SPARX Major Production

 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