Week 10

The animation of the M did not go overly well moving the M caused a lot of problems with the skin causing lots of folds and dents to appear, as well as during walking it the shoulders of the M separated and caused it to stretch and deform.

In the end the animation of the M was a simple walk forward and had the guitar move up and down to look as though it was being played as well as a floating guitar can. This also caused conflicts on whether the M should use his legs to play the guitar but this would cause the M to randomly float and out of the two the guitar floating was the less of two evils as well as overall actually looking good.

With the animation I added several cameras so that I could render different views of the animation rather than just a face on shot of the M walking.

I tried to improve the M walking by making his legs look more obvious in the scene using more movement but with this I had trouble with the bones in the M which were causing the Ms Legs to fold skin and look very unnatural since the M leg had no real type of knee. With the problems with the M bones I again tried to re-bone the M in an attempt to make it look better but this caused the skin from the M to randomly stretch into the distance during the animation.

Merging the M with the stage to create the actual scene instead of just a character took a few tries and had to have the M resized a few times because of it being as tall as most of the stage but the M was placed in and resized correctly so that its animation would take place on the stage.

The animations with each camera were short cuts because I thought quick cuts to heavy music would look better then a long shot which wouldn’t go as well with the music.

Week 9 - M persona

To give the M a more heavy metal persona I gave him some spiked bracelets which were easily done by creating 2 cylinders and using one to boolean a hole through the other creating a bracelet which was then wrapped around the legs of the M. The spikes for the bracelet were created using cones and liking them to the bracelet as trying to boolean or weld those caused problems when the M was moved. I did try to skin the bracelets so that they would move better with the M but this also caused problems that the bracelet would fold and stretch making it look very unrealistic.

I also began to bone the M and try simple animation. The boning of the M took several attempts as it was quite hard to organise the bone structure to give the M more fluid movement. The boning structure used at the end was 2 sets of bones running done each leg of the M and then skinning the M frame over the bones.

While I started animating the M I decided that with just bracelets and now no hair as I decided to leave the hair out, that the M looked rather bare and not how I imagined a stereotypical heavy metal fan/music player. To add more to the M I created a simple flying V guitar which seemed to be a symbol for heavy metal.

The guitar was made out of simple rectangles and then boolean to make the shape of the guitar. The guitar was then welded together to make easier to animate instead of having several shapes to move. Just having a plank like guitar looked rather dull so I added strings and some decals on it to give it even with its already cartoony look, to make it look more real.

Week 8 - Starting the M

This week was mostly used to begin to give the characters shape and try to give them any items and clothing that they might use.

I began to create the M using to cylinders and welding them together to give an M shape that was more rounded which I believe would of looked better then a square variation to give a better look. Welding the cylinders did give some trouble it seemed that at certain angles you could see like a grove at were the cylinders were connected but at most angles it would be fine.

Giving the M hair was simple to do; all that was needed for the M was to convert the M to an editable poly and selecting a portion and applying a hair and fur modifier to it. Changing the hair was just using the styling tools within the modifier and changing the colour, length and style.
The M hair caused a lot of rendering problems on some machines causing the hair to randomly appear on the bottom of the piece. In my opinion the hair also did not look to good as I wanted which was probably because the hair went through the grove in the middle of the M and did look much humanised.

Week 7

In this week the group consisting of myself, Sam and James discussed separating the YMCA characters so that each person would do a character of the YMCA and whoever finished the basic design and build first would do the remaining A.

We also discussed that the end of our piece would have a band like scene of all the YMCA characters in position to spell out YMCA while participating in the band to show off more of the live band nights offered by the YMCA.

The YMCA characters were going to differ as we had decided that each character would represent a different genre of music and thus giving them a personality.
The characters we decided are Punky Y, Heavy Metal M, DJ C and Reggae A; we believed that giving the characters names and the impression of a personality could relate them better to the audience.

The characters will be more cartoon like the realistic since we believed that with the target audience going from young children up to the age of round 16/17 that a cartoon like advert will gain more attention then going for an ultra realism type approach. With this we also considered rendering times etc as to not have to rush everything at the last moment with animation taking a long time to do.

I searched the internet to find images of stereotypical fan of heavy metal. The common aspects I found were spiked hair and spiked jewellery or clothing.
The hair was decided to run through the grove of the top of the M and it to be spiked high up using a brown or dark orange colour.