Making of "Meet Meline"

MEET MELINE : THE MAKING OF (Sebastien Laban and Virginie Goyons) from Sebastien LABAN on Vimeo.

Amazing work. This will give us all a rough idea on what it will take to complete a good film.

More Animal Robot Concepts

Here are my three. I tried making a biped horse to see if I could get around the concerns about animating quadrupeds. I think it looks pretty goofy.

Concept - Animal Robots

Here are three sets of concept drawings of various animals found in Europe, with the exception of that raptor. Each set contains the actual animal study and an overlay of mechanical design. The design is quite rough. The purpose of these drawings is to get a sense of creature's silhouette. Once we have our creature, I can then move on to create the actual functional mechanical body. I was hoping Europe has more scary animals that you know will mess you up if you mange to meet one in the forest. very disappointed.... I guess we will probably end up with a mishmash of many animals.

First Set [Greyhound, Goat, Lynx, Bear, Fox]

Second Set [Wolverine, Raptor, Spanish Fighting Bull, Deer, Wolf]

Third Set [ Badger, Mink, Beaver]

Be sure to let me know if there is a particular animal you are interested in seeing

Cat in Question

So at out last meeting, we came to the conclusion the cougar is out of place. The setting of our film leans heavily towards a European style village, and as such, the cat will not work. We also decided having a fully mechanical creature would better serve the purpose of our story.

But we are still tossing around the idea of having the mechanical creation we come up with be based loosely on an animal. The animal would have to native to Europe, something the creator (mechanic) would take inspiration from.

Now I have come to accept that the cat will probably go, but I was still curious about what the feline population is like in Europe. After all, it never hurts to look into possible ways of salvaging old work, so long trying to save it does not skew your perspective. The most important factor is how well it serves the story after all.

I found one interesting possibility. A lynx. Here are a couple different breads and where they originate from.

Iberian Lynx




I really like this guy. He has that really menacing look to him that I feel gives him a lot of character. This breed is on its way to extinction and lives in Spain.

Carpathian Lynx

There home is in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania.

Eurasian Lyxn

pretty close relative to the Carpathian Lynx from what I can tell.

Now of course that doesn't take out the difficulty of animating a quadruped, but in my opinion, a quadruped would be a whole lot easier than something that say moves like a spider. Of course 2 legs would be the easiest to animate, but from a design standpoint it is the most difficult to create something unique.

We'll talk more, Saturday at ten. Everyone try to bring in 3 different designs.

Quadruped Rig Test

Here is a Quadruped Rig I made and tested out today. Still have a lot to work on though. Tired to put him in some poses that I thought he would be in during the short.

Walking on a roof scoping on the solider on the ground

On the prowl.....

RUN!!!!!!!

Stalking...

My New Mel Script Creation

After many sleepless nights and missed meals this week, I am finished programing the holy grail of time-saving mel scripts. It takes every selected Material and creates Matte Passes for them, organized in a way that is extremely easy for the compositor.

In short, we now have control over every object in post production.

More Details Here

So what that leaves on the compositing front is the ability to create custom passes with Deex's system as well as gamma correction for linear workflow (complicated subject, I'll talk about it later). In good time.

The New Materials We Will be Using!

As I mentioned a while back Maya has some big problems with Render Passes. Namely a 5X Render time increase bug (which I've notified an Autdesk rep of) and lack of EXR image file compression. I have been taking a very active role as of late in the Maya Rendering community at CGtalk to help solve these problems. After many months, we finally have a solution courtesy of Deex!

The Standard Shader

The Skin Shader

(+Many More)

The Render Outputs

Unfortunately there is only a Maya 2009 x64 PC compile at the moment. We'll need to find someone who can compile it for mac os.

So what does that leave? Well, we still need an automated Matte Pass creation solution. I'm trying to write a script for that here that will do it for us, but I'm no programmer so it may be a while before it's ready. Hoping someone else will come along and help.

Either way, this is a major breakthrough for us today. I'm hoping once semester starts we'll be able to start building assets with these shaders right away.