Saturday, July 30, 2005
Allllmost there....
OK, so it’s taking longer than I though for the lighting. Well I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist and I have spent a lot of time tweaking the shit out of my scenes and it really sucks when you spend several days doing something and don’t really have anything to show for it. But I finally am happy with it all, so now its on to the final rendering and let me tell you that is going to take a while. Over 3000 frames, but Damn am I proud of it. Anyway, here are just a few little screen shots for those who have followed along (And just to prove that I have not been slacking :)
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Scene 1 in the Bag.
Just a quick update today. Scene 1 is in its final render now, had a lot of issues to work through such as figuring out that I needed to parent the texture reference into the Proxy Smooth mesh, creating more lights and linking them to the ship and earth seperatly instead of trying to share them (I had a lot of flickering issues until I did this, even after adjusting depth map settings), and removing the spec map on my dome as it was really ugly when rendered with refractions. But all in all I think I am finally happy, we will see tonight.
Tonight it is on to lighting Scene 2 and 3 and should finally be done and ready to post some more work.. Yeah!
Tonight it is on to lighting Scene 2 and 3 and should finally be done and ready to post some more work.. Yeah!
Monday, July 25, 2005
Crunch Time? What’s that?
Well it should be crunch time and I should be going without any sleep what so ever to try and get this all done in time, but I guess I need to fill in the rest of the world on what deadline is. Oh well, I would be stressed if Buzz or Zak had made any definite remarks about the absolute end of the class. All they have really said is that because we have been so lenient with them and getting the whole class together, that they would work with anyone who was working hard. And that Is something I have been doing.
Haven’t updated my blog because of this in fact, well except for all the distractions, like getting sick, friends coming over, and things of that nature. But I have completed all the animation and am very happy with the character animation towards the end. You can really tell that I was getting the hang of using the really crappy rig I made because I found very sloppy ways to get around it. Such as a host of buttons on the shelf to select each cluster in the tentacles. It may be sloppy, but a hell of a lot easier than trying to find them in the view port.
Lesson Learned 1: Learn MEL quickly. I will not only iconize every rig I do form now on, I am going to make quick pick UIs as I like being able to go back and forth between the two for whatever fits my needs. I will also learn to write a pick walk script because it would have been a huge time saver to just be able to hit an arrow key and move to the next cluster in the chain, or another arrow key to move to the same numbered cluster on another tentacle. Bottom Line is I am going hard core into MEL and learning to be my own TD of sorts.
So after all the animation was completed I moved on to pain effects. I have played with it before but only how to make default tubes and the such. Could never really figure out how to change anything. Now I know, and knowing… Battle… Yo Joe! and all that crap.
Lesson Learned 2: Well not really a lesson learned, just frustrated that I have to composite my scene 2 if I want to use paint effects because I have my ship flying all over the screen and the glow from the tractor beam will apparently break down because of it. Will have to try it out, if so no big deal I guess, I will just render to TGA files, and bring them into work to composite them together if V-Dub won’t do it.
I also spent quite a few hours last night tweaking my aliens skin texture. Man this is a complicated texture and it keeps getting more and more complicated. There is like 7 billion nodes in it and growing to try and get it to look just right. If I don’t finish it pretty quickly tonight then I am going to simplify it greatly. Oh well, this texture alone taught me a butt load about the hypershade and I am very comfortable in it now and getting to the point that I understand the connections that need to be made to get a certain effect. A good example would be plugging a ramp into the cell color of a leather node to get a color to change over the surface yet still having the leather look to it (Which by the way I am using to plug into incandescence to get the glowing on the dark parts of the skin).
Haven’t updated my blog because of this in fact, well except for all the distractions, like getting sick, friends coming over, and things of that nature. But I have completed all the animation and am very happy with the character animation towards the end. You can really tell that I was getting the hang of using the really crappy rig I made because I found very sloppy ways to get around it. Such as a host of buttons on the shelf to select each cluster in the tentacles. It may be sloppy, but a hell of a lot easier than trying to find them in the view port.
Lesson Learned 1: Learn MEL quickly. I will not only iconize every rig I do form now on, I am going to make quick pick UIs as I like being able to go back and forth between the two for whatever fits my needs. I will also learn to write a pick walk script because it would have been a huge time saver to just be able to hit an arrow key and move to the next cluster in the chain, or another arrow key to move to the same numbered cluster on another tentacle. Bottom Line is I am going hard core into MEL and learning to be my own TD of sorts.
