Loving both the original thread and nunnehi's tl;drs.

Hey Roo... how did you get into this kinda stuff?


Also...Nunnehi, that was a really cool story. I am glad I took the time to read that huge post.

Thanks Tapir and gambit.

TLDR Warning, I'm going for the Full Life Story here.

As a child I was good at math. Whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to be my parents would reply for me 'accountant', in reality I had no idea. But this, and other factors, made me conditioned to think that a wanted a high paying job, irrelevant of how much I actually wanted to do the job. When I was 15 I did two weeks of work experience, one at a radio station and one at the head office of a building society (do the US have these? It's like a bank but with no shareholders. To the consumer, it may as well be a bank). At the time I was looking at being an investment banker or actuary or something like that. The first week was fun, interesting and I learned a lot. I worked voluntarily at that radio station for the next 39 months before I left to go to university. The week at the building society was one of the most tedious weeks of my life. I spent half a day in each department and every one was utterly boring. The environment was oppressive and only one person there seemed happy, and he was being promoted every 3 months. It may have been utterly tedious but I certainly don't regret it. It made me realize that I didn't care about money and that a career I would enjoy was much more important.

So, cue rethink of whole life. I had very little idea of what I wanted to do but I knew I was pretty smart and at a good school so essentially it was a case of pick what I want to do most and go for it. A couple of months later Wall-E was released, at the time I knew I loved the film but it wasn't until the DVD release towards the end of the year that its true significance on me would become clear. On the 2nd disc of the release was the feature length documentary Pixar Story. Boom. I knew I wanted to work for Pixar. At the time I didn't realize that I definitely wanted to go into animation, but I set my sights of film and television. Not long later, it's time to pick A level subjects (these are the subjects students in the UK study for the last 2 years of high school) and I surprise most people, except my closest friends, by picking no sciencey subjects at all. For GCSE (equivalent to the first 2 years of high school) math at my school was split into sets. I was in set 1 and, despite having grades at the top of the set, was one of only two people in the set who didn't take math forward to A level. Many people thought I'd gone off the deep end. My parents, who didn't even take A levels themselves, however were mostly supportive and, given that most of these people seemed to be headed on the same path I was before the building society, I didn't let it bother me.

I spend the next 2 years just trying to slog/glide through school whilst working on my portfolio in my spare time. The work pays off, I pick the unis I want to apply to, I get into all of them and get a full scholarship to one of my top 2 choices.

Fastforward to the present. I've just finished my first year and I'm dead set on animation even though my course is Film and TV production (although if truth be told there is very little TV on the course). In the meantime Up and Toy Story 3 have been released and, after working on quite a few film projects, I realized that the actual production of live action filmmaking didn't appeal to me that much and that story was really what I was interested in. It's worth noting that my first step towards film was learning how to screenwrite, which is something I did in between the work experience and the release of Wall-E. The first screenwriting book I read was 'Save The Cat' by Blake Snyder. It's slightly derivative but very accessible. It made me realise that screenwriting and story aren't obscure arts that you can either do or you can't, they involve principles that can be analyzed, broken down and studied. To me it seems that animated films take care of story more than any others. Years are spent on storyboards and reels, whereas there might be only a few months spent on storyboards etc on a live action film. What's more, in animation, everything is almost perfect. Shots are reviewed and refined until they're exactly what the director wants. This is less true at studios that aren't Pixar, as they have lower budgets, but there's still a greater degree of control. After watching Wall-E and Up and can safely say that spontaneity is overrated.

So, I want to get into (3D) animation. Therefore, even though I want to work in story, I'm teaching myself how to animate. Part of the reason for this is I want to make a couple of animated shorts before I finish university for my portfolio and I can't do that without knowing how to animate! Over the next couple of years I'll be doing all kinds of projects like this to improve in various areas. I'm hoping to use this and maybe another 3D still image project as a springboard to my first animated short. I'm currently working on a screenplay and also a live action short as well. I'm also reading everything I can about story, animated film, pre viz, digital art etc etc (I have nearly every art book that has been produced for a 3D animated movie and I just subscribed to 3D artist, 3D world, Advanced Photoshop, Digital Artist and Imagine FX. That may seem excessive but the people at those magazines produce pro work and help me keep in touch with the industry as well as teaching me new software and techniques to help my work). Basically I'm doing anything and everything I can to get myself to a point where I'm ready to enter the industry, pretty much starting with this project. I have of course done many other projects before but whilst the portfolio I submitted for my university applications may have been deemed impressive for a high schooler I know it's not good enough for a pro portfolio and this is the first project where I really want to ensure that I'm producing something that could easily be professional quality. If I deem the image I produce to not be good enough I will look at what went wrong and try again.

