Tuesday, 21 December 2010

I decided that the last sequence of the chase where Darren elm says “one day” is just to much in the face, literally, and it would be more mysterious and interesting to elongate shot 41, the shot before from behind, and him say “one day” with the camera in that view from behind, making the latter sequence in the tree cave more exciting with it being the first time you see the elms faces talking. Anyway I did some preview renders, and put them in the Animatic and it works great, so solved the nagging problem I was having wit the “One day” sequence

Monday, 20 December 2010 (latter on)

Began working on the next sequence today, had some trouble with the timing, and setting up the cameras for the sequence, just trying to produce the same results in 3D was difficult, but in the end I cut down the Animatic to the sequence I am working on, and timed it that way, rather than having to work everything out over and over again.
Anyways as said before here the Animatic with the 3 sequences done so far, I will probably keep uploading every few months so it shows the progress throughout the piece. To tell the truth the section where he says “one day" is nagging me, and I might go back to it latter, im unsure if it’s the camera being so fast, or just the expressions on the character, but it just seems wrong somehow.
Anyway heres the link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8buAEmaBbws

Monday, 20 December 2010

I have had flu the last week but still managed to keep up with the work anyway. I have been doing alright, the initial scope of the action Darren Elm would do was a little daunting, but in the end the hardest part was deciding the best camera angle for the speech at the end of the shot. Anyways I have added the pre rendered scenes to the Animatic, and will upload it tomorrow so the tutor and peoples can view the progress so far.

Monday, 13 December 2010

I finished shot 38 today, after some major troubles with the run cycle, and jump. They just didn’t look right and after a few days of tweaking it came apparent from a friend that the back needed adjusting slightly when he launches into the run. I am happy anyway, thankfully its finished and onto the next run sequence, with even more action, on shot 39-42. I think I will block it out latter tonight and tomorrow, and try and get it done before Friday, but to be honest the last shot has really slowed me down, so I may have fallen a couple of days behind with it.

I think in the end I will add the distance blur and motion blur in post, and also add some blur between the white background and leaves and branches… Making it look a little bit more dreamy.

Here are two renders from the scene.

Thursday, 09 December 2010

I began working on shot 38 today, and also uploaded better quality versions of some of the videos I have created to youtube. I also updated the website with them

Here are the links

The Animatic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sF0-weZMpRc

George character test
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUv22igcNi0

Character animation tests
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGM13ZKlGPI

Rigging
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjIlO7jW708

Wednesday, 08 December 2010

I have been trying different resolutions to test what will work best for the output of 720 576 widescreen. Currently I am just rendering a sequence about with the same resolution and aspect ratio to see if that is any better. At the moment with the start sequence of the zoom in, it tends to have a checked shirt on tv effect when zooming in on the factory with the bricks. And I am thinking this is something to do with the resolution and scaling it up and down to fit. Rendering a sequence at 1920 then scaling down produced terrible results with the zoom in, and at 864 a similar effect occurred, although less.

Apart from that I have completed shot 35 and set up the Animatic so I can drop in finished, or block out shots. I am quiet happy with it although I did initially struggle with the run sequence. The next shots, from 38-42 are even harder with all out action of Darren running, jumping and performing acrobatics across a log, while trying to chase a Moth
I will start these tomorrow anyway, and see if I can really get ahead a little with it. It’s a big sequence and I am rather daunted. But I gotta learn the hard way!

Here is a shot from 35



Edit – the strange effect I was seeing in the rendered animations was because the final shots were progressive, where as they should have been lower first. So it seems the best resolutions to work with is 720 567 with a pixel aspect of 1.4587…Lower first…

Saturday, 04 December 2010

Adjusting the FPS setting were not as much as a problem as I thought, simply changing them in the timeline in Max didn’t affect the actual animation or timing, so I thankfully don’t need to go back and readjust it.

Changing the Animatic to a different resolution and settings was a lot bigger a problem, only due to my limited knowledge of the software. Copy and pasting the Animatic to a new project took out all the sound, which I re-added by hand. Yet if I had known I could have pasted it to a new sequence instead and therefore the sound would have been ok. Deleting the old sequence after.
Another problem I had was rendering out the final Animatic to test if everything was working alright again failed. The Animatic was rendering out at 4:3 not 16:9. After scouring the net and asking friends, I stumbled upon a website with a simple explanation, on the export settings I had not chosen square pixel, which is the standard for computer’s hence why it was perceiving it as square pixel 1.1 rather than 16:9… (I think). Anyway here is a link to the site.

http://therenderq.com/compressing-169-widescreen-video-for-the-web-and-maintaining-aspect-ratio

it also gives a nice round up of the best output resolutions, which I will use for the actual renders settings from max at 864 x 486, which is a match from the original 1920 x 1080, therefore I wont have to change any cameras in the scene (thank god). And only have to scale down slightly the resolution to fit the premiere file. I will test this out during the week anyway to make sure there is no loss of quality by scaling the renders down slightly. Again as said in the previous post the great thing with this is that it will take half the time to render.

Here a test render I did a few days back

Friday, 03 December 2010

I had a wee bit of a blow today with my work. A silly mistake that I should have known has set me back a few days. I had rendered of the scene for this week at 1920 1080 as with my Animatic and other last scene, and as the tutor noticed today, I was using the wrong settings, at 30fps instead of 25fps and NTSC rather than PAL. A major problem for my work (it should be at 720-576 DVPAL widescreen). I had been working at 1920 widescreen all the way through, so my Animatic needs redoing, plus any animation I have done so far on the project.

I am going to try and finish the reworking of the Animatic again tonight. I am really hopefully that this will sort out my codex problem I was having. Such a mistake, but at least it was caught early enough to not cause to much of a problem.

Tomorrow I am going to rework some of the last animation, plus some faults with the render that needs fixing (the antenna of the centipede sim is way to powerful and the speed in which the camera exits the cave).

The good thing out of this rendering problem is my renders will be three times quicker to compile!! Considering it wont take long at all to render I may as well start rendering in the next few days, and if I need to change anything latter I can readjust it and re-render again. Gets me a little ahead with the latter part of the schedule.