Work in progress... fmp

Since it's been a while since I posted on here, I thought I'd share a little bit more of what I'm working on this year. First is my final major project, which is a short animation set in a dystopia universe, very much inspired by Blade Runner. I will probably do a post at some point explaining the story, but for now here's some concept and 3D mockups of what I've got so far...

The environment consists of a victorian designed room with a wall that's been blown out so that it gives this epic veiw of the cityscape in the background. The 1st initial concept (above), shows this best. 

The pictures beneath are a 3D mockup/photoshop hybrid that is very temporary. Right now the only object in the scene is the piano, but the final environment will be cluttered, filled with debris and rubble. However, I rendered it out to play around with the colours in photoshop, and see which would make for the best lighting.

This first one (below) is the direct render from Softimage, with added ambient occlusion, and the lighting seems very washed out and soft. Since it is rather fussy tweaking settings in Softimage, I decided to render it out in its initial state and then paint the colours in/tweak the shadows in Photoshop instead, to give a more instant feel for what was working.

From this...

to this...

So in this one (above), I quickly added in a backdrop for the city, and went to town with the blues in the foreground. I wanted the room to look cold, but again the light is a bit too dominant still. One of the things my personal tutor commented on was that the blue was too soft a shade, suggesting opting for a green instead to contrast with the red.

So in this one, I've gone with a shade of turqoise green whilst keeping certain elements (like the piano) with that reddish tint. Combined with a darker ambient occlusion to really make the light bits stand out, and already it's looking far more atmospheric.

Lastly this is taking all the red out of the city, and it looks freeeezing in there. What a difference the right colour makes. I'm not totally decided yet on which combination I'm going to opt for, but I've been fascinated by the whole process. The possible gripe with this new setup is that it really does look like I'm ripping off blade runner now. Damn.

There is also a memory sequence in the film that I am planning to do in 2D, which you can see a test image of below.

I thought I'd also post this last image of the head reference of my character for the piece. I've roughed in the topology lines for side of the head for modelling reference, so I thought it might be interesting to show... Oh and she will definitely have hair too, at some point...

Just to point out, also, her lips aren't open in the front sketch, it is the outline of her top lips to help with modelling