So after all the animation was completed I moved on to pain effects. I have played with it before but only how to make default tubes and the such. Could never really figure out how to change anything. Now I know, and knowing… Battle… Yo Joe! and all that crap.
Lesson Learned 2: Well not really a lesson learned, just frustrated that I have to composite my scene 2 if I want to use paint effects because I have my ship flying all over the screen and the glow from the tractor beam will apparently break down because of it. Will have to try it out, if so no big deal I guess, I will just render to TGA files, and bring them into work to composite them together if V-Dub won’t do it.
I also spent quite a few hours last night tweaking my aliens skin texture. Man this is a complicated texture and it keeps getting more and more complicated. There is like 7 billion nodes in it and growing to try and get it to look just right. If I don’t finish it pretty quickly tonight then I am going to simplify it greatly. Oh well, this texture alone taught me a butt load about the hypershade and I am very comfortable in it now and getting to the point that I understand the connections that need to be made to get a certain effect. A good example would be plugging a ramp into the cell color of a leather node to get a color to change over the surface yet still having the leather look to it (Which by the way I am using to plug into incandescence to get the glowing on the dark parts of the skin).
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
I can hear it calling my Name.
Well it’s about 4:00 at work and I have lost all motivation to be here. Just got a call that my Art of Rigging book just arrived at home. OOOOhhh Just can’t wait. Going to use it to help in the rigging of my Mech. You see I did not have plans to really go too overboard d on the mech project (Well unless I get official word that I have the time to do it) I have added two, uhh well only one functional cannon to the base of the cockpit and want to write a script that will automatically create a fully rigged laser beam with the click of a button.
What exactly does this mean? Well lets say I am at frame 232 and want the small cannon to fire, I simply click the create button and it creats the geometry for the laser, creates a curve and animates it along the curve according to the muzzle and current time. It would also apply the texture, hide the curve, and Create a tab to adjust options. Maybe even create particles for wherever it hits. Sound complicated doesn’t it. Well I have it all figured out in my head except for two factors; the angle to create the curve, and writing this I just figured out the other which was to know when the laser hit the ground. Easy enough, just get the value of y and when it is at a certain height (like say 0) it has hit the ground.
Anyway, I can’t wait to get home and start checking it out. :)
What exactly does this mean? Well lets say I am at frame 232 and want the small cannon to fire, I simply click the create button and it creats the geometry for the laser, creates a curve and animates it along the curve according to the muzzle and current time. It would also apply the texture, hide the curve, and Create a tab to adjust options. Maybe even create particles for wherever it hits. Sound complicated doesn’t it. Well I have it all figured out in my head except for two factors; the angle to create the curve, and writing this I just figured out the other which was to know when the laser hit the ground. Easy enough, just get the value of y and when it is at a certain height (like say 0) it has hit the ground.
Anyway, I can’t wait to get home and start checking it out. :)
Reference This!
So I feel like last night was a total loss. You see I spent like 4 hours trying to figure out how to stop my textures from swimming around my model. I looked high and low and was about to post a question on the forums when I ran across a thread about adding a texture reference. Well I remembered Zak saying something about this but he did not elaborate. Finally after searching and trying everything I could think of, it took a matter of only a few clicks to correct the issue. Under the Rendering menu – Texture – Add reference object with my alien selected. Bam! Just like magic, the alien no longer looks like he is in a Disco.
After all of that I was so disgusted I decided to turn in a bit early and watched a little Futurama; I love that show. Tonight I will get back to animating Scene 2. Yay, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Lessons learned: Don’t arbitrarily throw fractal, noise, etc nodes to try and dampen specularity. I added one to the bubble on my ship and it looked good in the one frame I rendered it in, but when I turned on refraction, man did it look crappy. Lesson is to make sure you render it with final render option before you say you are happy with it.
After all of that I was so disgusted I decided to turn in a bit early and watched a little Futurama; I love that show. Tonight I will get back to animating Scene 2. Yay, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Lessons learned: Don’t arbitrarily throw fractal, noise, etc nodes to try and dampen specularity. I added one to the bubble on my ship and it looked good in the one frame I rendered it in, but when I turned on refraction, man did it look crappy. Lesson is to make sure you render it with final render option before you say you are happy with it.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Animania!
