Shadow tests

This is my first attempt at baking out the shadows as a texture map and then playing around with them. I'm not 100% sure if I've done it correctly but as a first attempt I think it was worked out alright. The shadows don't look how I would like them to yet but now I know how the process works I can give it another go and possibly increase the size of the texture map so that I can add more detail and spend some more time painting the shadows.  

Maya Tutorials

Part 1: Classic Active & Passive Rigid Bodies

Lighting Tests

Since my shadows are going to be giving away the CG nature of my environment I need to do a few lighting tests to figure out what I can do with the lighting to help the shadows fit with my textures and the look I am going for. All I've done so far is set up some basic lighting so that I have a few shadows to play around with.

Prison Details and character design

To help myself when I go into modelling my imaginary prisons I decided to use my base structure and draw the details onto it to make it easier to know exactly what I am modelling. I still have a few of these to do but I have decided to do them while I'm in china as I won't have access to a computer when I'm there.

To design my simple characters I took some of the characters that are within the Prisons and drew them. There is going to be minimal details on them, they are more to add to the atmosphere of the environment.

Finished composed music

I have my finished composed music for my animation now so the next stage is to start figuring out my animation through pre-viz and storyboarding. I would just like to thank Morgan Pearse for composing this for me I think he did an amazing job.
Since I now have the music and I've started thinking about how my animation is going to play out around the music, I have actually decided to rearrange and change a few things from my basic structure to fit better with the music.

https://soundcloud.com/kym-mumford/piranesi-final/s-2rank

Shadows and Character Tests

One of the problems I have left to figure out with my project is how I am going to tackle the characters and the shadows.
The shadows are going to be a problem because they are a dead giveaway that my world is made in CG and so I am going to have to try and figure out a way to give them that same sketchy look that my objects will have.
At the moment though I'm just going to look at the problem of the character. I have done a few texturing tests and I think I'm getting close to what I want but I haven't quite achieved it yet. Using a character I modeled from a previous project I tried pen on white paper by itself and with a toon shared, and I don't think either of those was anything close to what I want.

I then went into photoshop and played around with the texture and using the alpha channel to give the texture some transparency which I feel has come a lot closer to what I want. Also to get a better idea of where the toon lines on the model were I made them blue on one of the renders. However because the character I used is quite high resolution I think it doesn't quite work. So the next stage is going to be modelling the simple character that I will be using and then try out the texturing again.

Maya Tutorials

Part 1: Classic Active & Passive Rigid Bodies

Annoyingly I had this so the ball went straight through the middle but it seems when I rendered it out it moved around a bit so now it only hits the bottom. 

Life Drawing

Finished Base Structure

After the last base structure I did I felt like I had a better understanding of what I was building. I decided to do it again this time keeping in mind that this basic model will be what I use for reference when building my actual model. 

I'm also going to be using the base model to then draw details on it like ladders, chains, lamps etc.. so that when I start modelling the real thing I will know exactly what I need to model. 

Life drawing

It's taken me a little while to upload these but here are some of the drawings from life drawing that I went to.