Emperor and Concubines: beginning a new year of work

A picture showing how much work I've completed on the Emperor and his concubines so far, and plans for the work to come as we enter the new year.

I've reached the stage with these characters where I'm forced to put them in their final poses before I can continue sculpting details like skin wrinkles and, even more so, cloth.

Hooray for transpose master

Today we started arranging our existing models into very rough poses just to make our pre-vis animation a little more interesting for the hand-in tomorrow, and have discovered that it is indeed possible to do all the posing in ZBrush. We had been biting our nails a bit over this, wondering whether we would have to spend lots of time rigging and skinning.

All the examples below were created in less than half hour each, and very little additional sculpting has been done to correct artifacts of the transpose process. With more time invested, this method is certainly suitable for the film, and incredibly fast.

Obviously for the final poses where we spend more time, the poses will be more dynamic and detailed.

Emperor's Concubines

Here's my work so far on the emperor's concubines. Their grotesqueness is meant to represent the corruption of the society that exists around this arena and moment in time, in that weird ideals of beauty are a fairly good sign of a civilisation going to pot. Thus, they both have weak chins and fairly saggy bodies.

Some Environment work

Here is some of the environment work that I have been working on towards the film.

The idea was to try and keep it quite romanised in terms of look, but really push detailing that will bring out the style and look of the film/environment. Firstly here is the emperors podium. This is pretty much the base mesh, which has yet to have details worked such as sculpted egraving details on the builing at the back, the two gold plaques on the pillars, and most importantly the main blank section in the front bottom piece is planned to have a carved piece that is similar to The battle of portonaccio.



And the quick concept for it:





Secondly I have been working on the entrance up from the slave pits. This is still very much w.i.p, and we are debating whether to use the gates or not, it is likely they will have to go as the camera will move up through them. One thing to definitely be changed is making the chains a lot thicker...

And some fairly random concepts...

Here we have a slavemaster, the champion, and a big guy holding a hammer.





The slavemaster possibly doesn't fit with the whole Roman theme, and the champion needs further work to make his armour grander and more eye-catching. And the big guy with the hammer was a very late night job and can pretty much be ignored...hate it.

Sally the gladiator

Some work on the big mace-wielding man machine:

Pollex development and previz update!

So heres our first draft of the previz. Its a good start but has alot that needs adjusting tweaking and redoing. Sound is also a placeholder for the moment aswell.

Polllex Previz first draft from Tim Mehmet on Vimeo.

And here is a look at what ive been working on so far. The first is a couple development sketches for the minotaur, the final design is the best compromise to something that works as both a roman gladiator and a brutish bull like figure.
I also have a couple colour sketchs ive been toying with. For these i went with a fairly saturated warm feel, with strong yellows and purples. However other ideas are being explored and worked on.

Emperor progress

Here's a wireframe of the basemesh of the emperor, and a Zbrush WIP after about an hour and a half of sculpting.

New Emperor Design

After many people opined that the film needed to be realistic and gritty, I decided to redesign the emperor, shedding all cartoon-like elements.

Emperor concepts

Concepts for the emperor. He will not look so cartoony in the actual film but I really tried to push the design at this stage so that as it becomes toned down during the modelling process, it will still be very strong and original.

A gladiator and a hydra

Some concepts. We've since decided not to have any mythological creatures in the film now, but the hydra concept shows our line of thinking: if we were to have fantasy creatures they would have been very grim and visceral designs...not like typical fantasy but nasty and authentic feeling. Hence I based the hydra on crocodiles, triceratops and komodo dragons.

Now we have decided to hint at mythology instead. Thus, we have a gladiator in a minotaur helmet, three dogs on the same chain to represent cerberus the three-headed dog, and perhaps other such references.

A few shot concepts

Here are some concepts created as we worked out the storyboard for the film. We began to think in terms of "set pieces", i.e. self-contained little tableuxs that the camera would arrive at, explore, and then move on to the next. Thus, the process of storyboarding involved designing the poses of the set piece, and then working out the camera movements that would best display it.







These are concepts for poses.





These are more developed shot concepts, almost at storyboard level.

Stages of the film

Here are some concepts I did to display the various stages of the film. They are not shot composition or character concepts, and don't represent the final look of the film in any way, they're purely to show how the film will progress in a very broad and general way.



First we see some slaves or novice warriors awaiting entrance to the arena, in a corridor leading off of the main fighting floor.


Then we are shown various scenes of gladiators fighting, dead or wounded.


We begin to see that some gladiators are looking towards the centre of the arena.


It turns out their attention is focused on a gladiator about to kill another, and in turn his attention is on another area.


That area turns out to house the emperor, whose impending final decision is being awaited.

Hello World

This blog will chronicle the production of the short film "Pollex". We are three students in our third year at the University of Hertfordshire.

Matt Aldridge BA(Hons)Games Art http://www.matthewjamesaldridge.co.uk
Tim Mehmet BA(Hons)3D Animation http://www.limbo3d.co.uk
Jeff Hatton BA(Hons)3D Animation http://www.jeffhatton.co.uk


As none of us are animators, we needed to produce a short film that would display our modelling skills without being spoiled by poor animation, and also felt that animating would be a waste of time seeing as we all want to be employed as modellers. Thus, we decided to cut out animation almost entirely, and produce a completely still film with only the camera moving, in the vein of the recent Philips advert, and various games trailers and experimental films.

So, "Pollex" captures a single moment of time in a gladiatorial arena, the pivotal moment surrounding a champion about to deliver a coup de grace to his defeated foe, awaiting the turn of the emperor's thumb. The camera will explore the action in the arena, then reveal the champion and his victim, and finally show the emperor, who will then turn his thumb, ending the film.