HOLY FREAKING CRAP I LOVE MAYA!!! Lets see it’s now at about 34 hours over the weekend getting Scene 1 completed and I have all the animation done, but still have some tweaking in the graph editor to do and I must say I am very happy with what I have done and impressed as hell yet again at the power of Maya and this freaking class. After getting all the other animation completed I moved on the to the last thing: the dreaded antennas. Well after about a half hour of struggling to get them to almost look a little rubbery and failing miserable I could see that it was going to take hours to get them right…
I sat back and decided to think, there must be an easier way to do this, I mean there is this soft body dynamics system and all. Well I decided to give it a shot and started turning the curve of the spline IK on each antenna into a soft body with the copy as a goal. This meant deleting the clusters and locators I had and recreated the IK with 4 spans this time. I set the goal weight very high at 75 to 100 and started playing it. BAM! Almost got it on the first shot. Adjusted conserve to .85 and it was exactly what I was looking for. Damn I love Maya.
Really I am brain dead at this point and am so sick of hearing the song I picked for the first scene I never want to hear it again. Thank god I am almost done with it. :) Really it is nothing new for me to work so much on a project, it is just when animating I don’t really get to put on any music because I am listening to the sound in Maya to make sure it all syncs up. Makes for a really mind numbing day… In all I am reaching the 200 hour mark on this project, but sitting back and watching it is well worth it, especially knowing that I am able to apply what I am learning to all kind of situations.
Anyway I haven’t done any lessons learned in a while so though it was about time for one.
Lessons learned:
A good rig is probably one of the most important things in character animation. It was so much easier to animate my little guy once I added the more advanced spine system from an earlier post. And only having a cluster system in place for the tentacles because I could find nothing that gave me that level of control really drove this point home this weekend. I really see why professional animators say that they get about 4 seconds of animation a week done; character animation is hard and very tedious. Add to that a control rig that is not very intuitive and you will drive yourself insane. Jeez, I shutter to think about all the extra work that went into animating Toy Story as compared to today’s animators; really makes me respect them a hell of a lot more.
I sat back and decided to think, there must be an easier way to do this, I mean there is this soft body dynamics system and all. Well I decided to give it a shot and started turning the curve of the spline IK on each antenna into a soft body with the copy as a goal. This meant deleting the clusters and locators I had and recreated the IK with 4 spans this time. I set the goal weight very high at 75 to 100 and started playing it. BAM! Almost got it on the first shot. Adjusted conserve to .85 and it was exactly what I was looking for. Damn I love Maya.
Really I am brain dead at this point and am so sick of hearing the song I picked for the first scene I never want to hear it again. Thank god I am almost done with it. :) Really it is nothing new for me to work so much on a project, it is just when animating I don’t really get to put on any music because I am listening to the sound in Maya to make sure it all syncs up. Makes for a really mind numbing day… In all I am reaching the 200 hour mark on this project, but sitting back and watching it is well worth it, especially knowing that I am able to apply what I am learning to all kind of situations.
Anyway I haven’t done any lessons learned in a while so though it was about time for one.
Lessons learned:
A good rig is probably one of the most important things in character animation. It was so much easier to animate my little guy once I added the more advanced spine system from an earlier post. And only having a cluster system in place for the tentacles because I could find nothing that gave me that level of control really drove this point home this weekend. I really see why professional animators say that they get about 4 seconds of animation a week done; character animation is hard and very tedious. Add to that a control rig that is not very intuitive and you will drive yourself insane. Jeez, I shutter to think about all the extra work that went into animating Toy Story as compared to today’s animators; really makes me respect them a hell of a lot more.
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Animaniac!!!
Taking a break from my weekend of actual animation so I figured I would update my blog. Man let me tell you that this crap is tedious as hell. I tried to do pose to pose animation, but I am just not experienced enough to get the inbetween actions to flow smoothly, so I am sticking to straight ahead. I did find out another big helper, and that is right clicking on the time slider and selecting Key Ticks and From Channel Box. I was getting so many ticks that it was impossible to adjust keys back and forth and I hated going over to the graph editor to do it; saving me a effort of time in getting the timing down. I am focusing on the basic body movement right now as it drives all other movement and it seems to me that a majority of the other body parts such as the head and stuff will be mostly secondary actions (If I am using the terminology right).
I will have to do a bit of tweaking to textures and a lot of work on the lighting but I am very happy with they way this is all coming out. Man I am happy I took this class. These projects may seem pretty simply, but buzz and Zak are really good at showing you a million point three ways to do everything and it has really given me a firm grasp of Maya. Actually I find myself not really having any trouble with it right now, well nothing that I can’t quickly fix. Example would be that I tried to throw in a blink and his eyelid shot through his forehead, which would have surely killed him if I hadn’t went into inputs and moved the Blink Cluster above the blend cluster at the bottom of the stack without a second thought.
