Fantastic Voyage Submission Post First of May 2015

Attack of the Hookworm from Mailin Berg on Vimeo.

FV Title design

FV Attack of the hookworm wip

My first wip video with an old TV Look made with After Effects! I followed a tutorial and I think it's not too bad, just very dark and certainly not fast enough so I will tweak some more :) I also haven't cut anything yet and will add title and credits too!

FV Animation Test Render (poor quality)

 

This is just the mid part of my renders put together in After Effects, I have cut a few frames and talked to Phil so will apply the changes now! I rendered it in poor quality to make sure it uploads on blogger, but I find it almost fits the 1950's feeling better than the shiny 100% quality I had before!

Scene render

The first scene that has been rendered and is an actual animation now, not just pictures!
Premiere is being stupid and not letting me playback plus I have rendered almost all files in Maya Iff yesterday and premiere doesn't accept them, so need to convert them in after effects first!

FV First scene playblast

I've changed the camera slightly to give a better view of the body swimming but I still can't explain how the worm dips to the side and down?

Fantastic Voyage Progress

Now the foot is in a lighter colour with much better light and surroundings!

FV Larvae

Aaaaaand they're cute again! Sort of.

FV test renders

First I took a render with the tail not being animated properly so it was too dark due to the shadows

 

 

 

but after animating it, the bump map stands out much more and lets the light shine onto the worm!

My first test render of the hookworm entering! FV

This video is a test for the lighting, animation and camera movement. I'll have to do it again anyways as it's not quite the right format so hit me with your feedback :D

Animating the hookworm yesterday gave me a lot of trouble as the tail tutorial inspired rig was less than perfect for the animation (and broke, unfortunately!) but after drawing out a plan on what the animation should look like suddenly it was much easier and I managed to complete at least this one! More test renders will come soon :)

Fantastic Voyage progress on foot

I have decided on model, texture, bump map and position of camera for this shot of the foot, now I just have to get my hookworm to work properly!

Fantastic Voyage Bloodstream progress

I have bump mapped my bloodstream and added a red blood cell which will get a few more companions soon. I like how the strong shadows work out, they are exactly as I imagined!

@Simon Rigging Controls glitching away from my model!

For some reason I can't move the model properly as the rigging controls doesn't stay in the same place as the model so I can't really move it up and down or forwards... What do I do?

Fantastic Voyage Test Render

I have made a little test batch render to see if my wannabe stop-motion animation works. I think it would look much better with a background, but this is a start?

Maya Tutorial Alien Blend Shapes & In-Betweens

I didn't listen to Simon giving instructions about the keyframes so mine looks more like a snail race!

Maya Wire Deformers Tutorial

Following Simon, we created a curve to manipulate the eyebrow, painted the weights to only influence the area around the eyebrows and then made the connection with the original head to give the boy expressions.

Life Drawing Last Lesson!

 

The last Life Drawing session of the year and I forgot to upload it! It was a pleasure to draw Lydia again and I'm sad that we don't have Vicky anymore, I've learnt so much!

Fantastic Voyage Hookworm skinning and rigging

Today I have worked on rigging and skinning my hookworm and while the skinning is not perfect, it's a start! It moves! I also have problems with rendering, weird errors keep appearing: // Error: *Fatal* (mental ray) : mental ray encountered a fatal error. The system may have become unstable. Please save the scene and exit Maya.
Does anyone know a permanent fix to this, I have imported my hookworm twice so far?

FV Blood Stream and Lungs progress

The bloodstream, will add bump maps next.

A little playblast of my lungs which are textured and bump mapped.

FV Hookworm bump maps test

1

2

3

Which of these bump maps look best?

Fantastic Voyage Progress on my Hookworm!

Today I have added UV maps to my model and have started experimenting with bump maps, and run across a little problem: the teeth don't show up in the render?? They are a whitish colour in Maya so should technically be there...
Any help is appreciated!

Fantastic Voyage

Today I have tweaked my hookworm model a bit so it's all combined and grouped properly and I have also found a way to make the shadows crisper and take them out of the hookworms eyes and nose! Plus Julien named him Oliver, meet Oliver the hookworm!

Maya Tutorial Rigging Techniques 4: Tail

Fantastic Voyage Hookworm Progress

I've given him a mouth so that he looks more fleshed out, also adding colour makes it more visible and as I have seen lots of images with the hookworm having rings around his body I thought I'll add some as they give additional detail to the character.

Head Close up - I don't know why the eyes are so blurry? Because I used nurbs or is something wrong with the light / shadows?

Fantastic Voyage guidelines for myself and first model

 After watching a few 1950's B-Horror films I have managed to single out a few important parts that I should include (maybe at least partly) into my own animation. They include:
- moving black and white dots all over the screen, increasing and decreasing in size for atmosphere
- slightly shaky camera
- terrible sound quality with a static background noise
- constant dramatic music
- stop motion animation techniques for anything supernatural
- the camera keeps its distance, not much emotional attachment to the characters
- often only one light source which creates impressive shadows
- not many background noises, and not many environmental noises either, only obvious noises and the dramatic music
- mostly black and light grey but not a big variety of grey tones implemented

After thinking about all my notes I decided to ditch the narrators voice and work with dramatic music instead and I will also concentrate on mimicking the stop motion animation and creating a top layer for the whole animation for nostalgic purposes.

This is the model of my hookworm so far.
Feedback please!

Edit: Some lights and different Lamberts!