Blocking part 1

Have done the first lot of blocking for the animation, mostly to do with the waking of the robot after it has recharged.  Have noticed a few things that are annoying about the rig, but most of the problems turned out to be from me setting keys on the wrong control groups(such as the one the controls the orientation of the finger controls).  I believe I can have most of the blocking done by at latest Tuesday hopefully giving me enough time to clean up before Friday.  Still need to make the meshes for the environment have done some but have not put them together yet and figured out their orientation in the scene hopefully will have this done by Tuesday as well.

Strike a Pose

Here is what I achieved today.  I finished the rig and now my robot can move.  Only thing not done is the wheel but I will figure it out and do later in the week.

Almost rigged!

The character is almost rigged just the eyes and the eyebrows to go and some polishing on some of the controls to make them easier to use and select.

Learning rigging

The last few days I have been watching a lot of videos on rigging.  One site that I fund quite useful was Poly face.  It has an entire collection of videos on rigging characters for free.  The ones I found useful for this project where the hand and arm tutorials and the mech rig also gave me ideas on how to rig the arm of my character, though I have yet to do that and time is running short.  I plan to spend a good portion of the weekend at Te Aro rigging and starting blocking for the main shots of the animation.

Character Model

I have fixed up a few things on the model mostly to do with edge hardness.  Now that this is done I am going to look up some tutorials on piston IK to make the arms work as I want them to and also some tutorials on hand rigging.

Sunday

On Sunday I did a few hours of animating and managed to get the majority of the animation and a bit of the lighting and camera stuff done.  Should be able to render the first scenes on Tuesday during the lecture and be able to put them up on the blog then.

CCDN 271 Assignment 1 Hand in

 Lars Hopman

A Quiet Revolution produced by Earth Council, is a short documentary outlining the importance of water in our world and what certain individuals are doing to help maintain it. There are three cases presented each looking at a different point of water conservation. The first is rainwater harvesting in rural India, second is water pollution in Slovakia, and reforestation in Kenya which helps the rain soak into the earth and allow for fertile earth.

The film does show some great points for designing for water management for the 90%. The first is how important water is to the economy. The first case outlines this clearly, the village, which went from having not enough food for themselves, to having excess to sell, after sorting their water shortage.

Next, solutions must be affordable and upkeep-able by the people who are using it. As most of people in these examples are low income villages they cannot afford to pay for powering massive water pump that runs on petrol or uses power as most of them do not even have power lines to their village.

Lastly, sometimes rather than looking at what we have now we should look back at what was used before to manage water and improve those designs, especially when designing for low or nil energy cost.

The documentary main aim is to show how little governments are doing to solve these problems and how individuals have to step and do it themselves. The documentary does this by emphasizing the problems dramatically, help along by narration from Meryl Streep. This leads to questioning if the problems are really that bad, but with the interviews with experts, most of whom work for the UN or are Nobel Prize winners it does lend validity to their argument. Also helping is quoting that the united governments of the world spend ten times the amount of money on military than the required amount for water management which is not yet being met.

As a designer watching this documentary we should see an opportunity to help our world, not for finical gain now but for the economy it will build in the future allowing for further design opportunity and possible greater gain in the future.

Reference

SGIVideosOnline (2007, May 29). A Quiet Revolution [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfB0doRI_dc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HveMaSP6TZw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feW_NxpCnCo