Anyway, time for a beer and to get back to animating my little guy. I am so pleased with him that I am not going to upload any more pics until this is finished, I don’t want to ruin any of it for anyone following along. Zak’s critique really pushed to a level I didn’t think I could achieve yet. Although there are a few thing I would like to work out, they are minor and I think I can live with them; live and learn right.
I will have to do a bit of tweaking to textures and a lot of work on the lighting but I am very happy with they way this is all coming out. Man I am happy I took this class. These projects may seem pretty simply, but buzz and Zak are really good at showing you a million point three ways to do everything and it has really given me a firm grasp of Maya. Actually I find myself not really having any trouble with it right now, well nothing that I can’t quickly fix. Example would be that I tried to throw in a blink and his eyelid shot through his forehead, which would have surely killed him if I hadn’t went into inputs and moved the Blink Cluster above the blend cluster at the bottom of the stack without a second thought.
Anyway, time for a beer and to get back to animating my little guy. I am so pleased with him that I am not going to upload any more pics until this is finished, I don’t want to ruin any of it for anyone following along. Zak’s critique really pushed to a level I didn’t think I could achieve yet. Although there are a few thing I would like to work out, they are minor and I think I can live with them; live and learn right.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
He looks like a people eater to me.
Well Last night was spent working on the abduction again due to inspiration hitting me yesterday. Actually a buddy of mine started singing this song when we were talking about it and it just fit so perfectly that I had to redo the beginning, and I must say that I am very pleased with the results. It combines a lot of what Zak told me in my crit. And best of all simplifies things so much. Nope, no more bumbling for me to try and tell a detailed story in 2 minutes. Now it is fun and simple. Anyway, in redoing the animation I actually threw in some movement to the alien to get a feel for the scene and the stupid rig I made drove me nuts, so I went out searching for information on how to improve it. Just wanted to post the link so I can share this great information.
http://www.davidwalden.com/tutorials/spine/tutorial_spine.htm
http://www.davidwalden.com/tutorials/spine/tutorial_spine.htm
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Lunch on the Net.
Well just a quick update here to post my lunchtime activities. Today was looking for info on animation theory and came across http://www.keithlango.com/ Some really good info here on Arcs and stuff. :)
Monday, July 11, 2005
Insert Witty Title Here.
Another night where I am numb after working so many hours, but I wanted to up a pic of what I accomplished tonight, even though I still have a long way to go... Enjoy
Dennis the Menace
So where the hell have I been the past couple of days, well most of Friday night and Saturday I was sleeping as Hurricane Dennis kept knocking out the power. We only had like 50 mile an hour winds and were without power in my neighborhood for almost a day; off and on. I swear since Charley, someone can fart in our neighborhood and the power will go out. Oh well (it could have been a lot worse, so I actually feel quite lucky) I spent the remainder of the weekend modeling my Mech and got all but the bottom of his foot textured before turning in at about 2:30 in the morning last night.
Let me tell you that I am now an expert at planar and cylindrical mapping; what a pain in the ass to texture that bad ass mech, but well worth it to render it out. I can’t even imagine texturing it for full production use, the toe alone left me dazed and numb, ready to fall over in my chair. But I did listen to the whole VTM series while doing it and found that I was quicker than Zak at most of it (isn’t the pause button great :D ). So tonight I will be quickly finishing up the toe and then move on the to the rigging and UI.
On a last not e about UV texture mapping I have to say that I did it Zak’s way of planar mapping everything for about a whole 2 faces and then decided to try something a little different. I ended up just slicing section apart at the edges and moving and sewing them. I was about as quick as Zak’s method (No pause button this time) it was just more comfortable for me; I don’t know something about rescaling and rotating the faces when they were almost the right layout anyway kind of irked me. Everyone has their own ay of working right.
On a last note, you might be asking about my Abduction project. Well I decided to get away from it for a few days, thus the reason I decided to get the mech modeled and textured. And I am going to get the rigging and UI done as I am going to go back and use it on my alien. What a pain in the ass it is to animate him with all those chaotic locators floating all over the place. I also need to play around with different setups for his body as I have yet to get reliable results from the simple IK Spline setup I have going.
Anyway I will try and post a picture of my mech ASAP. And as sneek peek, I am trying to squeeze in a Model I finished in Silo shortly before starting the class. Just need to get someone to import it into Maya for me and save the scene so I can actually import it into the PLE :( But here is a pic of who will be driving the mech
. And iof your wondering I am figuring out how to rig him up with a VTM from Buzz himself I received sometime ago. Another of the great benifits of being a Member Sponsor.
