Week 14, Final week

All that could be done is done. This week is dedicated to editing, sound, and titles. This is a shame I feel, as I wish I could handball these tasks onto someone else while I touched up my shots, as this post production process is very time consuming at the most crucial stage. When looking back I can see areas which I need to improve my work flow.
Pre-Production: My storyboards were too long, with too many shots. I was over ambitious with story, though story telling is crucial to the enjoyment of any animation, if I’m catering for a demo reel perhaps a sacrifice needs to be made. Unless of course I was clever enough to squeeze a lot of story into very few shots, with very few character and very minimal character movement, then perhaps it could be pulled off.
Character design: Keep it simple. My Sheppard character has a cloak and a flap on his hat. Both these two apparels needed to be rigged effectively, so that they would move around in a flimsy fashion like clothing. Not only did I have to spent more time rigging this character due to his add-ons, but also these two elements slowed me down when Animating. Simplicity is the key to producing an animation that works, and that can be achieved within the time constraints.
Scene design: I was pleased with the overall look of my world, but I made the mistake of modelling the world with the purpose of catering for all shots. What I mean is; I build a ‘location’ in which I was going to put a camera man and crew into. It’s more effective to separate scenes and cater them specifically for one shot at a time. The trouble with this is that my lights would have to be imported correctly, with the right relationships in both strength and space, and then altered. But good lighting is quite important and very useful when adding style and intrigue into shots, so spending time tweaking lights I suppose is forgivable, but I must ask jack if there’s a more efficient way to do such a thing.

Production:
Rigging will be quicker now, and instead of taking up the bulk of my time and preventing me from moving forward with my project, it should be easier the second time around. I’m not foolish enough to assume that rigging will go down without a hitch in round 2, but it will be a less daunting, time consuming task. My rigs should be neat, clearly named with a consistent naming convention. Also all the scripts I have amassed will help speed up this process.

Lighting and rendering; Due to the importance of both, for my holidays or next project I will have to spend quite some time familiarizing myself with both shadows and ray tracing options, as well as experiment with different lighting techniques. Most of this needs to be done through the holidays, as I do not want to be bogged down on this stage, as lighting and rendering happens fairly late in the production process.

Post production:
Learning fusion and using final cut will have a larger emphasis than before, since with my limited knowledge of both programs and a lack of teachers, the usefulness of these two programs didn’t go down that well, as I couldn’t use them to there full potential. Some time will have to be killed in the holidays watching tutorials. I should get Chris and Lee’s help over the holidays.

Overall: All skills levels must be improved. I need better modelling skills so my mesh deforms correctly. I need to master facial rigs. I need to learn different rigging styles, both complicated and simple, as it is clever to use different rigs depending on what movement the character needs to do, as a opposed to creating a fully operation rig with numerous functions I would not need to exploit.
Playing around with Z brush wouldn’t hurt, but keeping polygon limits in mind and importing and exporting animated objects will be difficult.
I should also be researching more animation studios in Melbourne, and ask them for advice on side projects, so as to let them know my name, that I’m pushing myself to learn, and that I’m learning from industry standards. This might help me secure a job in the future, or could help with networking opportunities.
I also need to improve my gift of the gab, so people like me. I think at the end of the day, charisma will serve me best when networking and that trait will be complimented by a high skill level. If I can get that far.

Week 13

I’m simply rendering with Maya software, and Instead of shooting one scene with multiple light ‘passes’ I’ve just incorporated all my lights into one shot, and rendered without fancy ray tracing or shadows. Given the strength of my computer not a lot of rendering time is spent, so that should save me some time. I’m struggling with continuity when it comes to lights. As some of my shots are darker than others. Given that the story revolves around a day night cycle, I fear the animated short could become confusing, and the changing lights would be distracting. Obviously since I have one week left, and i'm still animating, lighting and rendering, time is certainly not on my side. I guess thats to be expected for an animated of my skill level, where the entire project has been a learning expereince, or an exersise in learning an array of programs. I feel like i've learnt alot, and my next project should be smoother and quicker to pull off, I hope.

Week 12

Week 12
Now that all characters have been fully rigged, and my grasp on skeleton systems and constraints has been improved, finally I can now animate the scenes with the most character movement. One such scene involves the Sheppard carrying the sheep, which was tricky because I had to parent the sheep in-between the Sheppard’s palm joints. It wasn’t fool proof, as the sheep would often break through the Sheppard’s hands, but the overall look evoked a sense that the Sheppard was lovingly cradling his lamb, which I was pleased with. To hide the sheep’s behaviour of breaking through the Sheppard’s mesh, I had to reshoot the shot with another camera angle. Now Rendering.

Week 11

Due to problems with rigging upper body FK handles, I chose to animate the scenes with the least character movement; scenes in which my characters were remaining static, looking up in awe. I used a simple twist blend shapes to make it look like the sheep character was looking over his shoulder. This saved time, and allowed me to actually complete scenes without rigging. Little short cuts like this, though using blend shapes makes the animation quite cheesy and wouldn’t impress anyone in the industry had it been on a demo reel, at the end of the day it’s still fast and simple and gets the job done.

Storyboard had to be revised slightly again, this time it was a joy cutting shots, not a horrid amputation as it was the other times. The entire version is just too much work to handle with my level of rigging skills. Story has been condensed and has, as a result lost a lot of it's impact, but an atmospheric piece is beginning to rear it's head through folders of rendered Tiff files. It's beginning to take shape. I ended up using alot more camera movements then I had orginally planned, both to show off the world and character, and beacuse it's movement without animation. Taking short cuts ect.

week 11

The dead line looms. Other assignments occupy my time, though the beasts are not on my pipe line, they must be tackled none the less. Further perfecting certain scenes, but i feel as if I've burnt myself out. Needed to take a wee break from the project, so I could look upon it with fresh eyes. If there's something a traditional artist could appreciate it's that ones perspective becomes clouded when working on a piece for so long. He begins to see it through the biased eyes of a mad man.

week 10

Problem with arm rig. Inverse Kinetics (IK handles) don't give me the movement I need. Animating individual bones proved to be time consuming, difficult with a poor result. used the 'make fk controller' script by commet and it did all the work for me. Rendered out some scene, but not happy with the lighting. I've been study the fine art, but still getting my head around it's functions within maya. Some industry professionals just use spot lights, and ignore all the other different lights in maya.

Compiled some ruff play blasts together.