Imps! Progress Report:
The images above are part of a lighting test
6
heads by Jamie
21 Dec 2003: The lava is made from plastic beads scattered on a translucent perspex drawing board, lit from below. I am planning to work with bunches of fibre-optics to create flaming torches and other light sources. Since these will trimmed from a fake Christmas tree (slyly bought for the purpose) I have to be patient for a few more days...
The larger devil is made from plasticine which has been shaped around a Lego Bionicle plastic armature. These have interchangeable ball and socket joints, which allowed me to re-jig the legs to reverse the 'knees' to be more fawn-like. They are easily available in a range of sizes and this one cost just four pounds (about $6) rather than the $69 stainless steel armatures sold by Armaverse. The imp mk1 has an armature of florist's wire.
25 Dec 2003: While researching the word 'imps' for potential conflicts of branding and to see what perceptions of the word may be held by others, I found http://web.media.mit.edu/~kbrussel/imps/
which lead me to http://www.didi.com/www/areas/products/monkey2/
a promising system for transferring stop-motion style animation directly
into a virtual 3D package. If I can use this for some of the animation
and RealViz
ImageModeler to input the initial modelling data, the efficient workflow
may help me to achieve far more than someone with my limited experience
might deserve...
image used by kind permission of D.I.D inc
31 December 2003: The last progress update to be featured at www.jednet.co.uk as I have taken 15MB of free hosting (in the name of F. Imps!) at www.southsurf.com/~imps and also bought the domain www.imps.tv for $50 which I plan to redirect to the free hosting.
Now I have a sequence in mind which I need to storyboard before it is forgotten!