So, how did I get into something like this? I suppose the TLDR answer is I want to do it so I am doing it. I didn't really get into it and most of my skills are self taught. I learned what materials to buy for Larry's model (i.e. epoxy putty) from a different forum I found through google, I got the whole idea of producing a model before making the image from Pixar and Sony and I'll be using 3D artist to teach me how to use the software to produce the image. If you want to 'get into' this sort of stuff then there's no better way than just doing it. You can't expect someone to just come along and tell you how to do it or offer you a job doing it, just go!

Not quite as long as yours nunnehi but still a 4 figure word count!

These tl;dr's are great. What the non-music parts of this forum have been lacking in quantity, it's really starting to make up in quality.

Apologies for the lack of updates for the last couple of days. In part I've been busy and in part I've been failing to learn Modo. It's easily the most tedious part of the process so in the free time I had today I went back to the clay to block out the T-Rex. To be able to do that I needed clay!



On Wednesday a mysterious box arrived! I wondered what could be in it. It was a puzzling conundrum and one not easily solved! Thankfully I had my trusty knife on hand to defeat the box in a gripping encounter.




My reward for such a momentous achievement, a bounty of clay!



Just in case you're wondering. Yes, buying one kilogram bags is an expensive way to buy clay! I wanted to stick with the same brand of clay for the whole model though and having it in separate 1kg bags has its benefits.

Larry developed some cracks whilst drying, I think it's mostly my fault for not working the clay enough before applying it and perhaps partially down to it being cheap clay. I tried to fix them today, I'll see how he dries again and I've going to take extra care when finishing the T-Rex now to ensure it doesn't happen again. Had I not made an armature then his head could've fallen off from the cracks. As it happens, the effect of the cracks is purely aesthetic but annoying nonetheless.










Apologies for the lighting but it was midnight when I took the photos. I think the final composition will be somewhere in between the bottom two photos but it will be poster size, portrait so you'll be able to see the rocks covering the T-Rex (to be added tomorrow hopefully) an some palm trees and sky above Larry.

Because I made Larry so big I haven't been able to position T-Rex in exactly the position. Ideally he'd be a few inches further forward so Larry can really get into his face.

This is awesome! Thanks for sharing and keep it coming!

Great thread man. Really looking forward to following this every step of the way.

Hi! Although I'm currently working for a client who seems to expect me to do work every waking hour of the day I managed to sneak in a couple of hours to all but finish blocking out the scene.

Last night I was feeling pretty low. I'd just received a whole bunch of work from my client that was going to take up the whole of the weekend. As I perused my newest issue of 3D Artist, which arrived 2 days ago, I thought about all the things that I couldn't do in there. Incidentally it actually has an article pretty much identical to what I'm doing here, going from concept art to clay model to computer image but anyway, I know I'm only 19 and that I don't even need to be able to do everything in 3D to have a career in animation but that doesn't stop me from wanting to be able to. Anyway, at 9:30pm my time when I started working on the scene I was still feeling slightly down. By 11:00pm I was slapping what was at the time a 2.5kg clay cliff whilst watching Suit's (which came back strong, by the way) Mike Ross quote Goodfellas and maniacally laughing. The Goodfellas quote wasn't funny, but maniacal laughter usually doesn't have a discernible cause, that's why it's maniacal. Anyway, clients suck, clay dinosaurs are fun and I probably need to get out more, or at least stop inhaling clay fumes.



This is roughly the composition I'll go for with the final image.




Ariel view! Ignore the fact that T-Rex doesn't have a back end, he was born that way, don't make fun.




I didn't bother using dowel or anything to secure the cliff. I didn't bother bulking it out with anything either but where's the fun in that? It meant I 'had' to use 7.5 kg of clay today but who cares! That's why I bought the 12mm MDF and not the 6mm! YAY DINOSAURS, WEEEEEEE!!!!!! It did mean that it was a little prone to sagging though so I used some epoxy putty to secure it. I mixed too much though and had some left over so I made this:



It's a total waste of epoxy putty but why not! (The A.R. stands for Alrighty Roo if you were wondering)



Roo stands in front of his creating, standing tall! You can see by far the worst crack that has formed on Larry. As I said in my last post, because of the armature it's purely aesthetic but annoying nonetheless. For some reason my patch job looked like it worked but then when that dried like magic the crack was back again. I'm going to let it dry completely and then use superfine white epoxy putty, which I ordered at the same time as my metal tools, to fix it.



