Well since ive had the day off today ive been working at home doing some more concept art work. While having lunch and watching TV, flicking though the vast amount of channels I start watching Scooby Doo.
You may think this has no relevance to the project what so ever and so did i, till there was a mine cart scene in an old gold mine where a miner was scaring people away from the town.

So here the clip from YouTube.
Enjoy, I did ! hhehe

Got some cart designs below and how the cart can join up with the second cart from behind.

Some other little designs for Kitty's room. Ive been looking into palm trees for the island which has the treasure chest on and the red balloon.

Ive used pencils, water colours, oil pastels, pro-marker pens and Photoshop.

Just getting ideas on different cart designs and looking at mine carts.


Got to have Lego ( just the best)

The one below I quite like as there are two two tracks joining up together in what looks like a cave/passage way, with rusty cart wheels on the track.

What idiots below ! lol

Here I was looking into how the cart can detach from each other and join back up easily. So here are some pictures of how trains link up together.



From looking at these pictures I started to come up with a design that would suit our cart on the ride.

These were taken from the Summer holiday to Crete (2008) in Zeus cave.


The contrast in colours and the way the rocks have fused together have a nice appeal I think, These could be used in our cave for the part of the ride.


Stalactites in the pictures above
These can give us great inspiration for modeling the cave and the type of textures can be given to the walls.

At last ive found out that the render farm is set up and working. This is good news which can speed up the post-production work flow at the end of term!

How fast is it?

A job with 8 Render Layers (one Ambient Occlusion, 2 Ray Tracing) of 200 Frames that took 5 h 50 m to render on one dual core processor. The same setting applied took 20 minutes on the render farm ! ! ! Roughly 15 times faster depending on job.

200 Frames = 20 min
1 Frame = 6 sec

Based on the figures above that it take 200 frames 20mins to render and 1 frame take 6 seconds I worked out a rough guide for how long our animation will take to render :D

So if you are looking at a 2 min animation (3200Frames) to render on the render farm it will take 5 hours and 20mins. Which is a little less time if you was rendering 200 on 1 dual core computer. ! !

From the concept art that I was doing for this scene which I really liked, I had an idea. I wanted to bring this picture to life in After Effects. Since I had all the layers from Photoshop all I had to do was import them into a Photoshop document into After Effects and it would bring all the layer into the scene.
From this I laid it out like the concept Picture and animated certain layers.




I had done it split screen to show how they are both having different ride experience. Kitty was on top because it was like Kitty was in Heaven, having a really good ride and every thing was good and happy. Lee and Chloe were in like Hell having a bad experience so had to be at the bottom.


The video below is what I was mainly concentrating on and I was quite pleased with the final outcome. This will show what going to happen in the scene and what the waves are going to be animated like in Maya.
Hope you like it

Over the last week it has been quite mental with the work that we have had to do. Every one has been mainly concentrating on the essays and presentation that were for this week, which has meant that the work has been grinding to a halt for the moment. It every hard to switch between different types of work when you get so engrossed in one, you tented to forget about the other or time runs out.
So due to presentation and every think I haven't done much work this week as I would have liked to, but after today I will be able to concentrate more on my work and be working like a mad man!

Thing to still do:
More concept art work.
Up date more of my blog
Possible some changes to the storyboards
Other things...........

Here are some renders tests, testing out different colour lights that might suit the sign.
Although this probably wont be the real sign that we will use I still wanted to test out the colour in the lights.




This is an Ambient Occlusion pass below

Here are my Storyboards that I contributed to the group storyboard.


This is a shot of lee and Chloe entering the graveyard, the lights switch on and off as two zombies are come closer striking different poses.

The zombies come really close to the cart as the lights go off one more time and disappear.
Lee and Chloe are cuddling each other still from being scared from the zombies, but realise that the light are on and are still holding on tight. They realise this and let go very quickly. The camera pans around the scene looking at the environment.
The cart move on slowly though the graveyard.
A giant hand smashes though the mausoleum to grab the cart and drags them inside. Girls very scared !
It's pitch black as there don't know whats going to happen next. Then suddenly kitty joins up with their cart and heads towards the exit.
Lee and Chloe cuddle Kitty and are happy that she is ok and are all back together. They head round to the front of the ride.
Lee and Chloe are eager to get of the ride as soon as possible, and do so while its still moving. Kitty gets off when the cart has stop and walks slowly away from the ride waving to it.
Lee runs back to grab Kitty's hand to pull her away from the ride.
They run off to where they broke into the fence and the camera pan up to the ride to a finial shot.

Looking back over all the storyboards and feedback from other tutors we will have to change some of the shots. This will be to show more of the character emotion and relationship with the other characters.

Here is some of my concept artwork for the ride so far.
These were drawn out first then i used Photoshop CS2 and pro-marker to colour them in.

I have been testing a way to have the wall smash when the cart come thought the wall and the zombie hand come thought the wall as well, sending brick of wood flying all over the place. I have tested it with a plug-in called "Blastcode" which is really good at creating debris and smashing effects. Here is what i have done with it soo far.

I know the bricks float off and do not really fall to the ground and go thought the floor but I wanted to see how good it would look using this blastcode

I think that this will work really well just need to tweak a few setting etc.. and I will look really good.

For the outside around the ride we are going to have grass possible blowing in the wind as the character enter the scene so it wont be just a dirt path.
Here is what I have done so far for tests.

These screen shots was done using the fur type process which gave you a little more control when adding variety to the grass e.g. length, making bald patches and other option. These have a little more unique style which is quite nice.

Here's what I started out with first. Just plain dry grass

Then I added some more greenness to the grass

I then changed the type of grass and made it not a dense and made a little path thought the middle, where possible people have walked down.

And on this one I have added some more grass coloured the floor brown and added some little flowers to make it seem more real.

These two below have been done using the paint effects and then adjusting the setting to make it look like grass. This way I thought gave a very nice look and with some variation in grass type it would look really good. And this can be animated to blow in the wind if needed.