Animate!

Going Live is finished! I'm really happy with the final outcome and we presented the film to Axis on Monday and got some pretty good feedback. Axis pointed out some things that could be fixed by the degree show (some of the things were things we had noticed in the editing room and didn't have time to fix so it's good that we managed to identify some of the same points) but overall it was pretty positive.



We also did a report and a presentation talking about our individual parts of the project. I hope my report explained my contribution well because I think by the time I got to the presentation I was completely braindead. I really just crashed as soon as the Axis presentation was over so I hope my presentation wasn't quite as ineloquent and nonsensical as I think it was.

So its less than a week till we present our Going Live film to Axis. Everything is rendered out and we only have 2 more shots to comp together (barring and quick re renders we find tomorrow). Looking at the film right now I'm pretty proud of it. Iv'e spotted a few thing I would have liked to have adjusted animation wise but overall I'm pretty happy with everything. Comparing what we have now to what we had even a few weeks ago I think the look of the film has improved so much. I will write a proper evaluation thing of the film after the Axis presentation but for now here is the nearly finished edit we did today (there are no credits in this version as they were still rendering).

(Also apologies for the low quality but youtube said my 1GB video was going to take like 2 hours to upload so)

So today Andrea, Li, Stathis and I took the shots that had been comped already to the edit suite to cut them together to make sure they all looked consistent and to pick up any problems in the animation/lighting/rendering/comp. Overall the shots looked really good together I think. There are some minor problems in some of the animations and occasionally the smoothing of the models but overall we are pretty happy with the shots we tested today. We fixed a few of the issues we found in order to re-render if we have time. We are going to do the same thing on Monday with (hopefully) the rest of the shots to see how the whole thing looks.

(Its very odd seeing it with bits missing, I can basically recite the dialogue in my sleep now so it really throws me when bits aren't there)

(And here is us awkwardly posing for a photo as things rendered out of premiere.

So last week we had a Skype session with Axis to get feedback on our renders and they told us our lighting was very flat. Looking at our renders again we totally agreed so we decided to re light and re render everything. Despite deciding to do this with like two and a half weeks to go we have actually managed to get through it quite quickly. I think we have all of the shots out now with just some re renders to go.

So I got to light a few of the shots (with a lot of feedback/help from Andrea, lighting is not really my forte but I gave it a shot) and I took some renders of my lighting progress with one of the shots. So these are going to be a lot of very similar images as I tweak the lights about but it should give you an idea of my process.

So you may have noticed that I haven't been updating this blog quite as much as I should have been recently. For the last few weeks we have been really busy animating and as soon as we were nearly finished that we ran into a bunch of problems rendering. We think we've fixed it now (find out for sure on Monday) but going back to fix all the shots is going to take a bunch of time I would rather have used to polish our animation. So its a bit of a nightmare really.

So we have finally reached the animation stage of going live! Yay!! We split the characters between us so me and Nely are mostly working on He-Man. These are the shots I'm currently working on. We are going to have a crit session on Monday with the class and another one on Tuesday with Brendan which should help me refine and polish what I've already done.

So the last couple of weeks we have been working on the lip sync. We are like 80% done with it now and most of us have moved on to animation. This is one of the lip sync shots that I was working on.



And here is our previs (now with a new ending!) with our lip sync shots added.

Now that the rabbit's accessories are done I got on with the rigging. I built the rig and the control shapes and I did half the blendshapes for the face (Aimi is doing the other half). I had a bit of difficulty with the skinning as I don't have much experience doing that but luckily Krish was there to help me, well to be honest he ended up pretty much skinning it for me.

We finished doing most of the shots of our previs before showing it to Brendan and Phil for feedback and advice. Brendan gave us some really great tips for improving the composition of out shots and made sure that we were using the rule of thirds and not putting characters on the centre line. Phil said that the humour of our piece was still coming across even in the previs which is good, he gave us a few tips about how to add the ending onto what we already have. We have started to do the revisions that have been suggested and we should be done with this new version by Wedensday and we will be able to show Axis the week after.

Krish asked me to sculpt the head for the rabbit. I started by building the basic model in Maya and attaching the ears Krish had made before taking the model into mudbox to reshape things slightly before giving it back to Krish for him to retopologize and attach to the body.

This week we have been getting on with modelling the assets for Going Live. I was in charge of making the model sheet for the Sylvanian family rabbit and with modelling the robot.



The next stage is going to be rigging and pre vis which I am very excited about.