changes

So after I figure what I wanted to do with the ident, however I ran into a little trouble with my health, and I caught a nasty cold but I decided to try and work through it, it didn't work out as well as I had hoped but I still pushed on and did the best I could.

So I adjusted the lighting problem which wasn't a big hassle, I also tried to add a bit more detail on to my vectors by adding a door handle to the door but I felt it was perfect the way it was so I decided I would get rid of it. Coming up with what I could do with the half tone Idea was quite difficult So I decided to get some pictures that I thought were relevant to ARTS and as I had already used artists I thought I would use musicians, I used a mix of old school and new school I used a picture of Chris Martin from Coldplay and The Rolling Stones.

I turned both of these pics into a halftone comic look and it still didn't solve the problem of what should I do with the static arts logo. the main problem in my head was that I had to make the ARTS logo more animated, and it took me quite a while but I realized that the idea was to make the whole scene more animated.

So I decided to keep it simple and have the images show in a wave form, I created a style where it resembled a sonar effect but it still seemed a bit funny to my so I tried to to have swipes like you would see in a photocopier and it seemed to have worked quite well.

If I was to do the project again I would definitely stick to one Idea and stuck with it, the problem with this project was I had too many Ideas running through my head and I was passionate about all of them so it was sending me in all kind of directions.

class review

So I wanted to show the class what I had produced so far, so I could get a some feedback on what I need to improve.

I had various things that were pointed out to me in the discussion on what I needed to do to improve my, in the vector section it seemed that it looked like there was two light sources, which completely eluded me and I thought about it carefully and it did seem like there was two light sources. this was the only problem as far as the first segment goes.

As for the second segment, the biggest problem was that it felt to static and there was nothing going on except for the drop of the word and it being pushed up by the finger, It seemed like the finger was a middle finger and the arts logo dropping seemed to subliminally state the channel is falling in a certain way.

taking on this criticism I had to come up with another Idea. I thought about using the halftone effect more as I didn't think it was used enough.

vectors

I wanted to create a cartoony feel on my scene as I thought it would be better to create something that's eye catching and would appeal to a much younger audience.

The process was very simple I just masked over the footage I had, I did have some difficult moments because it was awkward trying to get the masking right. this was just the first segment of the 20 second advert.

I experimented by including an outline to the whole scene but it looked sketch and It wasn't really the look I was going for so I thought it would be best just to remove it.

once I had done the base masking it still looked a bit funny to me as there was no shading and very little  depth so I wanted to make it more interesting to look at. I did try using various vibrant colors to achieve a certain look, too make the best of this I looked into color theory and color pallets to get the most out of the scene I had created.

For the second segment I had the ARTS logo pop up between the allocated time, I thought it was a bit static and could use more movement, so I had it fall down to the bottom of the screen, and then it would have been pushed back up by a finger, even this I felt wasn't enough, and as I had a bit of a creative block I thought it would be a good Idea to get some ideas on it via the rest of the class.

My Sky Arts Sting

I have completely changed my idea from everything I had done before previously. and it's all in good reason, as I had visited the roy Liechtenstein gallery and I took a few ideas from it like the half tone and the whole idea of using that Picasso style.

So I decided to get some images together and play around with the half tone settings. this one I did of beethoven the composer, here I was just playing with the effect due to the size of the image you have to zoom into the image quite a bit before you see the, which would defeat the purpose of me using the effect so I kept playing around with the settings until I got the effect I wanted. So I decided to play with effect and I got the effect below where it is a lot more noticeable.

I wanted the pictures to have some sort of artistic relevance, that's why I decided to have Beethoven up there first, the reason I decided to change it to Picasso was because he was also became a big inspiration during this project and the effect seemed to work with the halftone effect a lot better.



I also looked into Religion for inspiration as in my first year we had gone to see a lot of painting from the renaissance era, so I had to think of a way that I could combine that with something that has a Picasso feel without it looking corny, It's not a perfect master piece however after playing around with and getting it to look and feel the way I wanted it, I Thought it would be a good idea to put that up in the Ident.

As you can see below the image is a fusion of two images and in certain areas it has this feel of it's one whole image, whilst at the same time there are areas where it looks like there are two images. The aspect I love about this image is that the left eye looks like it is looking at you whilst at the same time it is looking away into the sky, I wanted it to have some sort of meaning when I was creating it without it sounding cheesy. I definitely enjoyed experimenting with this image because I had to think of how I wanted it to look and make sure the images were right for each other, so in that aspect it was interesting to see, I also looked into other examples for this there were a few I came across that were interesting, I wanted to see if I could get some inspiration for it as well as that I wanted to see if it was socially accepted as Religion is a very sensitive subject.

Roy Lichtenstein Influences!

This was something new, we were told about this trip and due to me working around the clock, day and night. I was worried I may miss the trip so I did my own research on the artist and what it was all about. I found a documentary on Roy Lichtenstein on YouTube and It showed me a lot about how he created his pieces, I appreciated the vibrant colors of the pieces, however I was slightly skeptical about the changes he was making I wanted to know more about why he altered these drawings.

Once going to the gallery we had two two exhibitions to see the first one was Roy Lichtenstein's Pop Art it was a lot more interesting to see up close, I was able to get more Ideas on what I could possibly include in my SKY Arts Sting. The Things that stood out to me the most were the polka dots and how he used them to visually represent a mirror and rays of light. The other aspect that also intrigued me was how he used triangles and also the ability to add the pop art style to Picasso style of drawing.

The Next gallery, A Bigger Splash wasn't something I would think of when you first say the word art, it was very experimental on the idea of using splashes, a certain part of me isn't comfortable with the Idea that using a paint brush and splashing it onto a canvas as Art and being recognized for it, it just seemed like if you was the first one to practice this art then you would succeed, anyone after would just be a copy, which didn't really sit right with me, I enjoyed the last piece where space and it seemed like we was in a room, the artist did very well with the shadows and including depth in the work, especially when looking at the telephone on the wall.

Splash Test!

So I decided to do a quick splash test within Real Flow, just to get a quick idea how things will actually move. 

https://vimeo.com/60401727

For this test I decided I wanted to try something where it wouldn't be something that took a lot of time, that's why I didn't bother adding any meshes, but judging from how the particles are behaving I think there is some tweaking going to be involved, maybe making the emitter a lot bigger or adjusting the speed to see the various reactions I get from the impact, I will do more practicing with this to see what else can happen!

New Idea

So whilst working on my splash Idea I was just looking at a plain white version of the Arts model and It just sent a wave ideas to me, because I could see the endless possibilities with this and I think this is what I feel this assignment/module is really about, to be able to let your imagination run wild and see the various kinds of concepts you can come up with.

With this Idea I wanted to mix compositing and maybe some Digital Matte painting I wanted to portray different aspects of the world, but showing various backgrounds of cultural landmarks, beautiful back drops.

So as you can see I wanted to play around a lot with depth perception and how things work you can see how things can go from seeing the great wall of china to a scene in vast area of crops, this has some similar aspects to the channel 4 ident where the individual adverts are seen in different areas of the world for e.g Time Square in NY. With this it gives me a chance to play around with compositing and probably some digital matte painting, I was also maybe thinking of having the word arts be a symbol of the person and I could put the word ARTS in a gallery environment and have the background still the same but just in a different environment.

Ideas and Modeling + Lighting works!

ok so after I got attached to the splash Idea I started to think abut various things like how would it look? what colors would I use for the splash? and things of that nature.


So first I did a little research on the color palette for splashes, my first idea was to use the secondary color's (CMYK) but I didn't like the idea of using black as it would stand out too much to in comparison to the other three colors. So my next idea was to look at the primary colors (RGB), It seemed like a great Idea when I visualized, however when I put it down on paper it didn't coincide with the color of the background of the scene which will be white, although after a lot of thinking I thought black would be a great addition to the primary colors but it still seems slightly out of place, as I am going for vibrant and appealing colors. I have had the Idea of creating a custom color palette but I don't think it would be as effective as using a set of colors already around, I was also of thinking of using complimentary colors for e.g Blue and Orange. I will put more thought over it in the coming weeks as I approach doing the splashes.

So after doing some research on color palettes, I decided to get some renders on what I wanted for the scene to look like however before that I needed a 3D model of the ARTS logo. My first idea was to use nurbs and create it from referencing the image (using image planes) but I couldn't find a suitable way to achieve this. I also tried to use the CV cure tool but it wasn't working either, the model would be to rounded and there would be no straight edges.

So I resorted to using Polygon modeling it still had easy aspects on the other hand it was a time consuming process. Although it was a long process I could see the improvement I have made in my accuracy and efficiency when  modeling, and even as modeling I was learning how to forward plan such as where certain vertices would go etc. I also gave the letters a more rounded edge (see image below) I think this worked well it gave the letters a lot more depth, I attempted to give it a more rounded edge but I couldn't make it work I will give it another go!

