Other Characters

The characters/objects that are going to be in the animations are;
A - Adrian, Apple and Ant
B - Boo, Ball and Book
C - Chair, Cat and Cow

Mr.Muzamir suggested that the rest of the characters should have the same style as Adrian. Now that we've broken down the list, we narrowed down our characters to the Ant, Cat and Cow that would require the same style as Adrian.

Here are the tryouts for the character designs :D

Behold... The apple.

 The rest of the objects would probably appear in the next post. Stay tuned!

Angie & Amirah

Simple Tryout

I did a simple animation of Adrian waving to the screen using Flash. Although I'm not sure why the quality of the image is so .. pixelated. It could be because of the setting that I used when I exported it as a .gif format.

Angie.

Character re-design

For the previous character design, we received feedbacks from Mr Muzamir:

- Character has no root.

- Needs more stylization on colors, cartoons style and strokes.

- Clean up the strokes.

- 

Therefore I have done a few research on cartoon characters and the style. 

What I wanted was a character that has a human feature but at the same time cartoon-ish and stylized. 

The main character, Adrian also has a cheeky and playful nature, therefore it should reflect on its face. 

Some good examples can be seen below:

Cheeky boy characters are usually with a cap and has a mischievous look, that can be achieved through the eyes and mouth.

The style that I am interested in which has a cartoon element but also has a human feature which is noticeable.

Cartoon from "Calvin and Hobbes" is also used as reference and is my favorite style among others. 

A style that Lai Yenn was interested in is known as the chibi style which plays with proportion. It has a big head and a small body and usually comes with big eyes. 

 Characters that inspired Lai Yenn are chibi characters like Ni Hao, Kai Lan and Pucca.

 Both of us re-designed Adrian, of different styles, but the same colour scheme that we've come up with earlier. 

Left: Designed by Amirah, Right: Designed by Lai Yenn.

Amirah & Angie. 

Introduction on Adrian

"Nice to meet you! My name is Adrian!"

"Do you know what your alphabet stands for?"

"Let's find out together!" 

-Amirah & Angie 

Animating

I found a rather helpful video tutorial on animating on flash.

And I tried it out as well...

There is much work to be done...... >.>

-Amirah-

Finalized concept

Finally got the concept finalized. We were worried that our 3D modelling and animating skills is not competent enough and due to the time limit, we weren't sure if we would be able to produce something such as that.

So I have proposed a solution to the problem.

Instead of 3D model popping up once the marker is scanned, it will load a video that would seem as if the marker came to life.
The animation will be smooth and continuous between the markers, to seem as if Adrian is walking from marker to marker.

Concept board

The flash card will start off with an introductory video which is held under one flash card marker.

The main character named Adrian will introduce himself and give an intro of what experience he will take the child to throughout the flash card game. 

Each marker will be designed and the images produced would be the first frame of the animation for the flash card. This will ensure that is smooth. 

One of the storyboard

The storyboard has also been produced.(From the letters A - C)

Above is the storyboard of the letter B as an example. 

Adrian Designed.

-Amirah-

Using ARmedia

I've been searching for tutorials online for ARmedia and so far, there weren't many tutorial videos available on Youtube besides the ones that we've posted on earlier posts.

But I've manage to find a couple of videos that displays how ARmedia works on iOS and Android.
For iOS

  
For Android

I've also managed to find another video that shows how ARmedia supports animation, although the animation was done with Autodesk 3ds Max instead of Autodesk Maya.

ARmedia supports basic animations or 3ds Max.  

And on their official forum, they have several methods on overcoming some of ARmedia's limitation when using Maya. 

For instance, ARPlugin only supports several materials which are; Lambert, Blinn and Phong. Any other materials would be displayed as a grey Lambert. And as for the animations, they do not support animation systems that uses Motion Path or Constraint. Instead, they offered a solution by using a Bake Simulation technique that is available in Maya itself. 

Taken from: http://www.inglobetechnologies.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=22

Angie.