Supporting Documents- 'Making Of' and Character Bible

Atom pancakes would like to share the documents supporting our animation, they feature the behind-the-scenes which helped us produce our final short.

Making of - The Final Chapter

If you like the character Arthur Winters, this document will explain how our studio decided upon the design and show some of the early stage drawings of him .

The Final Chapter - Character Bible

Enjoy!

Character Update

Tonight I continued work on the textures for the body. These again, need work as Zbrush doesn't export smoothed UV's so there are some issues here and there. But hopefully the images below give a reasonable idea of what our character will look like when complete.

Character Progress

This week it has been my job to move the character into Zbrush and create a high poly sculpt along with paint the textures. This allowed me to test normal maps, displacement maps and skin shaders. The images below so the character after I had finished sculpting. It took a lot of time to add very fine details but I hope that these subtleties make the character look far more profession and believable. 

From here I generated normal and displacement maps from Zbrush and took them into Maya to apply to the character. So far, this has only been tested on the head, but normal maps seems to be the best option. Displacement maps didn't help as much as I'd hoped and they increased render time a lot.

No maps Applied.

Normal Maps

Displacement Maps

The effects are subtle but add an extra level of detail that is normally missing from student films. These sculpts need some refinement, especially in the hair geometry. I've also started polypainting in Zbrush which allows to paint directly onto the 3d model. This works really well and although it will need refinement it is a great way of creating a base texture for your model. The images below are directly from Zbrush showing the first stage of the texturing using polypaint.

This texture requires more work but I have used it in the first test for the fake sub surface scattering shader. The images below show how this shader is refined.

There is a lot of work to be done in refining this process but it is starting to come together nicely. In the meantime I've also started work on sculpting and texturing props. The image below shows the writer's chair in it's first sculpting stage.

Keep posted for a lot more work soon.

Summarising our Progress

Another update on our project, although the blog has been very quiet, here at Atom Pancakes we are very active and trying to move with this project forward while meeting deadlines.

We have been doing several things, such as finishing Pre-production, and stepping on Production. Firstly we have decided to resolve our story, so we worked for weeks on getting the storyboards and Animatic done. The latest animatic, definitely shows what we are trying to achieve, however is always room for improvement on the following weeks.

So here is the latest animatic: 

Still in pre-production, we decided to fix the concept art, while it definitely showed 1930's the only worry was the place in which the animation would be set. 

So Jordan decided to create an extra piece of concept art to confirm our intentions.

As I mentioned before, we have also began production, where we all shared tasks in modelling something, from Character to Props and Sets.

Character Modelling


The Body

The Head 

The sets were also modelled and tested.

Study Room

Outside Shot

Props 

We have also began constructing all the props in the environment, props in which our character will interact with. 

Chair

Cigarette Pack

Clock

Dagger Award

Desk

Pencils

 Books

File Cabinet

Desk Lamp

 Typewriter

We are still in production, so more images will be posted here soon with all the progress.