Let me tell you that I am now an expert at planar and cylindrical mapping; what a pain in the ass to texture that bad ass mech, but well worth it to render it out. I can’t even imagine texturing it for full production use, the toe alone left me dazed and numb, ready to fall over in my chair. But I did listen to the whole VTM series while doing it and found that I was quicker than Zak at most of it (isn’t the pause button great :D ). So tonight I will be quickly finishing up the toe and then move on the to the rigging and UI.
On a last not e about UV texture mapping I have to say that I did it Zak’s way of planar mapping everything for about a whole 2 faces and then decided to try something a little different. I ended up just slicing section apart at the edges and moving and sewing them. I was about as quick as Zak’s method (No pause button this time) it was just more comfortable for me; I don’t know something about rescaling and rotating the faces when they were almost the right layout anyway kind of irked me. Everyone has their own ay of working right.
On a last note, you might be asking about my Abduction project. Well I decided to get away from it for a few days, thus the reason I decided to get the mech modeled and textured. And I am going to get the rigging and UI done as I am going to go back and use it on my alien. What a pain in the ass it is to animate him with all those chaotic locators floating all over the place. I also need to play around with different setups for his body as I have yet to get reliable results from the simple IK Spline setup I have going.
Anyway I will try and post a picture of my mech ASAP. And as sneek peek, I am trying to squeeze in a Model I finished in Silo shortly before starting the class. Just need to get someone to import it into Maya for me and save the scene so I can actually import it into the PLE :( But here is a pic of who will be driving the mech
. And iof your wondering I am figuring out how to rig him up with a VTM from Buzz himself I received sometime ago. Another of the great benifits of being a Member Sponsor.
Friday, July 08, 2005
A Passing Failure
Hey, I passed my animatics assignment, but something totally unexpected happened with it. Zak gave me like a 10 minute Critique and it was a damn good one to boot. Not like I expected anything less from Zak, but I just didn’t expect to get a college level critique on my project and it totally blew me away. How much did I pay for this course again? WOW, is all I can say, and I feel really bad for anyone trying to learn Maya who passes up this opportunity.
Anyway the day has been spent trying to figure out how to improve my animatics. You know what, let me try and old trick I used in college to get past creative blocks. I am going to write it all out. Sometime having to put thing into understandable words can make things clear.
~Stay Tuned.
Anyway the day has been spent trying to figure out how to improve my animatics. You know what, let me try and old trick I used in college to get past creative blocks. I am going to write it all out. Sometime having to put thing into understandable words can make things clear.
~Stay Tuned.
Wednesday, July 06, 2005
This is some Dope Sheet!
Ever revisit a project a day after spending an ungodly amount of time working on it and just asked yourself “Was I drunk”? Needless to say that I came home from work last night, went to finish up my animatics and was completely unhappy with several of the scenes and how I blocked them out. So I was up until 3:30 in the morning revamping several major portions of my project. Things like adjusting camera angles so that the whole little sandbox is visible during the ships decent so that it reads better when the ship is flying out of control around the yard (When you see the animatics it will become clear). Once I was finished I added the score to adjust timing and I must say that I am very happy with it. Would have turned it in, except I noticed that the scene where he sucks up the beach ball doesn’t read as well as I want it too, so a final adjustment tonight And I will finally be done. Yay!!!!
Anyway I would have given up if I had not found the dope sheet editor as it let me move an entire scenes worth of key frames around to accommodate my new ideas. Very simple too. So all in all it looks like my final running time is going to be right at 2 minutes without the ending credits, whew, luckily I already told my ids that I am going to have to hijack their computer for rendering to get this finished on time :)
More later…
Anyway I would have given up if I had not found the dope sheet editor as it let me move an entire scenes worth of key frames around to accommodate my new ideas. Very simple too. So all in all it looks like my final running time is going to be right at 2 minutes without the ending credits, whew, luckily I already told my ids that I am going to have to hijack their computer for rendering to get this finished on time :)
More later…
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
You won't smurfin believe what the smurf I did this weekend!
Sitting at work with a crap load of, well, crap to do, and I just can’t get motivated to finish out the day. So I figured I would update my blog real quick and see where that takes me. But first I have to plug the coolest guy in the industry (Aside from Jason Busby that is). I have spent the last couple of days stalking him through the pages of CG Talk and finally caught up to him on his blog. So I had laid out a plan to capture him and take on his identity, but then it occurred to me that it would take PDI/Dreamworks about three minutes to see that I had no idea what I was doing, so instead I decided to link to his blog.
