Advanced CG Week 1

I spent this week trying to decide the direction I'm going to take the story, and decide whether I should combine both Advanced CG and Massive. I went through a lot of different concepts in my head, with heavy emphasis on scope. I don't want to create a project that can't be completed in ten weeks. In my summer New Media course, I decided to create an animation using two characters. While I'm happy with the outcome, to create a complete animation in ten weeks, while having to model, rig, texture, and animate two characters is extremely time consuming and puts a strain on the production process.

With that In mind, I went through single character story concepts. There are some restrictions to what type of story you can create that spans one and a half to two and a half minutes using one character. However, one of the requirements of the project is to have crowd simulation. Taking that into consideration, I starting thinking of ways to have one character, but use it multiple times in a way that wouldn't seem cheap.


The picture above is a concept illustration that I began with, where the protagonist has to somehow overcome shadow versions of himself. That way I could use the same character and rig, but change how its shaded, and still have interesting animations on the crowd. Through the use of particle effects I could give some added visual effects to them and make it more aesthetically interesting.

In my first New Media class, I tried to create a character that I could use in future projects. While it was my first attempt at modeling, and the character didn't turn out as perfectly as I had hoped, it did give me a lot of inspiration. I like the idea of using child characters, and place them in adult settings. CG is the best place for that, as you don't require the use of an inexperienced child actor (lets face it, kids generally suck at acting, unless they're Haley Joel Osment). So for my protagonist I wanted the character to be an adolescent.


After deciding the character and general idea of the story, I wanted to come up with the setting. I needed something contained, but still unique and interesting. The picture above shows a cavern or tomb, with a center stone formation jutting from the ground, with a beam of light shining down. In this photo I have sort of a bottomless pit that the shadow versions of the character can emerge from, but I'm not really sold on it. The final version of the room will probably be around the same size, but have no pit, to allow more freedom of movement from the crowd simulation. With this I have the character and setting, with Week two ironing out the story.