Animate!

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 first things first I restarted the head. I really wasn't happy with how the first attempt was progressing. Unfortunately with the second attempt I kept forgetting to screenshot so I only have a few progress shots.

I finished my research poster =) I am quite happy with how it turned out. The font is a little big and I think if I were to do another one, now that I am a bit more comfortable with InDesign I would try and do something a bit more creative with the timeline or to break up the sections.

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.

So I have started trying to model my character in 3D. I think its going ok so far but it might just be too early to tell. I have been using some digital tutors tutorials as well the the class tutorials to help me with the modelling.






I'm not very happy with the head at this stage, I'm thinking about restarting it but I will keep working on it and seeing if I can improve it for a little longer.