Final Masters Project

       Allow me to present you my final year masters project, which took me whole summer to accomplish from scratch to finish. Mostly I was concentrating on destruction of hard materials such as metal or concrete. For that purpose I made my project development blog where you are able to see the whole process documented with obstacles I was facing with over 30 entries dedicated just to this project.

Project summary:
       The project is a short animation called “Connected Mistake”, which emphasise the dangers that could occur during reckless driving. It is in 60second and 30second format to fit the typical advert placement for television. Stylized semi-realistic look and non-linear time progression through storyline should stand out from the awareness film-add pool and transfer the consciousness message as for mature so for immature audience. The film explores the conversion of happiness to misfortune with colour mood change, where a small carelessness caused by cell phone manipulation during driving in sub-urban environment could lead to tragedy. Animation starting with disrupted storyline with nonlinear time progression first showing the outcome of the disaster.  Time is dramatically slowed down to emphasise the details of the crash. Timeline is swapping between backward slow motion time progression and normal forward time evolution. Film should point out the mobile devices manipulation and dangers involved while driving.  It is placed in semi-urbanized environment in European lifestyle to attract the wide range audience of cities and suburbs, mostly situated in affected areas where the risks involving driving are high.

Final Animation (60sec version):

Music is called End Of Era and its used with permission from http://stockmusicboutique.com Tutors: Martin Bowman, Neil Gallagher, Ian Willcock, Alan Peacock, Ivan Phillips Thanks to: all my friends and family for support Software used: Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Headus UV layout, Foundry's Mari, Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects

Highlighted development entries:
       Once again, here I will just show small pieces of behind the scenes, however feel free to check out the whole development blog "HERE".

This is a preproduction picture of a small boy and his dog buddy. It first those two characters supposed to be in the animation playing with ball, however due to some difficulties and plot changes were left out. This was my first attempt to use my new tablet with Adobe Photoshop and I must admit it’s a hell of a fun.

I was a bit sad that those two characters did not make it to the finish; nevertheless they were fully rigged and ready to go. (Face rigged, body rigged, cloth simulation, hair simulation, dogs’ ear simulation).

There are some texturing examples. On the left is a texturing procedure with Mari. I was trying to achieve semi-realistic cartoonish look.

Textures palette used within this project.

I was planning to include grass animations within project but with the time limitation I was not been able to do it. From technical point of view the grass was set-up and ready to go, but its presence expanded the rendering time by additional 4min per frame, which I couldn’t allow due to my hardware and time limitation. Right image shows the detailed foliage setup with P-flow editor.

Male and female dummy figurines head close-ups.  Those figurines could blink, smile, be sad and were used instead of the drivers.

I prepared an assembly images to show how the models and world is structured. First Image is an slightly modified Alpine A110 1600S car model with blueprints, real photo and 3D parts.

Secondly, this Toyota Corolla 1982was modelled with an engine as well, forasmuch as the front bonnet suppose to damage or fall off, thus uncovering the interior.

Both cars were rigged and additionally skin wrapped to destruction model. Wheels were spinning accord to position on the path constrain. User could animate the bumpiness of the car by rotating the top helper and turning the front wheels with front helper.

Here you can see various parts from which the world is assembled. Landscape, main houses, back stage houses, road and road assets, fences, background foliage, foreground foliage and additional assets form the world as whole entity.

    And finally let me introduce you my summer time working place where I was doing all the work around this animation. Those 5 PCs and additional 2 ones which are not in the picture were all rendering in final hours of development, forasmuch as I did not had access to render farms.  :)

Post-process update: HERE