8

Rationale:

Fantastic Mr. Fox tells of a family looking for a new home in a golden rustic landscape of woods. These houses exist in a tree, and I wanted to create another potential home that Fox may have looked at. Using many reference points from the movie, as well as background on Wes Anderson an his personal style, I modeled a 2 bedroom home around this aesthetic. Emphasis on brown textures as well as much wooden surfaces and objects - they are living in a tree after all. From there, the house was made to look as though it was for sale - opposed to a furbished home. This was achieved by the orderly scattering of objects in a realistic manner; paintbrushes, hammers etc. The camera follows the first person view of Fox as he walks through the home, with an initial pan to set the scene, much like the scene in the movie of the same situation.
BTW there are two pages of workbook, my skin just makes it not so obvious to tell...

7

Final

https://vimeo.com/77363671

When I actually started animating the camera I saw the ease in and outs put on the graph. I know the sheet said to make them linear, I thought because this was like a house viewing, it might be good to make the camera look like the actual first person view of Fox walking through. So I put the camera at eye level and walked through the rooms, no particular fast movements or twirls. I didn't want too much emphasis on the hallway so I did a fade in through the window to give it a coherent fade. I warmed up the scene and desaturated it as the colours were quite strong and almost plastic looking. The shiny-ness of some of the textures were less than optimal after looking at it over and over. I didn't like the kids bedroom wallpaper, but I didn't think the lambert or antistropic modes fit either so I chose phong. To compensate for the reelections of the shiny-ness of it, I messed with the curves in Premiere to tone down the whites. I also took away a bit of contrast to make it look more rustic and true to the movie. I used ambient lights that would be in the ceiling position, as well as some natural-style lighting through the windows of the bedrooms.

6

Soundtrack.
Considering how it runs, I want some sound to go with the video.
At the moment it will be a pan of the hallway as discussed. From there I will go into one of the rooms (not sure if I will cut or not) and then swirl around to see all the detail. Because its a pretty big map and it take a bit of travel to see it all, I would dedicate about 5 seconds for the hallway shot, leaving about 5 for each room and 5 redundant seconds for fades and travel etc.

 Camera.
Roughly what it will move like:

After looking through the soundtrack, composed by Alexandre Desplat, the third one I thought would flow well. Mr Fox. in the Fields. I will throw that onto the final once its on After Effects. The warmth can be bumped up in there too as well as the transitions. I already think I will have to knock out the hallway wall to get the panning shot so I might do the twirls around the rooms first, render those, and then delete the wall and do that bit last.

5

Kitchen references.

The same model types. Identifiable characteristics in bold over detail.

My version.

Finished bedroom.

More development in the living room.

4

After watching this interview, I got a lot more insight into the fine details surrounding some of the creative decisions and the inspirations of Anderson. I particularly like the scene near the end where it shows the lined up objects that Wes took photos of while he was at Roald Dahl's house. It very much reflects the simplistic and elegant chairs and tables I had pictured in my head. There will have to be an assortment of wood textures to accommodate these different objects. The fabric based objects are also brown primarily. All fits within the colour scheme.

Textures for new objects.

Going back to the hammer example I made a version of my own here. The shelf under it is influenced directly by the interview above. As the models are of miniature size compared to real-life components, that would mean the wood grain would be a lot more pronounced, ie. it stays the same size no matter the size of the object. For this reason I thought it might be relevant to make a more pronounced grain than might be normal in a 1:1 ratio environment.

I also didn't want every wall to be wood, so I made the other bedroom have a painted wood texture instead. The white rim was done becuase in that interview, Roald Dahl had similar around his home.

I did run into a problem. My original house frame as an extruded plane didn't seem to work very well. Most of the textures applied to it would fade away. I think there might be a certain amount of memory that can be allocated to the plane? After that it just turns to grey. That is what was shown in the earlier post where the wall looked funny. Luis told me the best thing to do would be to make boxes for each individual room. This means I will have to go back and recreate the rooms and apply UVs to them again :(
Luis also suggested to make the sheets from a plane, as I wanted to make a realistic and easy fabric texture using an nCloth off a Youtube tutorial. As the fabrics won't be moving it was a bad idea he thought, as well as being extremely intensive on resources. My attempts of cloth below using plane.

