And So It Begins! - Character and Narrative

On this first day back we received our first brief for Character and Narrative, which left me feeling slightly nervous but also ready to go and produce some really good work! For this module, we are to work in pairs and design, model and animate our own individual characters into a 1 minuet short.

In all honesty, I did at first worry about pairing up because I knew there were some people in the group I would have found it easier to work with than others. However after a chat with my tutor I saw the bigger picture of things and put all personal preferences aside, because this module is about working professionally in teams.

In the end, Ollie and I decided to work together which is quite convenient as we live together and shared the same urge to do as well as we possibly can!

Deciding on a Title

After much conversing and sharing of potential ideas, Ollie and I narrowed our choices down to "Adrift"/"Road to Nowhere" and "The Message." We began mind mapping our ideas for each title to help us make a final decision.

The rest of the day consisted of getting used to working with MAYA again, which proved to actually be much more enjoyable than I expected it would be.  To begin with, we did some experimenting with some simple polygon shapes. These shapes are made up of faces, edges and verticies and through these they can be changed. 

After some playing about the the commands and re-familiarising myself with how to move and manipulate objects, we all began playing around with a pre-rigged character. 

With this character, each point of movement had already been rigged, so we were able to experiment and move him into different positions. Each point needed to be selected before it could be moved. With some areas, such as the foot, there were different options as to how it could be manipulated. The heel alone could be lifted, the toes could be lifted or twisted. 

It was really interesting to see all the points of the body which could be altered. Alterations could be applied to effect the scale, to move and to rotate specific areas. The examples above show my first attempt at moving this character around. I have altered the positioning of the feet to make it look as though he is on the move.