Juggling

Progress for the juggling.



Taken most of the day to work this out, It just looks really sloppy and the balls are only roughed, but now that ive got my head round this and got something to work from it shouldnt be too bad.

Shots

Right shots that i've been working on over the last coupla days for feedback.


Shot 3
I havn't added any facial animation to this yet because im not too sure whats gonna be happening with the sound, which is quite heavily involved on this shot, so i'll do more to it when i have a clearer idea of whats happening with that.
Also this starts on frame 25. I've left the first 24 frames until Macho's animated in shot 2 so i know what he's doin and where to pick it up.


Shot 24, need some feedback on this shot. Shouldnt take long to add or change anything.


Shot 4. He does have rocks in his hands but they're parented to the controls which have their visabilty turned off.

Lemme know what you think.
Onto shot 22

Stuff for the site

And one for the main site.

Shot 4 issues

Right i'm having issues with with Macho's stretch as it is in the animatic.
Macho is essentially just a giant head with arms and legs and it turns out that he can barely touch his hands together.
This is the most im gonna be able to do with this stretch, instead of pulling the arm back with the forearm like a normal person would he'll be clasping his wrist and pulling it towards his body, and im not sure whether thats gonna work. Its looking a bit too clustered and his arms keep covering his face.
Shall i continue with this or revert back to what i was doing earlier with him stretching up to the sky???

Texturing Stuff

Spent the last coupla days doin a wee bit of texturing. and its going ok-ish.
Wasted quite alot of time today playing aorund with lights wondering why my renders were contantly overexposing before realizeing the blending mode of my occlusion was set to overlay....dipstick.

Got the stump through off Sarah on saturday and found that although the stump had been UV'd properly, the bark that raps around the outside of of the stump had only been auto mapped, and so had to waste half a day mapping that out properly. But thats done now and the textures are created and just need feedback.Right comments on this. Firstly on this particular render there is no bump map, tis something that i've started working on though, for the bark in particular it'll probably only be slight cuz i really quite like the texture thats on there and think it does the job pretty well by itself.
The top of the bark strips are now darker than what you can see here, i was getting annoyed that some sections of the top planes are noticeably brighter where the light falls on them, but its looking better now that i've darkened it.
I havn't yet added any paint splatters to this yet, im not 100% sure they're necessary and wanted to get ure opinion first.
And finally im not quite sure whats happening on the right offshoot but it looks like the texture overlaps in a couple of places, not sure what this is cuz its not the UV's - tis something i still need to go back over.
And the right offshoot is all floaty.

Next the wheelbarrow.
If this looks a little desaturated its because...it is. I only had one light on this so when i rendered it it came out really underexposed, so i brightened it with levels.
Found myself clueless when it came to the colouring of this so i just applied similar colours to what we had been using on the large watering can.
I've also somehow managed to apply the splatter paints on every service except the ones that we're going to be seeing. so i need to go back over and do more.
Also the wheel on this model looks somewhat...sunk. Do you want me to leave it like this or shall i raise it up a bit?
Basically tried to make this look as campish as possible...Too much?

Am going to get into uni for about 1ish tommorow to pick up these shrubs and leaves and will hopefully get them done by midday weds. After that i think im gonna spend a few days animating - going back and finishing the scenes ive started.
And i plan to start some test renders using shot 4 with textured Macho in textured enviroment over the weekend, unless im needed somewhere else.

As always thoughts and feedback.

Garden

This is a render from yesterday.
Note: theres is only one huge spotlight in this scene.

Im pretty much sitting with a bunch of Gruffalo screencaps infront of me trying to capture the same colour palette as they used, seeing as its been our biggest influence on this project.

Im really quite pleased with the fences - they've turned out better than i thought they would.

I've still got to bump map the grass and the dirt and im a little worried about the edging where the grass and dirt meet, its too harsh and makes the grass look like water. I thought about maybe a short level of grass skirting around the edge, but this would be quite a lengthy a boring thing to do so i dunno. I might just see if indenting the edge makes a difference, it seems to have worked were the fences and dirt meet.

