Pre-production - Synoptic project

The Idea

Our animation is all about the negative effects we are having on nature itself.

we personify nature to better convey emotion throughout our sequence.

Our animation starts with the beginning of an acorns journey through the environment, and progresses with his trip across varying environments.

Until final our protagonist acorn reaches the outskirts of their habitat that we are taking over, where its journey sadly ends.

Storyboard

Story Board animatic (with sound)

Production schedule

Initial Concept work - Character

Our 2nd attempt at concept art for the main character & concept of potential second character, a dog.

Our very first character concept design, made on Photoshop.

A rough sketch of how we imagined the character to look.

Improvement of character art with added detail and a colour pallet.

Developed the dog artwork adding in skeletal joints and refining colours.

Concept art for the big tree which is where the acorn comes from.

Initial Concept work - Environment

For the environment concept art, we all worked on different versions of each scene so that we would have variety of options.

research on the subject & production methods

For research, we looked into rigging. This plays the animation process.

• looking at rigging tutorials on you-tube as well as researching websites such as rigging 101.

• we were able to get a basic understanding of setting up a virtual skeleton that affect the characters joints and they move.

• IK rigging vs FK rigging

Initial assets (3D model tests)

We created models and assets using MAYA in order to test rigging and rendering.

MAYA also allowed us to create different proportioned character models as an example to how they wound look.

We created a drat scene to test lighting using Arnold and to represent where items will be placed in the scene.

We did this by creating a series of rocks, a leaf and acorn; before Then compiling together on a plane with some example tree stumps from Mud-box.

We created rig test by using better modeled version of the acorn's leg, this allowed us to secure each joint and test the capabilities of the rig.