Self Study

The past 4 weeks were a self study time at school, which I devoted to designing an environment and then modelling and animating in Maya, texturing in Photoshop and comping in Nuke.

Side-to-side comparison between the design and the final render:

And here's the full final shot:

For interested, here's the breakdown from Nuke as well as wireframe from Maya:

Commercial Project

Finally the commercial me and my group were working on came out!!

Director: Maria Madelaire | http://andarisi.tumblr.com/
Art Director: Federico Pirovano | http://federicopirovano.tumblr.com/
Technical Art Director: Signe Tveitan | http://blog.signetveitan.com/
Animation Lead: Louis Kynd | http://louiebonbon.tumblr.com/ 
Pipeline Supervisor: Signe Cold | http://signecold.tumblr.com/ 
Production Manager: Kristina Jensen | http://k-sletting.tumblr.com/
Environment Lead: Marta Milczarek | http://perplexingly.tumblr.com/
Generalists: Ebbe Wyrtz | http://ebbewyrtz.tumblr.com/
Henrik Langergaard | https://www.artstation.com/artist/h_langergaard

Sam's Voice: Mike Bray
Steve's Voice: Radoslav Nedyalkov
Additional Voices: Szymon Kuran
Federico Pirovano
Sound Design: Thomas Richard Christensen
Sofie Johanne Birch


Since the pre-production I was most interested in the environment design, working on the environment style alongside Signe Cold while Louis worked on the storyboards and the other teammates took over the design of the characters, animals and props.

Here's the research that I've done:

Although I didn't model or texture props other than the trees, I dressed several sets and did matte painting for all shots; with my main shot for both set dressing and comping being this one:

I also did the post-comp of the following shots:

(set dressing of the first of these shots was done by Signe Cold, animation by Kristina; set dressing of the second of these shots by me, animation by Kristina and Maria)

Maria and Federico designed and chose the color scheme of all the characters (which I colored to have an idea of how they would look like in 3D)

(the background of the second image was done by Signe Cold)

Before we went into modelling of the characters, I roughly sculpted the main character so that we could see the transition from 2D to 3D:

The lead character was then modelled by Ebbe and textured and rigged by Signe Tveitan, the drummer character was modelled by Signe Tveitan, textured by Ebbe and rigged by me, the basist, only female member of the band, was modelled and textured by me and rigged by Ebbe, the monkey was completely done by Signe Cold and the parrot and the lizard by Henrik.

By the end of the project Maria and Federico designed a poster, while I painted it:

Quadruped Project

The final result of several weeks long quadruped project, in which we designed, modeled, textured and composed withing live action footage a four-legged creature. Here's mine!

The final 2d design and environment in which I imagined the creature would live:

And here are some studies I did of the creature:

Rigging

The last course in this semester was rigging! I made thousand mistakes and it was hard to grasp the basics but in the end I became comfortable with it. Here's my final character rig:

Also feel like I need to show these two gifs. The first is made within 2h on the frist day of rigging, we've had several simple cube assignments without using any joints, just to prepare us for actual rigging:

On the second-to-last day when we were done with our main frog rig, we had a 6 hours long assignment - to model simple character, rig it and then animate it to the rhythm of Mambo no 5. Of course ended up doing something ugly with a broken rig but it was a very fun assignment.

In the end our rigging teacher put all of the characters in one video:

Biped Project - Modelling

I finished my Biped Project!

Lighting Materials

We've just had 2 weeks of lighting in maya classes. Our projects in chronological order:

Three different moods:

Three times of day:

Mood from a movie (I went with Chciago):

Glass:

Metals:

Still life:

Models either done by myself or downloaded from: http://www.3drender.com/challenges/

http://www.lugher3d.com/download/free-models-for-maya

http://www.turbosquid.com/Search/3D-Models/free

Project 4450

The weeks 44-50 were spent on the Project 4450, which objective was to design a character that would fit within Ernest and Celestine movie, and model them within an environment.

On the first week we were working with concept design with Benjamin Renner, a co-director of Ernest and Celestine.
I called my character Dora, she's an artist and a friend to Celestine.

During the next three weeks our teacher was Kristifir Klein, and we spent them on modelling.

The last two weeks with Rune Rask we spent on texturing, lighting and compositing in After Effects. To achieve a style similar to the styleguide, I tried to switch from the realistic lighting to a more toony one.

Here's the final Showreel with model turnaround, final keyshot and the breakdown:

Project 4450 from Marta Milczarek on Vimeo.

Intro to Maya

Between 41st and 44th weeks of school we started learning Maya!
After few simple exercises, our first real project was to create a small diorama

The second project's objective was to design and model an alien's head, attach it to a body provided by our teacher and hen rig them.

I've met several problems during the project

But I'm happy with the end result