Evaluation: Computer Graphics For Animation and Film January 21, 2010

Despite my mid-week drama I am reasonably pleased with how my animation has turned out. It’s not exactly as I planned it to be because of this little fiasco, but I think I managed to make it work to a reasonable degree. That’s not to say that my final version isn’t without it’s own flaws. For some reason when it came to my final render, the first and third jelly babies and the cupboard doors turned black and lost their texturing no matter how many lights I shone on them or how many times I fiddled with the material attributes.

Other problems I came across would be things such as when I used the smooth bind tool to attach the skeleton to the polygons the programme would crash when I changed the settings but the default setting meant that when I moved an arm, for example, part of the main body would move with it as well. I’d like to, in future, learn a way in which to combat this so that it does not happen to me again.

The main problem is the one that caused me to completely change my animation ideas. This was when I imported my characters into the main scene they needed to be scaled down but when I did this, everything came apart and no grouping, combining, parenting or anything could fix it. I then decided to rebuild my characters, and then realised how small I needed to make them and how fiddly the joints would be so I started again entirely. Probably not the best idea a few days away from the deadline.

I made a new scene using one of the cupboard shelves and scaled it up as far as I could without it disappearing and played around with the original character models that I made until they worked. With the deadline looming I had to cut up my story entirely so my final piece has next to no narrative and now the jelly babies are just doing random things.

iMovie saved my life when it came to putting my rendered scenes together because the file type that came out of rendering my projects as a movie file in Maya 2010 didn’t work in Premiere Pro and I then played around in Soundbooth re-recording the sounds that I had already made because I didn’t like them anymore. I also decided that I wanted a backing track but then realised that all I have is Garage Band (which I monumentally hate), and proceeded to use it regardless. So I have a random beat in the background to go with the random jelly babies.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with this project, it’s better than the last one, but at the same time, not a patch on our viral video which I absolutely love! Either way, I don’t think that this is that bad considering it is the first time I have used Maya. From this I have learnt that I like doing the modelling and rigging sides of things but I don’t like texturing or animating. Adding lights and cameras is somewhere in the middle, it’s alright but it can get a little tedious when it doesn’t do what I want it to. I also had a rough storyboard, but when I remembered to scan it I think I threw it away, typical, I’d make a new one, but there’s no scanner here, or one at home. Typical. Again.

Final Scene Renders January 21, 2010

Here are the final scenes that I am using for my animation rendered in 720p, I decided that instead of discarding my kitchen scene entirely I would use it as kind of establishing shot so that there is some suggestion that this is set in a kitchen cupboard.

Changing My Scene January 20, 2010

Right, when I put the jelly babies in the kitchen and scale them down to the right size they are teeeeeny tiny and the joints all came apart and it wouldn’t let me put a new set in. And more annoyance. So now I’ve decided I’m just going to use the basic shelf that they sit on and get them to do something there or something like that. It’s nothing at all like what I want which has really annoyed me and I kind of just want to start something completely new but that probably isn’t the best idea I’ve had to date considering that the deadline is on Friday and we have about 30 hours left in which to make this silly thing work. Here’s my shelf environment as it is at the moment.

So yeah, I need to try and find some way to make this work. Once again I absolutely despise my project, I expected that from the 2D project because I didn’t enjoy that from the beginning, but with this one I was really looking forward to getting it done and while I knew I was being a little over ambitious I didn’t think it’d be something as trivial as this that makes it not work. In a way I’m determined to get it to be as I wanted it to in the beginning because I don’t want to give up and start something new but I also want to start something that I know will work.

Making A Shoe January 20, 2010

I realised that when I thought I was ready to start animating that I still had a bit of modelling left to do. I had to make a shoe/a pair of shoes that would squish my jelly babies at the end of the animation. So I started making them.

I made my shoes and then decided that as the texturing wasn’t working as I would have liked it to that I would leave out this little end section and finish the animation earlier. This meant I could then also get on with my animating. When it came to importing my jelly baby characters to the main scene they kept falling apart. Cue huge amounts of annoyance.

Texturing My 3D Kitchen January 19, 2010

I’ve finally finished texturing my kitchen environment for the animation’s setting. Here are some render previews:

I’ve decided to leave everything in the cupboards as plain colours (as opposed to texturing them) so that the centre of attention is more focused towards the jelly babies as opposed to everything around them.

Finished Kitchen Scene January 13, 2010

Next up, texturing! I’ve decided I’m going to texture the bigger parts like the walls, door and cupboards but when it comes to the smaller objects in the cupboard I will leave these as block colours in order not to distract from the main characters while they are exploring. However, I am still debating this because my jelly baby characters are quite block coloured as well with the jelly texture so I don’t want them to blend in with everything in the environment so in order to combat this I think that I am either going to go all out and texture all of the items as they should be and make them look like proper food products, or should I chose to keep them in block colours I will reduce the opacity on the colours to make them faint so as not to distract from the characters as much. I also need to add a powdery texture over my jelly babies, I think I need a to do list.

My 3D Characters January 8, 2010

Here are my five characters for the animation thus far (fully rigged and added materials):

The red jelly baby and the pink jelly baby look almost identical in colour which is kind of annoying, but if my perfectionism takes over then I’ll tweak it a bit. Perhaps. I want to add like a dusting over them like you get on real jelly babies but I’m still figuring out how do go about this without making a massive mess.

Making the characters for my 3D animation January 8, 2010

I’ve decided that for my 3D animation I am going to make my characters look like little jelly babies as this will be easier for me when it comes to animating as I already have a fairly good understanding about animating this sort of ‘human’ structure thanks to our ABC Maya course.

Using all the jelly that I made a little while ago to add material attributes to my characters I made five main jelly baby characters for my animation. They will break out of the packet that they are in and go exploring. Here is the original character model that I made for this:

I then decided that this looked a little too much like a cuddly robot so this morning I started basically from scratch (just keeping the head and the legs) and added some indentation on the face to make some features so it now has eyes and a nose. The mouth was annoying, I left it as a dent.

I’ve now fully rigged it and added IK Handles and locators and all that malarky.

It’s a good job I love jelly January 1, 2010

I made loads of jelly the other night. It was fun. It’s not entirely random, I just wanted it to take pictures of for texturing my characters in my 3D animation. I now have six pints of jelly to eat through.

So, I’ve Finally Started My 3D Animation November 22, 2009

I took some photos in the kitchen today and started modelling our kitchen cupboard as the basic environment for my animation, the sweets start off here before they explode from the packet and then this is also where they explore.

Kitchen cupboard; now with doors: