Final Animation!

Now with SOUND!

Updated Chicken Texture

Old vs New!

Newest Animatic

Animated Shot 2 (Currently better than shot 1)

More Background Tests!

Rig Overlay

Rig Characteristics:

• Head/Neck acts like a Spline but with added IK functionality.
• A Follow function will allow the end of the head chain to stay put while the rest of the body moves.
• Extra Jiggle features in the Wattles and Belly.
• Spread feature in the tail feathers.

The Chicken, UV unwrapped and Shaded.

I built in some eyelids that can be animated or attached to the rig with driven keys.

Animatic

Background Composite Test

Background Test

Began doing some tweaks to the backgrounds we shot, to put a little action on them.  Here is the most recent version.  The animation is subtle, but hopefully it's enough to notice without overpowering the character:

Chicken WIP

The chicken mesh is underway.

Final Character Orthographics

Here they are!  We settled on a design, and these orthographic sketches will be taken into the modeling phase of the project:

Character Design - Phase 2

These new chickens are iterations on the characteristics we liked the best from phase one.  I tried to develop a small range of moving parts, smallest to greatest from right to left.

Chicken Anatomy and Movement Reference

Here is an amazing PDF on the anatomy and physiology of the chicken:

Anatomy and Physiology of Poultry

Good reference for Chicken movement and construction in CG.

Chickens have interesting heads....

 

A Morning Stroll (motivation for our chicken design)

 

More Chicken Character

Some in progress character designs for the chicken.  There's enough variation here that I'm confident we can cobble some workable design with which to proceed, even if we have to Frankenstein it:  "Take the beak from here, the feet from here," etc.

"A Morning Stroll" Inspiration

Cameron showed us a short animation (award-nominated!) called "A Morning Stroll" (2011).  They are offering it on demand on Vimeo, but if you're a little flexible with your morals and have light to medium Google-fu, it's available on the web.  Working on the next phase of chicken designs now, and we'll be taking some inspiration from the chicken designs they used in that short.  It's very expressive without having much form, which is exactly what we're going for.

Chicken Character

Phase one!  Some rough sketched of a chicken, and then simplifying the rendered version into some geometric shapes.  Group meeting will determine if this is the right direction, and will update with some more finished ones later on tonight.

Background Ideas

Eric found a cool thing that has neat flowing patterns.  We got really inspired to incorporate something like this into our background rendering:

 

Imagine this pattern with an animation: flowing, moving, swirling.

Lighting Reference

Trying to wrap our heads around how to show the void space/time that the chicken is inhabiting.  We came upon this scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  After a minor color correction, we got it to look like we wanted:

Original

Color Treatment

Treatment

And here is our formal treatment of the idea for the project:

Treatment

Production Schedule

Our schedule:

Production Schedule

Storyboards

We got together and made some storyboards:

Here they are a little more polished: