Minor Project: The Idea

The Task:

The task for the Minor Project was to create a self-directed project about anything we wanted to do within 15 weeks. The fact we had no base to stand on and we had to figure out what we wanted to ourselves scared me, i've never really had to come up with my own idea fresh out of the box before.

The Goal:

With this minor project I am hoping to do something that differs from the model of Wyld’s Globe I did during an earlier transcription project. By this I mean to actually create an animation that this time is a totally original idea of mine and hope to improve on my animating and modelling ability during the course of creating this idea for the task.

The idea:

Camera fades in from black to show a small artisan’s workshop (an artisan is a high grade professional crafter) and multiple shelves full of completed solar system models (Orrery).

The camera continues to pan across until we can see the artisan at work at his worktable. The camera cuts to the current orrery he is working on of our solar system, he ponders as to if it is finished while tapping his finger on the table. After a small amount of time he decides to pull apart the orrery and fits in another rotation ring with a small rod extended out far enough to be the new third orbit (this is where Earth would be). He sets it aside and selects a wooden ball from a tray of various sizes and proceeds to carve detail into it; during this the camera cuts to the shavings floating to the table, the camera cuts back to the finished ball as the artisan blows the remaining dust from it. The artisan reaches for a brush and the camera cuts to the paint as he gently dabs the brush, this dabbing happens a couple of times with the different colours. Cut back to the ball and it has become coloured looking very close to early earth before the tectonic plates shifted (Pangea).


He places the ball upon the rod and starts up the orrery and lets it spin for a bit. He slams the table and the camera cuts to the side of the worktop as he lifts a waste basket to the table and shoves the rejected orrey into it. He in anger places the waste basket to the side and gets out his chair and storms off, the camera cuts to the orrery in the trash and zooms in closer to the label on the base, the label states “ Orrery of Sytem “Sol” crafted by God (or some other name of god)”. The camera fades to black.

I'm Back For Year 3

Year 3 of the course just started and we have the Dissertation, Minor Project and Major Project to get through this year. To be honest I dread the dissertation I have never had much luck at writing, on the flip side the Minor project already has an idea pieced together for it that has been brewing in my head over and over again over the summer. This idea shall be told in the next post.

Full E-Sting Completed

Well here it is.

Match move tutorial done

In the end i had to borrow a motion tracked file off of Tom so that i can do this, it was fairly simple to setup the rest of it, i spent most of the time on tweaking my alteration to it.

Low quality software render

Here is a severely low quality render using maya software to see if everything works, i realised by doing this that i have forgotten to animate the static on the tv.

Animation still going

The animation is still going and has been a bit fiddly trying to fit the actions into the twelve seconds of time we have for this project but this is almost finished, including blend shapes for the E4.

The blend shapes i had to do again due to stupidly setting the delete all history button into the shelve instead of just the single object history delete.

Here is a render of the E4 which is acting as a giant monster.


I have also been tweaking my render settings to reduce the amount time it takes to render, this includes to knocking the resolution down from 1280 x 720 to 960 x 540. If i find that i have enough time to render it out in a higher resolution i will.

I have tweaked the city a little bit so that the road has a smoother bend, it just doesn't seem to look right with a sharp corner.

Progress report

The modeling is done, the rigging of the TV character is done and the scene is set with cars in the background and lighting set-up. All i need to do now is rig up the E4 to be the monster and animate.

TV expressions:


The car:


The city: