Tuesday, 16 November 2010

I have completed shots 1 – 2 and 132, as described in the previous post, and added more lights for the characters and added the weather effects of the clouds slowly moving across. The clouds give it a nice feel, and I am tempted to take out the smoke from the stacks and animate this also, perhaps as a png image sequence, rather than particle systems that would take longer to render and be less effect. But I will leave it until all the animation is finished and I can go back if necessary.

The first sequence of animation is really only short, although 40 seconds in all it only features Audrey taking out the card briefly and Darren riding on his bike, which was all rigged up anyway to ride, so it was just a case of moving him forward. It’s a good start anyway.

I began really relying on the curve editor through this first animated sequence. Animated a short walk cycle for Audrey, and generally learnt how to get over quiet a few hurdles, the last of which was animating the weather effects. I think for the final scene where Darren rides of on his bike with the Elmies in tow, I will use this scene and animated Darren in it, saving having to rework the weather effects and keeping the motion of the weather consistent from beginning to end.

Currently I am cleaning up my hard discs for more space, taking out unnecessary incrementally saved backups. So I have enough room on my hard discs for the rest of the animation.
Next step is begin working on shots 53-57, a 20 second two week sprint which is the night scene in the animation. So it will be the first actual lip-sync, and the rather worryingly hard to animate centipede! I plan on starting this tomorrow, rather than next week to try and get a bit ahead. I will hopefully spend a week animating the conversation, and another week on the outer shot with the insects.

I am currently rendering of the animation half size to show the tutors on Friday, and if approved I will render it off full size at 1920.
I am a little apprehensive about posting online each scene as it is produced, and prefer to keep the work off youtube until its completed, so unfortunately throughout the animation I wont be posting little snippets of animation online, just still image renders.

Here’s the same render as the previous post, only with the lighting adjusted.