Act 1, Scene 1, Shot 3... (BETA)

Opening Titles

Produced to resonate with the chaotic and destructive essence that is an integral theme to the film itself and the styles. 

Vault Design

Arsenal Turn-Around

Several Fully modelled & Textured destructive items ready to go... BOOM! 

Maya Models by Zoe Cheale & Alice Street. Textures Hand-painted by Ben Hudson. 

Jackhammer UV Maps

Scene 1/Shot 1 - Ready for Texturing & Lighting

Just to make sure the Composition is right... 

Development Sketch 

Road UV Map

Alas!

Nuclear Bomb UV Mapping

Chainsaw UV Mapping

Dynamite UV mapping

Prop Designs 

Original Net

Dynamite Hand-Painted Texture

Hand-Painted texture

Normal Map

Hand-Painted texture

Normal Map

Character Turnaround

What was most difficult about trying to reach a stage like this is my comfort zone of drawing very limited, one dimensional designs. As these will be recreated in CG, i have found my development tested, and tested more. But it's been fun trying to figure that out. Trying to find centrelines and approach character design with a very Disney-esque approach, finding dimensionality and three-dimensions to the posing and the acting.

What I do wish to carry on to try and distill into these two however is the principles that I love. That character design can be approached as a silhouette, and it takes from abstract modern gallery art the concepts of simplifying form, of using the clearest angle of a form as its primary shape and of largely ignoring or distorting principles of perspective and foreshortening, and rotation of solids.

'Black Circular Bomb' Texture Design

So we start out with a simple model of the desired bomb - Modelled by Zoe Cheale. 

I then take the UV Snapshot of the Bomb geometry. Nice, clean and simple. And I proceed to paint over it and make some art in Photoshop. 

I then take some of the design assets (The skull & crossbones) to generate a 'Grey-scale' Normal Map to act as a secondary texture on top of the UV Map previously created. I then upload these into Maya through the hyper-shade library and lower the Bump Depth value of the normal map to 0.150 so as to not make it too bumpy nor distracting, and I check out my results... (below) 

See that paint-brush hair in the middle of the crossbones (below) ? 

These close-ups demonstrate what i really wished to achieve, this hand painted, slapped together, very manufactured look, like they're made in the masses in the middle of a war-torn country or something with a little history behind it. With the skull and crossbones literally just drawn with chalk or a sharpie pen, on top of this rugged, and fairly violent looking surface. There's little mistakes and plausibility in the skull and crossbones, like it has been redrawn maybe once or twice, or there was a reference drawing underneath, before the finished design was drawn. 

THEN!

After consulting a tutor on the texture, and reminding me to keep consistency and try to not aim to look too realistic, i decided to tone down the realism of the texture, and create something a little more hand painted-esque. Below are the results. 

Going even more Cartoony now... 

Man Visual Development Drawings

Man Thumbs 

Refined design sketches 

Is he a goon? does he possess an ounce of intelligence? ...Not really. This is what I wished to instill into the monkeys counterpart in the robbery - the Man. We went with a very square type of head design to really push the idea that he's an empty goon up there. But we didn't wish to really loose a sense of appeal about him. We wanted him to almost be there for the wrong reasons - like he's a nice guy, but he's doing it for some sought out, motive that we can really emphasise with. We wanted him to be a nice guy, deep down, hence the button rounded off nose, and the big jaw. He's almost like a gullible bear who will believe anything he's told. Since he plays one of the most harmful roles within the film, it was important that we had something funny and stupid within the design that could be played with in this sense, that we could hit, blow up, and torture throughout our two minute run. He is the coyote of our film and we wished for the head to really play on this. The body originally started out as a big, hefty design, but as scripting and storyboarding took hold, we really needed a character who could move with not only the pace of the film, but the monkey as well - to keep up with the story. 

                                                        Refining a final body design.