Industry Excercise 1 brief

We have received our project brief for the Industry Excercise 1 assignment and from what i have read, looks pretty interesting.

Ok so in the project brief it states that i have to choose from 3 briefs, these briefs are

Brief A: Game Design - Build a Chop Shop Enviroment for Rockstar North

Brief B: Animation - Create an Ident animation for National Gallery

Brief C: Character Design - Design & animate some characters for Axis Animation

After reading the whole brief in full and some time to think i have decided to go for Brief C: Character Design.

Brief C: Character Design

Source: Jon Beeston

Editor -- Axis Animation

http://www.axisanimation.com/

“We would like your students to design and animate some characters for us for a potential animated advertisement for London Zoo. We are thinking about using a visual style that reflects traditional “Claymation” techniques but will be generated using CG processes. The characters should be worked up from the following list:”

1. Willie Billiams – “A hyperactive nine year old on his first visit to London Zoo with an obsessive interest in creepy crawlies.”

2. Pocahontas Billiams – “Willie’s sister, she’s seven years old but much more relaxed and more knowing than her sibling. She wants to be a gorilla.”

3. Wilhemina Billiams – “Willie and Pocahontas’s grandmother, she thinks everything smells bad and is worried that a chimp or one of those nasty bonobos might escape and “Poo in her hat.””

4. Wee Eck McGlone – “London Zoo’s long suffering head keeper sixty, bald, curmudgeonly, Scottish, fiercely patriotic and obsessive about sweeping up dung.”

5. Cornelius – “A middle aged silver back gorilla, the most civilised and sensible occupant of the zoo by far.”

“Your students should consider the following points when working through their character designs:”

• “If they work in 3D then they should concentrate on two characters from the list per animator.”
• “If they work in 3D then they should be using one of the major 3D packages, i.e. Maya, Lightwave, or Max. The characters should be fully modelled to a maximum resolution of about 100,000 polygons, decent texturing is vital, we won’t accept a model alone at this stage. The model should be rigged”
• “We expect to see support work on paper, development drawings and character sheets that should include orthogonal views, i.e. front, back, top, and side, and a more expressive drawing of the character in a typical pose.”

“We would like to see some expressive animation sequences that demonstrate the functionality of the rig and also character performance.”

The reason for choosing Brief C is because i really want to successfully create an actual Character that has gone through all the stages of modelling, texturing, rigging and animation.

I have never gone through the whole process so i want to work on these weaknesses and build on my strength which is concepts and modelling.

Also i enjoy the idea of designing a character as its much more creative and rewarding when you have created your own character from scratch and that is one of my main motivations for this brief.

So from the brief C i have decided to design one character which is the boy Willie Billiams. I spoke to Jared briefly and he said that i could stick with one character if i go through the whole process of the four areas.

The four areas i will be working on this character are

2D Conceptualization

Character Animation

Visualisation (and modelling)

visualisation (texturing and rendering)

Finally i have decided to work on my own as i really want to refine my skills and also decide and focus on the area i would like to specialise in. I have worked in groups before and i have enjoyed it but for this brief i want to work on my own. Definately i want to work more in groups in future projects as i would like to gain more experiance and knowledge from others around me.