 Once I had finished modeling the logo I created a 3 walled room to test out different lighting and rendering attributes to see what kind of look I wanted. The image below is a render of default lighting and render settings, which looks very bland and boring. The texture I used in the image below was a standard lambert shader witch a color change as I wanted everything to be white so the splash colors could be a lot more vibrant and outstanding.  I played with various lights and settings to get the look I wanted  after a lot of trial and error of using spot lights, ambient lights, area lights and more I got the look I wanted. (second image)

This a mental ray render using a mental ray shader with a matte finish, I think this a perfect look I added an ambient occlusion with some passes, I understand this will increase render times but it isn't something that I am concerned about at this point in time. I also adjusted the indirect lighting settings in the render settings I activated the ambient occlusion and the physical sun node. I most definitely got the effect I wanted however after looking at the render, I noticed the quality wasn't as good as I wanted it to be and certain parts of the shadows weren't very detailed and were distorted. These are things I will be working on as I progress throughout the project!1

Storyboards!

So this was a VERY interesting point of the project for me as I created storyboards for both the nCloth Idea and Splash/Fluid method, Hopefully the storyboards can explain the ideas I'm trying to explain but I will put some explanations in there as well. 

Ok, so this is the first story board, this is the idea of using nCloth. The whole idea is that there would be curtains/drapery unfolding, and it would pan to the right rapidly,  it would then suddenly stop and zoom in until it looked like a pair of curtains you'd see at a theatre. The curtains would open to the ARTS logo and to finish it off a figure - esq dancer's skirt would go over the ARTS logo and the sky arts channel logo would come up and then fade out! Hopefully that was understandable. The thing I noticed I was planning this storyboard out was the amount of effort it would take just to get this look working. Although it's a great idea and with the right amount of time it would be great piece to try.

This is the Splash Idea I had in mind. The ARTS logo would be in white as would the surroundings and the camera would be looking at the logo in a one point perspective view, it would then pan to the front and show the bottom of the word ARTS, from there it would pan out to show the whole logo at this point there would paintballs thrown at the logo. it would then show the splash around the logo and the paint on the logo it would then zoom into the hole of the 'R' and show the splash and show the logo ARTS for a couple of seconds then the main SKY ARTS logo would fade in. This was interesting because I was more enthusiastic about this idea, when prior to doing these storyboards my focus was more on the nCloth, I think this was more to do with the simplicity of the idea and I could make it work well within the time frame given, I will start uploading more, images that inspire me and gave me ideas as well as test renders showing what it would look like!

Some more Research.

I've done some more research on the dance styles that I mentioned yesterday as I think I could work with it. I thought could use them as swipes across the screen giving it a ribbon like effect. I have had difficulty on thinking up of a way to incorporate the ARTS logo into the advert if I choose to go with using the nCloth method.

I found the ballroom dancing interesting because of the classical style it portrays. I liked these two pictures because of the movement of the clothes on the women. I realized It would be a good idea to look into drapery and how clothes react with movement and wind involved. Looking into Figure Skating was also a big help as the length of the skirt is a lot smaller so it would react differently in some respects such as when the performer glides on a curve or even bends her body in a certain way (as seen above). Salsa was also another good example for me to look into as the movements are similar to figure skating in the sense that there is a lot of jumping in volved as well as there being a lot of weight shifting involved. There's not a lot I can say right now on the matter until I start experimenting with technology.

Sky Arts Sting

Today we had our first lecture for the module Short Shorts, we were given the task of creating a Sting/Ident for the Sky Arts, we were shown various pieces of work done, I saw some very creative pieces, I don't think this is something that I could have thought up in terms of practicality.

We were given examples on the kind of the things the channels could represent, such as ballet, classical and vintage art and more modern and contemporary art. these both gave me two ideas I could go with, one using splash's around the word ARTS creating like a stencil effect using Real flow and allowing me to continue my progression in fluid dynamics (see image below.)

My other idea was to begin some work in using nCloth in Maya, with idea of ballet being in my head I also started thinking about other forms of dancing such as salsa, ballroom dancing and figure skating. I think these would all be great ideas to work on.

I will be doing more research and development on both ideas to get a feeling of which ill continue in developing into an Ident!