inside the main building. I did it this way because I wasn't sure how we would be able to texture the inside part to look like a room if they were part of the same piece.

Character modeling: Squirrel

My first job for the project was to create the character of the squirrel. I started doodling them in class a lot and my initial ideas involved trying to imagine a squirrel standing in the T position.

It was kind of scary.

Then I started using simple shapes and decided that the squirrel should have a fat body with stubby little arms and feet.

From this I have learned that squirrels are weird.

These are the sketches I made for a reference as modeling.

His final design is round and soft, like a plush toy.

 

I start my modeling process with polygons and I build half the model because he's going to be symmetrical. The Extrude command is what I use most frequently, in addition to moving individual edges/vertices/faces where I think is necessary.

When I have all the necessary pieces laid out, I delete a few faces, combine the different polygons, and merge the vertices together. It's important to make sure you have the same number of vertices on each piece.

In the process of combining: one face was deleted from each before combining. The combined pieces can now have their vertices merged.

A finished merge. This is the inside of the arm.

Mirrored and smoothed.

The UVs

Car Model Progress

So far, the modeling for the first car is complete and the second car is not far behind.  On the first car, Kevin added windows and I added a grill. I also have the UV mapping mostly complete.

The second car was built by modifying the body dimensions and making a new grill.

Animation Begins!

Animation has begun. The only character that was ready for animation, both rigging and texturing, was Rags. So the scene's completed were the second scene to the eighth, where he first finds the flower and see's the squirrel run off with it. The camera is set up for the squirrels introduction though the squirrel is currently absent from the actual scene. In addition all scenes following the twentieth till the end have been completed regarding Rags and the camera work. Like the squirrel, all characters other than Rags have not yet been added to the scenes. In working with this animation we have discovered three key flaws to Rags design. A) For a character who has to do a lot of running, he has very stubby legs. Thus we have decided to change camera angles to stay away from his feet. 2) Rags' eyes disappear inside his face when he turns, this has been fixed. Finally, IV) Rigs' bow-tie, like his eyes, would disappear when he turned. Like the eyes this has been fixed.

Lighting

Still a work in progress but the lighting has come a long way. The window he's looking through will be curtained by a red curtain, thus will be illuminated. The light from all windows will be red's to create a feeling of warmth and welcome that is unavailable to Rags. Meanwhile all streetlights and lamps will be slightly blue, the ambient light completely blue, to create a feeling of isolation and desertion. Hopefully this is illustrated by the four pictures below.

Fixed Smoothed Generic Characters

Title says it all...

Rags Rig

Here is the complete rig of the main character Rags.

Rags Rig: