Oz The Great and Powerful

Oz the Great and Powerful was a surprisingly good film. I throughly enjoyed the story because it told a very different version of the very famous we all know and it did well to cover different aspect and make sense of the original movie. However, the highlights of this movie for me were two characters, the china girl and the 'good' flying monkey.

These two characters I think were executed so well and the voice acting in combination of the characters animation marry well together. The texturing and highlights on the china girl were really something and with the amount of screen time they shared they really stole the spotlight for me. As well as being well animated and wonderfully designed, the personalities of the two characters were so endearing and I can say with confidence that they made an instant connection with the audience.

Steering away from characters, the world itself was nicely designed and had some interesting concepts which I'd have expected as it was made by the same people who worked on the recent 'Alice in Wonderland'. For a computer generated world it did hold a sense of perfection which isn't really to my liking but I really liked the interactivity of the world when you first take a plunge into Oz with the main character.

VTR North

VTR North is a local Visual effects studio based in Leeds and Manchester. I'm interested to see how this studio will develop because after doing a bit of research into their background I found out that it's a fairly new studio. The studio in Leeds opened in 2005, and more recently, their creative post at Manchester opened in 2012. So prior to that, I'm excited to see where they go within the next few years. So far their portfolio of work is looking very promising. They've done everything from the DFS adverts you see on the TV to the amazing Fire Flight music video for the Phoenix Dance Theatre.



This video is the project that stands out the most to me that this VFX studio has worked on. It's really beautiful and more than that they use familiar software that I, as a student, use for my own projects such as Maya, Premiere Pro and After Effects. Putting the spectacular dancing aside, the visual effects for this are really captivating. The trailing fire effects are really something and slow motion sections that then explode back into real time is amazing. The ember particles are like the icing on the cake too, they really add to the atmosphere and make it look realistic.

This has inspired me to perhaps further my After Effects skills and/or carry on with this project even past the deadline because, due to some family issues I'm really behind but as far as portfolio work is concerned, I think that continuing my After Effects skills would be vital.

Dog from Half Life 2

Because I'm working with a quadruped, as part of some research I just had to include Dog. I think Dog is one of the main characters in Valve's Half Life 2 and to me is amazingly animated. He has such character about him and his movement is really impressive. In fairness his movement is more similar to that of an ape because he runs around using all four limbs but then stands on two when interacting with objects. Either way I just wanted to write about him because he's an awesome character.

The way dog moves I find is really suiting of his shape and build. When he runs around there's a sense of weight to him and when he rolls over it's quite a slow animation. Yet, dog is very flexible and has quite dynamic movement which becomes more apparent when you see him fighting. This video is a good example but another great scene which also shows a bit more diversity is his battle with the strider.



I really love the end of this cinematic where Alyx thinks Dog might have been done for and he shakes it off and gives her a hug. He's such a lovable character and one of my favourite moments has to be when you play catch with Dog when Alyx teaches you how to use the gravity gun. When Dog is introduced, although he doesn't have much of a face, the movement in his head when he's petted and gretted by Alyx never fails to make me smile. It imitates that moment when you greet a dog and their ears flop because they're happy to see you. And I just think the way he was animated is really impressive full stop really. To give a robot such personality and character through his movements I think is admirable. His movements are also accompanied by very quirky but fitting sound effects.

All in all, Dog is just a great package to work with as both inspiration and as a reference.

Texturing and Lighting

The actual texture on my alien is pretty messy. I just used a bit of photoshop whiz to tile together a nice paint splat, marbled effect. However, after adding the lighting, it all came together.

I decided at add purple and blue lights because they're very atmospheric and create the kind of sharp spooky look I wanted to go for. I also wanted to go for quite a dramatic look but still keep it quite colourful.

I did play around with the colour of the eyes and originally tried yellow and where it looks with the purple I just thought the green worked better in combination of the purple and blue.

This is one of the examples I used to confirm the kind of lighting that I wanted. Pinkish highlight but mostly purple with blue and green. Looking back at my render I think I achieved that quite well.

UV mapping my Alien

Not going to lie, doing the collaborations did take up a lot of my time because they weren't simple to UV map whether it was bad topology, gaps or just a complex model. So when I eventually got around to doing my own it was a bit late on the project already.

My model wasn't easy to unwrap either but after doing two the problems were a little easier to work around because I had a sense of what I should be doing already. I came across similar problems which required me to do a bit of auto mapping and cos if that my texturing isn't all that smooth, in fact, it's really angular in parts. 

Although there are a lot of parts to this model, I always arrange them next to linking body parts so it's easy to recall which each part is. I did this for the guys too and I was never asked which part was which so I think my layouts are easy to read. 

Overall though I'm happy with how it came out despite the fact there are a lot of bits floating about and I forgot to move the teeth out of the way.