Cuz it been a while.

Cuz it has been a while. Christmas has come and gone with the normal boring repetitive meetings of relatives and family friends who won't be seen for another year and after the dismal and anticlimactic event that is new years we're ready to start the new term. We had two meetings over the holidays one to meet our appointed sound design and show her what it i we're making and hopefully give her some ideas to go away and work with and the second as just a recap of work we had produced.

Firstly going to post this which is the final grass test that i did and kindof the one we're gonna go with.
Pretty much all thats been done is another tweak of the light colouring and adding the elements of longer grass and pebbles o break up the sharp edge of where the watering can meets the grass. There will be patches of brown mixed in with the green but where this is located is going to be entirely dependant upon the object placement within the scene file, so as soon as we start putting it together i'll get straight in there and make a start on that.

Right next I wanna talk briefly about the short animation "The Gruffalo" that was on over christmas, first of i thought he story was pretty weak the animation and rigging wasn't amazing and it was generally to cheery for me to like. But the environments were really incredible and i saw a good few pieces that i really liked the look of one scene in particular was incredibly similar to how i have been planning to have our piece look like. It involves a pan down from a mid height down tow at the mouses height, i'll upload pics of it as soon as i can find a working version of the film (all current versions I've found have been flawed)

Did some modelling of Macho over he holidays as well, I've got the general shape of him pretty much there. The body is fine and i dont really wanna change anything on it, I did have some arms and legs on him but then me with Sarah and she gifted me with two pairs of much better ones so i'll be using those. We alos had quite a long discussion over how the faces and limbs where going to work. We had a quick look at what they had done on the rigs for Studio AKA's Lost and Found. We noticed that instead of using a spline inside of the limbs they had placed the FKs outside of the rig of the arm and the use the painted weights and different values on the divisions. I did a quick test to show how i thought it worked and see whether we could replicate it. It didnt work brilliantly but it proved that it worked so i went home and spent some time doing a much better test.
So Yeh that works, the painting of the weights isnt at all subtle in this example but i can see any reason why we cant get this working on our final rigs. It'll be a damn site better than using a spline.

Also got a rough face model of Sarah that she had knocked up for Hero and i did a blend shape test using that. And i can confirm that it worked, so i decided to do a quick animation with the eye looking about and blinking. This worked perfectly and was looking really nice so i sent it through to render. It got about half way through rendering and the computer froze and wouldn't respond then it crashed and wouldn't power back up. Upon inspection it was discovered that my motherboard had pretty much melted...bugger.

Thankfully the hardrive is intact so i haven't lost any work. Decided i'm gonna spend a good few hundred making myself a really fast processing comp for when we start rendering.

Erm...what else....

A small change i made was to give the eye an eyeball. This gives a curve to the eye and will allow us nice reflectivity. Though i'm pretty certain that Sarah already had this in mind.

Right i think hats about it...l8rs.