Modelling bone ship segments

Decision has been made to tackle the bone ship by breaking it up into different parts. Yesterday everyone got a buttress done each. Today I've been working on making arched windows and a spire. Put a message on facebook for all the animaters to work on spires and windows etc. so hopefully they'll come in tommorow or monday to work on it.

Unsure if this method is going to work because I've crashed Maya because the computer doesn't have enough RAM to deal with the amount of stuff in the scene and what I've made are only segments. When we get all the segments together I don't think a single computer could handle it in a scene.

Re; Just made another spire today;

Grave-digging

Haven't updated in a while, been busy doing hair report etc. Otherwise have been making/texturing a couple of bones for the bone ship. On Saturday me and most of the physical realm team went to the quarry and got trailer loads of dirt for the set. It's looking pretty good.

Mudbox bone skulpting

Learning how to sculpt in mudbox. Managed to make a skull after three tries. First one I didn't start from a base, the second one I didn't UV unwrap so it had to be tossed but I feel like I've got the hang of it after the third time.

 This is what it looks like in Mudbox

This is what it looks like in Maya. For some reason the more protruded bits didn't come through on the normals map.

Way behind the others in bone production, Laura reckons she's done 10 already. I've only done 3, a hippo skull a scapula and the human skull above. Hoping to step it up now that I've got a firmer grasp on Mudbox.

Change in method

Been announced today that the external location shooting is not going ahead due to the weather.We're going to green screen them instead. So now the animation crew are going to be busy modelling. Currently I'm trying to lesson Brandon's workload by drawing up orthographic views of the buildings that he's drawn so that they can be modelled.

otherwise bone modelling is going on with the animators. Rachel has decided that she wants 60 between us by Monday next week which shouldn't be too hard now that we know how to use mudbox. I've made a Hippo skull today which is UV unwrapped and ready to be textured.

First day of shooting

Assembled at the tin shed at ten on Friday, though I got there earlier. Because I didn't have a computer to check facebook I didn't know exactly what was happening, I wasn't actually needed on the shoot. I decided to stay behind and clean the tin shed because it was in a state.

I spent a few hours cleaning up but I couldn't get rid of the rubbish because both the skips where totally full. To add insult to injury the crew had taken the broom and the dustpan and brush so I had to improvise using a broom end and a cardboard box.

Hammered lots of nails into the walls to hang tools, that saved some space. Also popped up a couple of the cardboard boxes to put the rest of the cardboard and foam into.

Left for downtown and did some research. Started going back home for dinner at 6.30 and got a call from Sarah saying that they needed some of the sets finished for tomorrow. Had dinner then got picked up by Sean with Tony.

Apparently there had been some miscommunication as well as the loss of a location so that had changed the plans. Now we needed green screens as well as finished walls by Saturday instead of Thursday which was the original schedule.

Me and Tony painted 5 MDF roof pieces with the green screen paint, at which point we ran out of paint, Lee and the others were going to have to paint the other pieces before the shoot the next day. Similarly we couldn't screw the supporting back pieces to the pieces of roof because the square headed drill bits were on set so that was also going to have to happen before the shoot the next day. We also filled the backs of the wall pieces with painted card. One of them had already been done but we couldn't find the pieces until I had found that other people hadn't realised their use and had used them as paint mixing pallets. Luckily they were still usable as the other sides had been untouched.

Next we ran out of staples so we had to start using nails to tack the cardboard to the walls. Then we ran out of brown paint and I couldn't figure out how to mix the same colour. We were also starting to run out of bigger cardboard. It was starting to feel loke the donner-reed party all over again. After running out of everything me and Tony decided to sit tight and wait for the others to get there to see if a solution could be worked out.

At about 1.30 or 2 in the morning people started arriving, gasbagged and promptly left. This didn't surprise me as I knew that they were all tired and wouldn't want to help but it still made me bitter. Lee and Calum stayed behind to help finish the sets. Lee, Calum and Tony worked out a solution by cutting down the number of walls and roofs that needed to be green screened by having the them at an orthographic angle to the camera so that the back wasn't seen.

This decided we made 1 more wall, a greenscreen converted from a wall covered in plywood as well as one made from a patchwork of boxes covered in masking tape to hide the joins. These were the Green screens that were going to have to be painted the next day. The quality of work dramatically dropped off because it was now 4.30 in the morning, the hour of the wolf, and freezing.

We finished as it was nearing 5am. I got home at 5.15am went to sleep very grateful that Tyler and James were doing the VFX work the next day.

shooting now, and other updates

my home computers hard drive got fried so this is the first update in a long while.

Been going into the tin shed every day with for the duration of the holidays although I haven't been able to get in consecutively at 9. Everybody has been making props because the interior scenes are going to be shot first.

During this week

Me and Jiang (Vince helped a bit) made some polystyrene rocks for a table design that Brandon had made. We didn't have any solid pieces of polystyrene though so they weren't very carvable. I spray painted then with the black spray paint as we didn't have enough bottled paint to properly paint the rocks. They look awful but I'm hoping they'll look fine from far away.

Laura made a baby skull belt buckle for Osseus's chest belt and I made Osseus's
second belt that goes around his hips. I've nicknamed it the moustache belt.

I made the centre piece by doing the same method I used for some of the masks, molding clay and paper macheing over the top of it. I couldn't find clay at the time(we didn't have Vaseline anyway so I wouldn't have been able to have used clay), so I used Jovi/Plasticine. Unfortunately it didn't work as nicely as I'd hoped because it wouldn't seem to dry properly so the paper mache distorted a bit when i took it off the Plasticine. The "moustache" part of the belt was cut out of foam and sewn together. once together I painted the whole thing black.

On the Wednesday I completed Brays belt as Jade had been sick and Brogan was too busy to finish it. The centre panel had been completed by jade already but the outer panels weren't finished. They were painted but the edges were jagged(it's very hard to paint with a brush onto fabric) and the pink and red needed to have more coats as the purple was still visible underneath. So I stuck some more coats on and made the edges crisp, this took a very long time as it is very difficult to get a crisp line onto fabric so I had to be very patient.

Later I also sewed some parts of the belt back together as they'd become loose. I found the most effective way to do this was to hammer a nail through the layers of the belt then thread string through, using a piece of wire as a needle.