SPARX Major Production

  After months of hard work, revisions and technical difficulty, the team is proud to show off the final product of all that work. Some technical difficulties we came across were the render farm having many internal bugs thus having renders take longer than they should, lights in renders effecting the wrong areas and file sizes on a strict budget. Breakout was an original project created by: James Hardy, Joseph Vyner, Kyle O'Malley and Tianna Blaiklock. Special thanks go to: Dan Bryce, Andrew McGregor, Tim Emamooden and Maruisz Jasionowicz for creating the sound.

After many weeks of modelling, texturing and rigging, we have our first look at the antagonist of our short!  This creature is responsible for the destruction and danger J4-CK finds himself in. This render was made to test the rigging and effectiveness of the character design, and detect any technical issues that might occur when working with the model. - Joseph Vyner

I've been tasked with taking concept art and the art bible, and translating this into an environment. The aim was to create various 'corridor walls' and tiles that could be interchanged, depending on what was needed for each shot.

 Here is shot 8, I have been working on it for the last week. We are now well into the animation and here is where the short gets a little more interesting.  - Kyle O'Malley

Here is an update on the animation I have been working on in the last week.  After doing some work on shot 7 and seeing how it fits in the overall short, we decided it doesn't mesh well as it breaks the mood and is unnecessary. We decided to remove it and expand on shot 6 and at 8.  - Kyle O'Malley

 As of the end of last week, I'm happy to present the first look at our finished protagonist after the texturing and look-development processes. Meet J4-CK! This is a test render to ensure we face no problems when rendering our main character model, as well as a proper look at our character outside of its production stages. - Joseph Vyner

 Here is some of the animation's I've been working on for the last week and a bit. I am now getting comfortable with our style and the character. - Kyle O'Malley

 This week we began animating our short. This animation will be comped into shot 1 and then transition to shot 2. I really enjoy the animation style, and believe it will engage and interest our audience. - Kyle O'Malley

 Last week I spent my time Rigging our Robot in preparation for animating. He is equipped with an FK/IK, switch a number of Set Driven Keys and the MASH network for the Eyes. I am excited to get into animating with this incredible character we are producing. - Kyle O'Malley   

One of our two characters has been modelled! This is our robot protagonist that has been rigged and is moving on to texturing. This screenshot features the completed model with placeholder materials, the rig is not included in this file to work within an efficient and careful pipeline where our model can be updated at any time. This was made in Maya, it will be textured in Mari and rendered in RenderMan. - Joseph Vyner

In the past week I have done some initial render testing to to ensure that the rigs work all the way through the pipeline. The Wheel rig would break during rendering, due to the nature of the MEL script and how it calculated rotation. This problem was quickly solved by creating an alembic from the rig once the animation was finalised. The Eye rig took a few creative solutions to get a system in which we can change the look to fit with our character design. If we decided to change the look of our character eye's it is now only a few changes that need to be made to the existing rig, rather than having to create a whole new one. Kyle O'Malley

 For the longest time, the project has been called "Scared robot and scary alien". That changes today as we officially name the project ' Breakout ' woohoo! That being said, the team has been discussing and working on title designs for the project and after iterations, we came to a final result that we are all happy with. Its definitely starting to come together and the team is itching to get started creating assets and begin getting shots together. Other title ideas James

 Here are some of the Research and Development work I've done over the Break.  I was working on getting the wheel that is in the shape of a ball to rotate, for ease in animating.   I also developed the eye rig for animating the face. To create it I used MASH and blend shapes so it could all remain in MAYA during animation. Kyle O'Malley

 Here are some of the Animatic iterations, I developed over the break for our project. - Kyle O'Malley

Here are early 2D concepts that have been made to convey the overall aesthetic. There is a wide range of different ideas, all of which can be used when we move into 3D modelling as a point of reference. These drawings create a foundation for the 3D assets, allowing everyone who works on them to have a clear idea of what is expected, allowing for everything to remain coherent.   

We're taking a different approach to the robot character in the early production of our alien. It won't be until the final shot of our short that it is revealed to the audience, and so there is much less need for an immediate rig. Due to the difference in modelling, being an organic creature, basic shapes forming the anatomy of the alien were brought into ZBrush for sculpting. We've started to build our antagonist, which at a later stage will be returned to Maya for retopology.

We've jumped into Maya and ZBrush to begin figuring out our characters in a 3D space. With simple, placeholder geometry, a rig has been built for our robot protagonist that can be updated as progress is made towards the final model. Due to the fact that we've figured out the height and proportions of our character, the rig shouldn't require any major adjustments. This means that animation can be done in the early stages of production with no need to wait for the final model to be complete. - Joseph Vyner

This is our first animatic based on our storyboard! Soon we will be hopping into some blockout scenes to further refine our camera angles and movements. 

This is our first storyboard produced by Tianna! Many changes will be made, but we hope that this conveys our initial ideas and shots.

Joseph has also been working on some alien designs inspired by insects, deep-sea creatures, and of course other aliens from our favourite movies.