Annoyingly over the last day or so an couple of files have corrupted and i need some stuff -
UV'd Flowepots + Wheelbarrow (got off Sarah this morning)
UV''d Tree Stump (wasn't with the rest of the props)
All the bushes and leaves.
Mushrooms (apparently still being UV's)

Texturing

Right, am taking a week off of the animating to get some texturing done.

I spent a coupla of day s fiddling around with macho textures and getting them done using Maya's Fast skin.I really quite like maya fast skin and was planning to push it useage as much as i could for this project, but during mondays meeting with Sarah and Dan it was decided that using the fast skin
to texture our characters wasn't really a viable option. Although it looks really good its a very fiddly process that isnt very user friendly so its getting dropped so we can spend more time perfecting other elements, sometimes its a real pain that we don't have more people working full time on Gnomes, ah well.

As requested

Right this is shot 32 as of 12.15(am) friday morning.



Its ok-ish up until a point, the struggling to keep the weight up is working really well, but the lift from crouching needs work done to it, cuz at the mo' he just... does it, then stand stationary for about 15 frames.

I dont like the smile i have him doing at the end, it isn't expressive enough and looks generally bad and i might make the eye twitch a bit more subtle - make it look like its a small detail that supposed to go unnoticed...but still catches everyones attention.

Also need to bring the pot down further on his head before he starts lifting to add more weight cuz it looks too floaty.

Things to note -
Having him holding the flowerpot above his head in both hands is a right pain in the arse, its easy enough parenting the pot to one hand but matching the movement with the other arm has led to no end of grief, and has taken a ridiculous amount of time to get looking only half decent.

The flowerpot was WWWAAAAYYYYY too small and i've had to scale it up to fit Macho inside...should be okay though...i hope....

The flowerpot crash looks REALLY bad without the sound or dust, i did add some camera shake to it at one point, but then realized that if we're gonna be adding dust effects in AE then it wouldnt be possible to have the camera shaking, so i got rid of it...and its boring again

Found a couple of problems with the blendshapes as well. Namely that he doesn't like to look up with his eyes - simple solution is to not have him look up. I wouldn't say that the animation has suffered any and am not sure whether its worth taking the time to fix or just keep cracking on until its a proper issue.

Lemme know your thoughts on the animation. And also lemme know if we're gonna break into uni on Sun to get some texturing done (i've studied the layout and think i've found away around the security alarm).

The first incomplete animations.

Both of these are works in progress.


Animating has only in the last two days started running relatively smoothly. Being the first piece that I've animated in about a year i took me a couple of days to remind myself on how things worked - "Ah! The Graph Editor! I remember that."

The first couple of pieces i created were truly terrible so this is about the 4th time I've animated scene 3 and i got a bit bored of doing it, so i decided to apply my now refreshed (though limited) animation knowledge to one of the other scenes and go back to scene 3 in a couple of days.

I've started using video referance properly for the first time and i can't believe that i havn't used it before. Its been immensly helpful with posing and arcs, and in real life you do things thats you would never think to add off the top of your head.
For example when i was filming myself weight lifting for referance everytime before i lifted the weights i would do something to loosen up my muscles, whether it was shaking my hands off or stretching my neck to one side it was a involuntary movement that i never would have clocked to add to the scene. These little details - although a pain to add in - are what makes good animation and really brings your characters to life.

Although this did lead me down the side route of being overly ambitious, I ended up thumbnailing and trying to add all kinds of slouches, jumps and stretchy/yawn hybrids to the movement until 2 days later it dawned on me that i only had about 110 frames to animate the scene and far too much happening. So big cut back and now he just has a quick arm shake to loosen up as he's moving towards his rocks (don't look for it, it ain't done yet.)



This shot (4) is alot closer to completion, i've got a couple more elements to add to it before i feel its been done to a reasonable standard, no more than 2 hours work, spoke to Dan Dahli today and he commented that the timings need to be a bit more uneven to add weight to the movement - something i completely agree with - but due to the ever pressing time restrictions i'm going to leave this for today and make a start on shot 32, which is one of the harder shots and is probably going to need some more time spent on it.

Edit - Just noticed the timing on his bounce (shot4) are off kilter to the weight lifiing....bugger.