I was feeling wild so I added a pterodactyl on top of the cliff. It probably won't even be in the final image but why not?

Putting so much clay down today, and it being 2 days since the T-rex was blocked out means I have essentially boxed myself into a corner and simply have to smooth and finish this tomorrow, clients be damned! Well, it is Sunday. After that all I'll have to do is a little bit of background foliage.

Tomorrow I'll take some better photos when it's light.

It's such a waste of clay but that makes me love it even more. I wish I could throw another few kilos on there just for fun but now I've only got 1kg left.

I don't know why I don't do this sort of thing every day. I'll be glad when I can say goodbye to these clients, then I can!

I wish I'd made the board bigger, used about 20kg more clay and built an entire canyon twice as high and 3 times as wide and T-Rex's full body, maybe with a few Compsognathuses in the background and a river with a towering waterfall. Maybe next time!

My clients are driving me insane:

'Oh hey, you know all those audio files that you outputted so they peak at -3 db? Yeah, even though you said you can't make them louder without causing distortion can you make them louder? I know you can do it because this other audio recorded without you when we had the gain set way too high and is totally totally filled with bucket loads of distortion is louder so that means you can make the other stuff louder, right? No? Do it anyway.'

DOUBLE FACEPALM.JPG

So now I have to waste time making my work deliberately worse and re-render every file. OH JOY! I don't even know why they want it louder but now I'll be spending my evening normalizing and hardlimiting it all trying to push it as far as I can without causing distortion for what I perceive to be No Reason At All.

Sometimes I feel like they're just giving me any work they can think of because they can. My theory is that I think this because that is exactly what they're doing. I'd tell them to take this job and shove it but they haven't paid me yet so I have to grin and bear it for now.

Anyway, I digress. Whilst stuff was rerendering earlier today I managed to take some time to clean up the rockface and the T-Rex and I remodelled Terry (or should that be Ptery?) the Pterodactyl and built him a proper nest. Here's some better pictures.





I'm hoping that later tonight I can build some background trees and practically finish this clay model but it might have to wait until tomorrow. I'm adamant that no matter how crazy my clients get I will finish this tomorrow even if I have to stay up until 3am again like last night.

If it makes you feel better, your audio levels they're trying to have you deliver at would get rejected for broadcast anywhere in the world. A typical broadcast limiter was set at -8dB on the digital scale (sometimes -10dB). The amount of compression you use inside that limitation was up to you. Now, in the U.S., they are giving us a dialnorm standard (look up EBU standards for UK stuff, just to get an idea), that will lower the overall dialog levels of mixes exponentially from what they once were. Because of that change, we are now allowed more room for music and sound effects volume, but everything always fits around the dialog levels anyway, so it's not going to change the world in that regard.

The internet audio levels are almost always a disaster, and that stuff just makes me sigh....

By the way, I love your little side character you made, and am looking forward to the final rendering of everything.

I've tried explaining why no competent person working with audio would ever ask for audio to be made louder when the entire waveform's range is already practically -10 to -3 and I think the client even understood it. My theory is that in between then and now he spoke to his partner and his hot headed partner insisted that he tell me to make it louder anyway, the immutable laws of the universe be damned!

I'm going to send them an email now to set them straight, essentially, and not just about the audio but about all of the ridiculous things they are doing. It's gotten out of control and, despite its advanced state, they're going to kill their own project before it's even ready for release. I won't clutter up my thread with this but if you want to hear about it PM me (I'm not sure if it's funny or just sigh-inducing).


Anyway, back on point: trees!





I might add some more foliage to the final image, I haven't decided yet but I won't be doing any more in clay. In fact the clay model is pretty much finished aside from Larry's repair work and so now I'll be moving on to the computer work. I might not have time to do any tomorrow but I'll see how it goes.

i like it.

This is an awesome thread. I once tried to learn Blender with aspirations of working in animation, but failed royally. You seem to have a better artistic personality. Never worked with/heard of modo. Im assuming it involves animation and not just character modeling?