Really Jason Schleifer is a really amazing guy. He worked on LOTR and Madagascar and the whole time he answered question to anyone and everyone over at CG Talk. And I mean everyone, like explaining his theory of creating a MEL script to procedurally automate the creation of a character rig to a complete newbie, and not in a few sentences either. No I’m talking a long winded thorough and complete explanation, like one I might give if I were talking about something I knew; like belly button lint. Don’t get me started.
Anyway go check out his pages, and his interview over at CG Talk, it is well worth your time:
Blog – http://jonhandhisdog.com/shh-life-er/
Web page – http://jonhandhisdog.com/myIBPortal/
Interview - http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=247336
So onto my update. I pretty much finished the Animatics this weekend and let me tell you that following instructions is one thing, I was able to whip right through those sections of the project, but in laying out the first complete scene all on my own, it took me all day Saturday to get it all blocked out to where I was happy with camera setups and movements and the such, then Sunday was spent getting timing down so that’s two days just for layout of my first scene. But it was a holiday and I took even more time away from the project to just be with my family, I missed them so, always sitting in the next room, little pouting faces waiting for this class to end. They are great about all of this and it makes me feel great to have such a supportive family.
But I got it all into Vegas Video last night and started to get all the sounds tracks timed out and decided to go to bed early, so that’s what I will be working on full bore again tonight. I am actually thinking of getting into the next project before finishing the animation on this one as the lack of good character controls are a real hindrance, so I think by setting up the mech I will be able to come back and make this project what I want it to be. I will decide that later tonight after I finish putting all the animatics together.
Really Jason Schleifer is a really amazing guy. He worked on LOTR and Madagascar and the whole time he answered question to anyone and everyone over at CG Talk. And I mean everyone, like explaining his theory of creating a MEL script to procedurally automate the creation of a character rig to a complete newbie, and not in a few sentences either. No I’m talking a long winded thorough and complete explanation, like one I might give if I were talking about something I knew; like belly button lint. Don’t get me started.
Anyway go check out his pages, and his interview over at CG Talk, it is well worth your time:
Blog – http://jonhandhisdog.com/shh-life-er/
Web page – http://jonhandhisdog.com/myIBPortal/
Interview - http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=247336
So onto my update. I pretty much finished the Animatics this weekend and let me tell you that following instructions is one thing, I was able to whip right through those sections of the project, but in laying out the first complete scene all on my own, it took me all day Saturday to get it all blocked out to where I was happy with camera setups and movements and the such, then Sunday was spent getting timing down so that’s two days just for layout of my first scene. But it was a holiday and I took even more time away from the project to just be with my family, I missed them so, always sitting in the next room, little pouting faces waiting for this class to end. They are great about all of this and it makes me feel great to have such a supportive family.
But I got it all into Vegas Video last night and started to get all the sounds tracks timed out and decided to go to bed early, so that’s what I will be working on full bore again tonight. I am actually thinking of getting into the next project before finishing the animation on this one as the lack of good character controls are a real hindrance, so I think by setting up the mech I will be able to come back and make this project what I want it to be. I will decide that later tonight after I finish putting all the animatics together.
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Crash and Burn.
Well I took a couple days off from the class because after working a month straight I was getting a little burnt out. You know getting cranky, not wanting to even look at the alien any more, but the break did me good. Got some sleep and I am more excited than ever about finishing this project. Especially after seeing how this projects look when it is rendered out. So I am moving on the animatics and I must say that I am learning all kinds of things. Like the importance of a good control system. Take a look at the image below, that is all the controls I have just to move this little alien around, and you can’t even see the locator that controls his eye that also has all the blends hooked up to it as wel as the jaw joint that is skinned to open and shut. Whew, it gets really confusing. Almost makes me want to iconize all of the locators into curves to make everything easier to find, but I am making myself do it the hard way because I am learning why so many controls are important. And really it is not that bad now that I am used to it, I pretty much know what locator does what now.
Anyway, I ordered a book for the first time in a while, http://www.cgtoolkit.com/ for rigging and what a book it promises to be. Includes 9 hours of Video content and goes into beautiful MEL detail on setting up professional rigs for such things as muscle and fat jiggle, soft eye expressions, and many other uber cool things. Can’t wait to move on the the Maya TD class already on 3DBuz for us member sponsors and then into this book. Man Buzz, you ROCK! :)
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