Sunday, 20 November 2011

The film has been approved by my tutor, and I am currently getting everything ready for the final presentation. I am undecided when to upload the film, but it will probably be the week after the degree show. Anyway the film is finished and therefore the blog is also finished. I learnt a heck of a lot through the process and hope if anyone else reads this they will find some help in their own work.

So that’s it

All done

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Added a new video to the website in behind the scenes, it’s a shot breakdown of the work involved in animating the one shot, from Animatic to final piece that would go into the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgHVG6sqS8

Also I have the sound back from Hal at Audio Mainline and the sound is superb. Very happy with it. So unless there’s any more pressing changes, I think I am nearly complete in the production of my first animated short.

Tuesday, 08 November 2011

Its been a few days since I finalised the film for sound, and have began looking over my work so far and categorising it easily for presentation. One thing I have not spoke about yet is the Facial controls I had developed for the film.

The basic UI is setup in combination from a variety of sources. The book Stop Staring by Ospia, although developed in Maya greatly helped in the creation of the floating UI system and flow for ease off use. Centring on the Complex setup of the book for blend shapes, and combing this with Paul Neale’s rigging DVDs to create the basic floating UI.



Each circle on the UI represents a joystick for the control of each section of the head and listed accordingly. All controls drive facial blend shapes (38 in all) except for the jaw control which is a combination of Blend shapes and bone movement (preventing such things as the teeth to show through the cheeks).



They work in a percentage so that for the controls working directly on a line, it moves a percentage of the blend from 0 to 100. However for the joystick controls, working in a square, they work directionally, giving a percentage on each blend dependant on location in the square. The controls also affect the tongue, but the eye controls float away from the eyes as a look at constraint with dialable pupil dilation.



Each joystick control’s surrounding shape keeps the control confined and also allows presets to be created. These are instanced to each other allowing complex blend shape setups by simply dialling in a developed facial emotion that may be reused, such as Phonemes on the mouth movement. Where any phoneme used can be saved and dialled back in at a latter time.



The setup, although using the same ui setup for each character, needs each blend shapes for each character developed independently, and any presets also saved independently. Therefore every character has a unique set of blend shapes and ui elements. With phoneme development being the last thing in the process to create, using the preset saves. This means that when developing the lip sync it can be made easier down the line by creating custom phonemes (based on Comet’s animation work http://www.comet-cartoons.com/ and the Stop Staring book by Osipa) when creating the facial rig. Of course this means more work in the build but in the long run it pays off.

Saturday, 05 November 2011

I have rendered off all the last sequences, adjusted the lip sync where it needed and sent it off to Hal to work on the sound. Good day in all. I got behind a little bit due to computer troubles but I am back on schedule again and beginning to work on my dissertation imagery at the moment. Feels funny not having anything to do on the film now!

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Its been just over a month since my last blog post. The films coming along, I spent this month re rendering scenes with better lighting, and bug fixing. At the moment I am just creating the zdepth maps for a sequence where I changed the animation, for the character to appear more dazed. I am hopeful, dependant on render times, that I should have the film wrapped at this stage by Friday so I can send it off for sound design at Audio mainline

Saturday, 24 September 2011

I had a great tutorial on Friday which really pinned down the faults in the work or animation. After going through a new schedule I have about 24 faults to re render. The only draw back is the time it takes to render a sequence. But I am hopeful I can have these faults fixed by the end of October. Then can send it off to Audio Mainline for the mastering of the sound. The faults are generally lighting issues with the sss shader. Where around the mouth area there are noticeable red areas in the skin. Due to the backscattering working out the thinness of the mouth wall. I am compensating by adding more lights to the front of the character, thereby tricking the effect a little. So far it seems to work well. Also changing the inner mouth wall for some shots to a standard shader rather than a sss skin shader


On another note I think I need to explain the shadow workers. Someone commented the other day that am I going to change those characters as though they were placeholder characters. The shadow characters is an analogy to being a lost worker. Spending so long on the line that there real selves just aren’t there anymore. Where as George, although spending so long on the line, just sleeps through the actual work, perhaps dreaming of his time on the subs. They were characters I did create as with all the characters, although without any discernable features and just blackness to look at.

Sunday, 18 September 2011

Finished a trailer for the film and currently working on a dvd menu and poster for the film, before getting back into fixing the Ian bug. I am pretty confident that I can resolve it with better lighting around the front of Ian’s face. The only problem is how long it will take to render new sequences. Will be starting the last bug by Tuesday I think, since the poster and dvd menu renders should take all tomorrow.
Anyway here is the trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6S7EAoI16I