14th January to the 18th January

Aims
Complete the boat and France’s scene.

Goal’s reached?

I’ve managed to finish the boat scene and I’ve made alpha channels of all the layers. When showing Dave he insisted that the whole scene would be much easier to do in after effects and part of me is starting to agree. I ran some tests in Maya and they look a little rubbish so I’ll have to spruce them up a little. If I do want to make the scenes in Maya I worried for a while about shadows as the alpha channels wouldn’t cast them if rendered normally (another reason to do it in After Effects) so I researched a bit and have discovered that if I turn on Ray tracing then the alpha’s will cast shadows so that’s that little problem out the way.
As for France. I’m having problems with Paris so instead of mope around about it I decided to swap it for Holland, as I know exactly what I want to do with Holland and have a good understanding of how I need to set out the layers as I did my little test.

Des said he’d make our motor bike for the stamp collector to ride on and he's really good with vehicles so I must draw it this weekend and give it to him. Hopefully I can get him to texture it too.
The picture above is an original test i did for the boat scene as if i were to colour everything in a similar style to the Dutch scene.

I would like to explain exactly how i plan to do these scenes.
We have 5 locations

The Channel
Paris/France
Nederlands
Egypt
China

Within each of these stamps the environment will be made up of several layers. Forground mid ground and background. Each of these layers will move independently and i will render an animation of George on his motorbike that i will composite into each stamp as he journeys through chasing the stamp that will also be animated in Maya then composited into After Effects.
I'm hoping that i will be able to incorporate this into each stamp but some may not be possible.