Saturday 6 March 2010

Final and Evaluation

The final composite when i'd rendered out my sequences from maya into after effects, the sequences didn't match up so as i did this on the day of hand in i had to just key frame the bumps in AE which is why it's not as good as it was when in Maya.



Evaluation
I feel that i certainly didn't give my all to this project, which is a shame because towards the end where i was concentrating on the work i found that i was getting into it much more.
Maybe i found it difficult to get my head down because i wasn't sure of the process of what was involved, and procrastination was a winner for the most part.

This isn't like me to neglect a project as i thought it was close to last terms unit. I feel that it is certainly a good thing to learn about maya live as last term i thought i wasn't really into compositing, this was because again, there was no goal for me, i didn't try and understand the production process and the industry workflow standards.

If i were to do this again i believe that it would be much much better, and i plan to try it again because i want to prove to myself that i am capable of getting this right. I am happy that i can use this terms knowledge and go forth myself. I didn't even know what Maya Live was!!

Animation and Tracking

Here are the playblasts from maya with the animation of the dino tracked in the scene.









Lighting

So i can't just stick my dino in without being lit properly in the scene, so as i was watching the scene we have some cuts where the lighting is soft on the facial features, then as we turn to Edward we are met with harsh lighting.











Strong directional lights for the dino











Soft spot light so i can have a feather on the edges maybe











Even though i've written that the lighting is soft here, compared to the next shot with Bella, it is quite harsh.













Also i'm thinking to set the colour of the light to a soft pale blue as that's the grading of the film.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Problem

So after having a little fiddle with the rig, i realized that when i imported my character into the MayaLive scene it was too big, and i had no way of successfully scaling him down to fit the scene.
When i'd try and import him in with different scale settings the rig wouldn't resize with the mesh, also the problem i had with the left ear means when i re combine the mesh to the rig the ear spins in on itself. All crazy business.

So as it's being close to the deadline, i have decided to just admit defeat on JP and bring in another rig, which is a little baby dinosaur. I chose this dinosaur because the rig scales, it's a simple rig and i wanted to have a bi pedal rig as this was what JP was.

I have had a play with the dinosaur rig and all seems to work as i want it to.
So now i have the five scenes to animate on top of, and i've tested the dinosaur with the tracking, all works well. TICK TOCK!


Saturday 27 February 2010

Rigged animation test

Ok so i have now rigged my Jigglypuff and here are the test animations, the rig is rather basic as my character doesn't seem to do too much on screen, also i have included a video of how the jigglypuff moves in the cartoon..



The position of the feet vary as when jp is standing still the feet point out, when modeling i decided to model the feet separate.




















Ear Wiggle Test



Feet and hands Test



Being rusty on my rigging and short on time, i realized i haven't added a maing body controller so i can't stand and tilt JP on one leg. Also i would like to add attributes to the toes so that i can have him tippy toeing up. The feet are not easily controlled in that i can't swizzle them from side to side, so i will have these checked over before i animate in the scene.

Also when i import my JP in a maya live scene, my JP is huge and i'm not sure how to resize him so that may be to do with how i have rigged it.

I'm annoyed i cannot find my book which helped me rig last term, and this is meant to be such a simple rig!

Friday 26 February 2010

A little velvet..

Just for a nicer look i have applied a plush velvet shader onto the model of my Jigglypuff.













I had to set up the ramp shader in the different shades of pink to depict the different shades.











and here is the outcome!

Another Schedule

This is a clearer version of the schedule. The different colour sections act as the dependencies, so i wouldn't be able to continue without completing one colour first.