Animate!

[EDIT: ADD MORE IMAGES. (I forgot my pendrive)]


On Friday Matt Cameron came up from London to give us a lesson on NUKE. I have used it very briefly before to camera track but that was like 3 years ago and I really couldn't remember much about it. We had a talk about the kind of work Matt had been doing in London and his experiences working in both London and Scotland before we moved on to the practical class. Matt showed us around the interface then showed us how to comp out a tracking marker with a plate from a short film he had worked on. In the afternoon we showed Matt the one of our renders with our new lighting set up and he went through how he would composite that in NUKE. He showed us how to use our depth pass to blur the background and give our shots a sense of scale. He also went through how to add grain to our shots to make them look less cg. The results we managed to get from NUKE were a lot better than we had managed with after effects and after briefly talking it over we decided to comp our Going Live shots in NUKE.

I really enjoyed working with NUKE, i thought I would be more intimidated by the node based interface as i'm much more used to working with timelines but after a little while getting used to it I actually found it much easier to see what I was doing using the nodes. I think I'm going to, if I have time, maybe do some NUKE tutorials and try some more compositing stuff out.

We have had 2 lessons from Sang on zbrush now. The first was an introduction to the interface then a tutorial on how to use fibermesh. We are going to use it for the hair of the trools so he showed us how to create the kind of hair we want and then how to import the curves into maya and create hair with them. Once the modelling stage is complete we will be able to start doing some experiments with it. We had a second lesson on how to retopologise the models we got from the photogrametry of the troll we did. Sang showed us how to sculpt in missing details to get a good high quality model to work with.

So on Friday we had a refresher lesson about natural lighting. The lighting in our Going Live project is going to be very important so we requested this class to remind us of the lighting techniques we learned last semester.

We followed up our lesson on walk cycles with a run cycle. There was more focus on follow through and secondary movement this lesson as well as a more in depth look at how to use the graph editor to smooth the animation.

Maya classes are back! We have started this term with some animation which is great. The first class was looking at a basic walk cycle. This is the final result (if the video is working properly now?):
Learning a bit more about the graph editor was very useful too as I feel like I always neglect it somewhat when I animate. I really enjoyed getting back into animation after not doing much of it last term. This semester will be fairly animation heavy which is good. I'm going to try and do some 11 second clubs alongside Going Live and developing my final project if I have time.

In our final tutorial of 2015 (that went by so quick!) we learned how to render out our model and composite it into a scene.  We used image based lighting which I had never used before, I have seen the like mirror ball things you use for it but no one had ever explained how the lights from there are applied in 3D so that was cool. We then set up our render passes and layers for compositing.

After it was all rendered out we moved it into after effects to set up our layers and create the final result.

In part 2 of our rigging tutorial we finished our IK/FK switch (which I found very difficult, I could not get my head around the connection editor for some reason), created finger controls,  created a few blendshapes and painted skin weights on our model.

So in our tutorials we started learning rigging. This week we placed the joints and created control shapes and the lesson is going to continue next week with skinning and blend shapes. We learned where to put the control shapes and how to place them so they would make sense for animation. We also put IK and FK handles on the arms so that we could switch between them.

So today we had a quick tutorial on after effects. I have used it before for little things but I haven't really done much with it so this was really useful for me. We looked at how to key out green screen, how to rotoscope (which apparently we will be doing a lot of in entry level vfx positions), how to camera track and how to insert a 3d object into a scene or an object into a 3d scene.



I'm actually quite interested in compositing, I might try some nuke tutorials over the Christmas break if I have time to try and get a feel for it.

For our research module we have to create a poster showing what our research for the year is going to be about. Phil showed us some examples of bad poster design and gave us some tips on how to make a good academic poster. I'm kind of worried about how my poster is going to turn out as graphic design is really not my strong suit. We had a quick tutorial on how to use InDesign which was new for me, it looks really good though I'm considering buying the student package of Adobe Creative Suite so I will get to experiment with it more if I do that.

This is the result of the tutorial. We were basically learning how to use columns and images properly and how to make sure the poster is high enough resolution for printing etc