Rhia Crouch's Blog

Had to go over Moon's UVs again before moving on to Sun's. I hope that when I start to texture my characters the seams don't show up but hopefuly as they are going to be mostly blocks of colour this shouldn't worry me to much.

For my final project for my time at university I am continuing with my minor project with the aim of createing a finished animation at the end of it. This has been the goal since I started this idea in my second year but now is the time to finally complete it. I still have a few things to finish off and a few things that I need to start on, such as completing the characters and starting to think about the environment designs. The best way that I can make sure that I achieve my goal end is by setting myself a series of smaller goals that will help to build up to the final product. I don't feel that making a long drawn out plan will help me that much, as I might panic if I start to see I'm falling behind in my tasks, but it would be nice to see what I need to do next and set myself a time limit to do it. As for the final hand in I plan to have complated: Characters fully rigged and textured Environment designed and created Pop-up props designed and created The Making O...

Looking back at my Minor project I can see that this has really tested on a number of levels and has made me face things that I would normally not want to do. It has also made me see how much work I have to do to reach my goals. My main aims for this project was to have the two characters in my animation fully rigged and textured but I seemed to had over estimated my working abilities, as there was a number of times that I had to go back to something to make it better after getting feedback on it. The main thing that this happen with was redesigning my characters. I was happy and willing to get the feed back and act on it but after some time I was starting to feel that I wasn't going anywhere with my work and was wasting time fixing the smallest of details. I was hoping to have them done with in two weeks but it took much longer. After I had finaly landed on a finished for my characters I had to start thinking about how I was going model them in Maya. I haven't been that co...

Minor: Moon and Sun Turn Arounds from Rhia Crouch on Vimeo .

Putting together my Art Of for my project is abit of a challenge for me as when I try to plan out the pages I can't seem to make them look nice. I also seem to have trouble with trying to get across the feel and art style of my project even when I'm using the simplest of styles. For each chapter of my Art Of I am going to use a title page. As shown below I have used borders that relate back to the colours of the characters as well as using the a faint wood texture with the text in the middle. The pages that I seem to be having the most trouble with are the ones that show the designing process that I went through for the characters. I seem to find it difficult planing out the pages so that the images are not squashed as well as not being overloading the pages. Below are some tests that I have done.

I'm not too sure if I have gotten the UVs right on Moon as some of the seams can be seen, but as she is going to mostly be blocks of colour I don't think that it should matter.

Finely finished Sun's model. It took me abit longer than I wanted as Maya decided to freeze on me when I was cleaning up the screen and delete the crown and arms so I lost time finding an older file and fixing it. I've also decided to leave out the Sun's collar that went round the neck so that I don't have any more trouble and can move on to the next step. I am happy with the way that it has turned out and am happy that I have been able to model two characters.

Arms are slowly coming along.