I played with bump mapping for the kitchen because I wanted brick, but there was no convincing models I could find. They were all too rough and gritty. I wanted a smooth brick so what I did was make the wall a grey concrete like texture and then physically make bricks in a white reflective texture. It is easy enough to duplicate these using the side view. The red fridge was a bit over the top, so I thought a completely neutral white kitchen might look best.

Progress. Floor plan and textures more or less mapped out. Beginning to shape objects. Boxes and things with sheets on them are the obvious start. From there I will make little models to place throughout ie the hammer and paintbrushes? Bucket etc. The star carpet on the kids bedroom is a reference to the wallpaper off the movie (stars and the moon). Repeats of certain textures keep a consistency and flow throughout the rooms ie. floor in kitchen and bedroom, walls of hallway and living room as well as carpet.

3

Now I have to consider the models in more detail.
The position of the items may not need particular planning - in the same way someone would leave a paintbrush on top of a shelf in a random alignment. I may put a paintbrush and hammer etc. among some basic (opposed to fancy, simple functional items that would not be particularly wanted) items across the rooms. The random arrangement of a somewhat messy nature should be ideal.

Just like in the shot of the panning camera of the rooms in the previous post, items of use include these. Working cloth to line some surfaces might make the scene more realistic also.

Minus the 3D effect, this scene would very well represent a final lounge/kitchen scene. Lighting accounted for (roof). Basic items such as chair, table, stove and bench.

My plan of kitchen layout.

This is the aesthetic of the movie, wooden chairs of a basic toy-like look. Slightly out of place brick walls. Bump mapping could aid in making a similar effect. Elegant overall orange tint. Pillars.

A good example of the potential aesthetic is the difference in these hammers:

The second animated one is more in line with Fantastic Mr. Fox. Toy-like. Exaggerated main features. Lack of fine detail. Looks more like a toy-model. This is how I would intend my objects to look. The fact that it would be easier to model too is a bonus.

2

After starting to actually use Maya it doesn't seem to feasible to make the tree AND a whole detailed room.

The leaves could be easily textured as a flat plane and duplicated, but positioning and the complex tree branches seem like a daunting task for a 6 week project. Instead I may focus on the house idea still, but maybe add another room or two. What makes this more feasible is the fact that if the house is for sale it won't actually have furniture. This means there is less objects and therefore I can make 3 or 4 rooms to make up for the items.

A good scene to show this is the pan of when they first move in:

The pan of the camera travels along the entirety of the house, showing all the rooms in a linear movement of the camera. I will probably have to make a hallway with the end wall chopped off to get the camera in. But this seems like a nice way to represent the setting of the house without having to make an entirely new scene of a complex tree and grass.

The doors would all have to line up perpendicular with the hallway for this to look as such.

Floor plan:

This could fit with my original idea of a long kitchen with the utensils on the wall. Since there is the children's room and the parents' room, they could be textured appropriately to match the scenario.

Looking at the room of the kids in the movie:

The cross-sectional wallpaper, still rustic in colour, is reminiscent of a typical human child's bedroom - vinyl stars. It should be easy enough to find a similar wallpaper texture.

Along with staple wood textures for walls/floor/beams etc. heres what I have so far:

I then drew a plane on Maya, created sections, and moved them to the desired arrangement. Then I extruded these edges up and gave them thickness.

The moving in process would involve boxes, sheets, hammer and nails, among other things. All of which I am intending to place in my composition. The kitchen was way too long going across the whole width so I made a separate room on the left. For an ensuite?

There seems to be a weird thing going on with the walls, they sometimes fade out like this example above. Ask about it next class?

A lot of the textures I downloaded have visible joins. I had to get the UV mapping precise to have these elephants match up. I really liked the cyan and gold texture above (2nd from last example) but it wasn't seamless :( Looking at more of my textures, about half of them aren't either. I will have to find new ones and make sure they are seamless. Else photoshop them.