What's this? News? Well I never...

Hey Alcoholics,

Long time no post. I would like to apologise (sincerely, I am sorry) for the complete lack of updates on our behalf. The person responsible has been fired (joking, else I'd have to fire myself). Anyway, there is a rather good reason for the lack of posts and it is as follows:

Story didn't work.

Ok, so I'll break that down a little more. We had an idea. We got people exited with our idea. We produced a crapload of art and assets and moved as quickly as we could to get some renders to show people how cool our idea was. We came across a couple of little niggly plot holes and patched them up real quick and kept the train rolling. More holes, more dirty patch jobs etc. Anyway, we had an epic on our hands with some rather big story problems. So we went back to the script. We rewrote.

And then we went back to our (actually non existant) storyboards and we drew.

and then we animated.

And then we lit, rendered and composited.

And now I am happy to present to you SC14_SH01_giantSquidly.

That about exhausts the updates for the moment though.

Cheers

Gruffleglenn and its History

I may have mentioned at some time that this film started off inside a single room. There was no exterior. At some point along the line we decided to include a window and a few shots outside the window in order to make the film seem bigger. Outside the window was to look something like this.

Outside Als Window

Then, later on we decided to have a shot of the city, that's purpose was to show the passage of time and act as a bit of an establishing shot. Which was going to look a bit like this.

Original concept for the City of Gruffleglenn

And after a bit of revision, like this.

Updated concept for the City of Overhang

Next, we wanted to show some of the town and surrounding land. Just to make this feel a bit like a living breathing town so we decided on having a map of the kingdom in there at some point. This is not the original map, it went through a couple of revisions by its self, but this is pretty well a final one.

Map of the Kingdom of Overhang

Then it was someones smart idea to actually start on the map, zoom into the city and then into Als window.

This was a bit of an effort, but we ended up doing it nonetheless (although it's not quite finished yet). So we basically start on the map, push into Gruffleglenn, at some point going through a layer of clouds and emerging onto the farmland in the outskirts of town, then into the city itself to witness the sunrise over the ocean. Very epic and dramatic.

Journey through the clouds

The Farmland sans lighting or clouds

Then we wanted to show a bit more of the city (and also reuse the original outside the window bit because we kind of liked it), so we have a couple of shots that show different areas of the city also. Like the Dirty Carpets Inn, the markets and hightown, where Al lives. (this is the heavily WIP section)

The Dirty Carpets Inn

The Market

Gruffleglenn Hightown

And that is how the city of Gruffleglenn came to be. The official story taken from local lore actually goes something like:

McGruffle, the caber toss champion from Othercity gets lost on the way to a tournament and stumbles upon the most beautiful bay he has ever seen. Hypnotized from its beauty and approaching death from starvation, he curses the gods, who cause an avalanche, destroying the bay, leaving only nasty cliff faces. Many years later, Duke Yung I is passing though and decides to set up camp for the night. He never left and Gruffleglenn just sort of grew from there. As for McGruffle, many say that the deathly skinny hermit that can be seen on occasion bears a striking resemblance, and is rather good at caber tossing.

Alchemist Textures and Gruffs Grinder

So it's been a couple of weeks since the last post but we now have a pretty well completely textured Alchemist. The reason he is both clothed and unclothed is that he spends a bit of time prancing about in his underwear. Unfortunately there were a few issues that escaped my attention, the eyes on the unclothed Al aren't blue, and there is a few instances of the body poking through the clothing.

Alchemist Textures v2 from Matthew Scott Graham on Vimeo.

So that makes now two characters textured (Al and Squidly) once character mostly textured (Gruff) and 5 characters to go (Meat, Spud, Pidgy, Laurence and Grimm). Though at least three of them are yet to be modelled. Also here is a prop that will be used by Gruff for sharpening an axe. The bottom of it will be off screen, so there's no pedals or anything.

grinderAnim from Matthew Scott Graham on Vimeo.

There will be more props to come over the coming days.

Gruff texturing WIP

Here is the current texturing/shading progress on the barkeep Gruff. As you can see there is a couple of issues with texture seams, particularly around the arms/shoulders. Should be fixed very soon. Still to add, spec/reflection maps for the skin, scars, tattoos and maybe some stitching and other small details.

The main concern right now is whether to keep the texturing on the characters fairly simple in order to help pull them off the background, or use other tricks to achieve the same affect whilst not having too much difference between characters and sets.

Textured in 3D-Coat and Photoshop, rendered in Renderman with a simple 3 point light setup. A lot of the shaders are using procedural bump maps which I quite like the look of too.

Forgot the Other Side.

And the pic I forgot to upload yesterday is the other side of the room. As you may or may not be able to see, the laboratory equipment made of glass is not very visible. A mistake, but this is still a WIP so you'll just have to forgive us for that.

Al's room and Squidly

Here are a couple of new renders. Well actually the work is not new, but the renders havn't been posted before. The first image is of Al's room / laboratory. Is still a work in progress, with not fantastic lighting, and some textures/shaders still to be done. Rendered in Renderman.

The next is a render of Squidly. He is basically Al's lab rat. He may be a baby Krakken, no-one is quite sure. If he is, what do you call a baby Krakken, a Krackling? Shaders and textures not finished yet.

Renders, Lighting, Clothing and the City of Gruffleglenn

Here's some recent images and also some that I've only just gotten around to posting.

Some more Animation Tests

Here is another animation test. This one will eventually turn into a finished shot.

 

Trying Out Different Renderers

So, progress has been a little slow lately but there is sure some exciting things that we will be sharing over the next couple of days. We have been playing around with different renderers (because as soon as you chuck displacement at Mental Ray, it shits it's pants. Also, everything has displacement.), and have finally settled on Renderman.

Below are two images, the first from Renderman, the second from Vray. Keep in mind that this is still a work in progress though.