Preparing the cat for texturing

With only two weeks to go before the dissertation deadline, i haven't had much time for the film.
However with the spare time I have had I have been creating the UV map for my cat character i completed last week. This is the UV map ready for texturing below:

Finished cat character

I used the start of this week to model the rest of my cat character, i also added on the extra planes which will be used to make the character look a little more fluffy with the use of alpha channels. i am glad to have the model finished as the dissertation has made it rather a long process to complete this character. I used the end of the week to model a fireplace for the old peoples home in our film, lots more modeling still to do though for me!!

Character Modleing

This week i have been modeling my cat character.
it has been going ok, i decided that i would use curves to model the body in Nurbs first, which made modeling the body very easy as i got a nice smooth shape to my character. i had to put some thought into how i would model the legs of the cat as the character has to be able to streach and bend alot so i wanted the legs to be able to move and not be too atached to his body. i made the leg as seperate objects to the body so when i converted them to polygons it was quite annoying to merge them together again. i need to go back and add some more details to the body later.
i have spent a bit of time over the weekend starting to model the head, i went about it rather a longway making the head up using curves first, this has cost me alot of time trying to sort the mess i made! shouldnt take me too long now i know what im doing again.

Back to modelling

The beginging of this week i spent writing the draft of my dissertation so as usual that takes up alot of my time! Tuesday evening i got back to helping my group out with the moddeling of the characters everyone seemed to avoid moddeling the hands of the characters so i decided to help James and John out by moddeling the hands for thier characters.

No time for work

I decided this week that i will have to focus on doing the draft for my dissertation. Unfortunately this meant i havent had time to work on the Grim Reaper project.

The Completed 2D Animatic

I have finaly finished the 2D animatic for our film this week, after it taking alost a week longer than i had planned! I am pretty pleased with the final look of the film and the way it flows. i still think that i could tweek a bit of the timming in some scenes to add to the antcipation when an old person is in trouble. We have had some good feedback from people who have watched the animatic so i am confident that the timing is good enough to pull of the comedy in the film.
i had problems rendering the file out in premiere , the file would not play smothly dispite me trying various file types and commpressions. in the end i found from Desmond that the problem was caused by After effects rendering my origional scenes out at 30 fps instead of 25, this was what was causing the jumping. fixing that was quite a waste of a day!
It was really good to finally get a version of our animatic that was up to date with our script and have the right timming. this week we also sent the animatic to Ben who was going to create the sound track to our film.

2D Animatic

on the first day back to college i set out to start my part of creating the 2d animatic. over the hollidays james had sent me and john the drawings for the animatic, it was Johns job to shade in all the drawings. as i didnt have a scanner then i had to wait till we were back at college before i could scan them in. on monday i scanned in all the images, cut them out in photoshop with the help of John. i then had to make alpha images of all the layers for the animatic.
tuesday i began to animate in after effects.