Animate!

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.

[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.

Now that we are in the final stretch of Going Live its probably time to talk about my final project again.

Here is my character for my final animation. (The suit won't be grey in the final film that was just to help me work out the sections.)

I'm still thumbnailing the exact story (and we have another storytelling class that will hopefully help me completely lock it down) so in the meantime I have been getting on with my character.

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.