Setting the stage

I have spent time looking for pictures of theatre stages on google images to see what I could find for ideas for the stage sets etc. I want to keep it as simple as possible so not to detract from the dancers, neutral colours but still in keeping with a realistic stage.

Here are few of the images I found:-


http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/graphics/empire_theatre_stage.jpg


http://theaterseats.htroom.com/images/TheaterStage03.jpg


http://www.theglasgowstory.com/images/TGSB00373_m.jpg


http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/06/15/theatrespotlight460.jpg

Ithink the last picture is more like the idea I had simple but effective. Here is a still image of my theatre set, I though I might put a cut out silhouette audience in After Effects in due course.




I have slightly changed the stage now that I have the dancer on it. The changes are more for scale and realism issues, I have expanded the space on the stage behind the curtains which the audience probably won't see but I wanted to make sure it looked real. I have also added a bit of detail around the stage so it's not so plain.

Dance moves

I have been studying the film clips and shorts that I found on YouTube to see if I could put down some basic dance moves on paper, basic stances and strong outline shapes, I have a series of about 13 strong silhouette shapes that I'm going to use. I wanted to storyboard prior to starting the animation so I think I will sit with the music playing and get some inspiration. The dance is going to be slow movements as I don't want to make things impossible to animate well for myself. Up until this point the animating side of the whole process is the bit that I'm least comfortable with so I need to work really hard to achieve what I have in my mind.

Animating

I have decided that I will get on animating the first character of my dance troupe and try and copy the key sets that I make to each new girl in due course. I feel that I need to get at least the lead female dancing and then the others can fall into place once I am happy with the results. For obvious reasons I would like to do good animation not just a vast quantity amount of bad animation. I'm feeling quite positive. The other thing that I have decided to leave until later is the few accessories that make the girls look different, I can always add them towards the end.

Blend shapes

I can't decide whether to do blend shapes with the characters face so that she has expression, I should do I guess because I don't want her to appear stiff and unnatural, the only thing is that I don't want to move her face too much. Maybe the odd smile and blink would be sufficient. I might just stick with three basic blend shapes for animating, smile, left eye open/close, right eye open/close.

Rigging the model

I have had a few problems as I expected rigging the model. I found a tutorial to help as I felt that it was important to have a good rig for moving the character around and to try and make the animation process as simple as possible. I wanted to have inverse kinematics for the arms as I thought it would be easier to position them by dragging the wrist instead of rotating the shoulder and elbow joints. The arms are a little dysfunctional in some of the positions, but I feel at this stage they are a good as I can do with the time constraints, I feel that I need to start animating in order to meet the deadline. I have had a few problems as well with deformation of my character when moving certain parts, when I finished rigging and bound the skin to the skeleton I have quite a bad deformation under the arm which meant that the side of the body came out as the arm went up in the air, I have sorted most of the issues out using the paint weight tool which adjusts which skeleton joint has influence over the different areas of the skin. I'm still struggling to get the paint weight tool to function properly and I'm wondering whether I have a bug in my Maya programme, it certainly doesn't appear to be doing what the tutorial says!
Anyway I think I've fixed the problems to a sufficient degree to animate. I can't be a perfectionist unfortunately as don't have the time, I need to leave it and move on.

Character colourways

I've just stretched the model and changed the colourway.
I can't decide at this point whether to make all the clothes the same and just vary the eye colour, hair colour and accessories ie. cane, bowler hat, top hat, feather etc.
I may need to adapt the face slightly to suit so that each girl is slightly different.

Here are a few more render pictures:-

Decisions, decisions

Initially when I started this project I was going to draw stylised sketches of the final dancer idea that I had and model it in Maya. Whilst I am still modelling in Maya I have decided to model the character using photos of myself. I felt that the models I have produced so far are only as good as the sketches I have done and because of this mine aren't up to scratch, in my mind, what better than using real reference materials. Don't get me wrong I am not looking to produce a model that looks like myself I just feel that the photos are a strong base to start from. I don't wish to share these pictures of me in my underwear with you but I have got to a stage where I am almost finished the generic character for the dance troup.

Here are the single render shots that I have done to demonstrate where I'm up to:-







I'm pleased with the results.