"My Bear in Shining Armour" Finished!

My Contribution to the Project

From the beginning.

When we first started the project, originally the two girls Rebecca and Suaad wanted to do a piece about a princess and a frog. After brainstorming we realised that it wasn't strong enough as a piece and we really wanted the audience to feel, therefore I raised up the idea of doing a timeline of a man's life who had been through different devastating things that are very similar to events that have occurred in my own personal life. I believe that the best ideas come from realism and actual life events, it shows passion and drive. 

Moving on, i did some of the original storyboarding and the backgrounds that Suaad had designed, the original rough copy's came from me and then forwarded onto Suaad where she would perfect them. The original 3D animatic's were done by me and the story boards with all the different characters for experimentation also. I also did the concept imagery for the project. Also certain parts of the story have had little tweaks which i was involved in. 

For the Animation i animated the intro, the exit and the 3D ending. 

Regarding modelling i have modelled the environment, even though you cannot see the whole room that i modelled never the less the other models like the sofa are there. Because Rebecca tried to rig the character we had she had modelled and tried her best but couldn't manage to do it we had to use a Morpheus rig, therefore we used the standard Morpheus rig to animate the scene for the sound designer in terms of timing and we was told we could copy and paste the key frames over to the new reformed Morpheus rig from the one I just animated with, once I had finished re modelling it. Unfortunately that did not work and I had to re animate the entire scene. Also, regarding modelling I created the bear and i also experimented with fur textures on him but he look better without, after that I re formed the Morpheus rig and finished clothing him.

Also, I would like to state that I lost all of my files from my computer meaning that when I textured and UV mapped the entire scene I had to do that all again, so two sets of modelling and texturing. The original lighting was done by me and then Rebecca too over the lighting but I think I originally liked mine better. Looked less real and more sinister but I guess she didn't want that. Its tough when your sticking within the guidelines of someone else, even though I am co-director Rebecca was Director. 

Final Rendered Examples

So, here a few shots from the last scene with the new character in their, clothed and with scene being perfect the only two shots missing are the zoom into the bears eye and the exit from the tv showing the character. Reason is you will see them in the film and there are also some playblast previously showing movement.

Rendered images of each different camera shot

The only shots missing are shot 2 and 8 as they have been shown previously 

Other rendered shots of old character and update on new rendered shots with new character

The other rendered shots of the old character are basically what is on the play blast shown previously and soon i am to upload the rendered sequences of the final draft. After many rendered attempts we had found problems such as bottles animating on their own for purposes of copying scenes and importing the new character. Also, we found the characters face was also incorrect in certain shots as we could not see in the normal view play back in Maya. So after many rendered attempts we finally have a finished version of the scene. Unfortunately you don't get to see all of the scene that i had modelled but never the less it still there.

Character clothing

After i modelled the character, we needed to cloth him and as Rebecca designed some clothes for the character i helped attach the clothes to the character and fix any problems that arose such as the after we wrapped the clothes to the mesh the arms would not be visible in render so i fixed that and other problems that arose with the rigs controls that i also fixed.

Here is a rendered shot of scene 2 which shows the character fully clothed in pose.

Shot 4 rendered with old character.

shot 4 of the hand opening the animation in the final will be slightly different