The End!

So the film is officially finished! I never thought I'd see the day, but the unthinkable has happened and we've actually finished the project.

I'm pretty happy with the end result! I think we've all worked really really hard over the last 10 weeks or so and it's been stressful at times, but all very worth it for the end result! The credits were a late addition created by Dave that I think look so cool! And I think it's a great way to show off the effort we all put into the gallery environment too.

I think our idea was quite a unique take on the digital environment brief and I think we've created something quite unique and fun to watch. I've learnt a lot about areas I previously hadn't touched on before this project, particularly lighting and UV mapping which has benefitted my understanding of Maya and industry practice a lot. I think I've developed a lot as an animator as well, because I had had to produce a certain number of shots to a brief and storyboard by a certain date which I imagine is a lot like working within the industry.

So well done to all of Meat and Five Veg!

Render: Done. Editing: Almost.

So just a quick update that starts with some good news: everything rendered fine! Dave and Maik have done a wicked job with the rendering and everything's been passed through adrive to James for the editing to being. James has posted a few drafts on the Meat and Five Veg facebook group but everyone has been pointing out certain things they want changed including myself. It's not a personal attack on James in any way at all, but we just want everything to look as good as it can. There were some problems with very strange sound choices, some out of sync noises and there were a couple of shots that got corrupted when they hopped onto adrive which is nobodies fault. I feel bad pointing out things that I'd like changed because I know that editing s no easy task, but I keep telling myself that voicing an opinion is the right thing to do which I know it is, I just still feel bad. But James is putting a lot of effort in as I type and he has been for a while so I'm very confident that he'll produce an edit that we're all pleased with very very soon.

It's done! The animation is all complete and everything has been handed to Maik to being rendering. The reason Maik is taking over rendering, along with Dave, is because there have been some recent problems with the render farm in college, the problem being that it's rendering capabilities have been considerably reduced in the last few weeks. Maik had been looking into buying a computer that was a lot more powerful than his laptop that could take over rendering and heavy jobs in Maya, but hadn't planned on getting it this early. But when we found out that the render farm was playing up, he went ahead and bought it so that we could render off that. That's commitment! And has really saved us in the final hour for rendering, so we all owe him a big thank you. But I'm not giving it to him, because the power will go to his head and we'll have a mutiny on our hands. Anyway, me and Joe and uploaded all our scene files to adrive.com, which have been taken down by Dave and Maik and they are just reapplying textures and lights and then scene 2 and 3 are being sent to render.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. That was my big sigh of relief to have all the animation done. As soon as the rendered shots come out then it's over to James and Malachi for sound and editing.

With the playblasts I've produced I'm attempting to stay as close as I can to the storyboard, just so it reads in a familiar way when it comes to being edited. Below are all the shots I had to do by the 31st of december, which was a target we had set in order to give us a good amount of time to render and edit everything together. I'm pretty happy with the most of the shots I've produced, but too be honest there's not really a lot going on in them so I was never going to think that they were the best thing I'd ever produced. The walk towards the painting I am very disappointed with though, as I just didn't have enough time to polish it and fix some problems in the way I would have liked. I used an old walk cycle test to start the walk off then carried on a few more steps. But it's just really poppy and unnatural and I'm not very happy with it. But on the plus side it's only a short shot and as long as it conveys to the audience that the character is walking up to the painting without them having too much to focus on the mechanics of the walk then I think I'll get away with it. But it's just a lesson learnt for the future I suppose: if one of the shots I have to do is a walk, do it first!









Joe has also been working hard to get all his shots done, and they are coming along really really well, but we;re going to need more time. And it's in no way because of laziness on anyones part, but because Joe is doing the shot where the statue falls down which is one of the biggest in the film and so more time is needed to make sure it's completely perfect, so we've all agreed to extend the deadline to the 2nd of January. I'm going to help out by doing a couple of small shots towards the end of scene two so that Joe's got more time to focus on this shot. But it's all coming together!

Okay so while the finishing touches are being put on scene 1 inside the gallery, animation is beginning for scene 2. Myself and Joe have split the shots in half, ad I'll be taking the first half, which happens to fit onto this sheet of Malachi's storyboard:

The next page of the story shows the plans we had for the statue shattering, but there's a big problem with this. The plug-in we need to be able to shatter the statue is really hard to get hold of, both legally and illegally. Dave sent an email to the company who made it enquiring about any possible discounts for students, and they never answered back. And when we searched online for a crack version of it we could only get hold of a windows version, and we're all used macs. This does change the film quite a bit, but we sat round and talked about what we thought we could do without the use of plug-ins that could wrk just as well. After a lot of discussion we decided that the character would again let his curiosity get the better of his and touch the stick holding up the sculpture, which would make it all come crashing down to the floor. As impressive as shattering the thing to pieces would have looked, I think this idea could work well too. It seems a shame to compromise but there's not much else we can do unfortunately, and it's getting quite late in the term for decisions like these to be drawn out and we needed to decide the next step as a group.

So Joe is gonna handle the other half of scene two, and there are only two shots of the film when it returns to the gallery so we'll take one each on that too. Again, I'm going to get going with the animation and post it all up in a couple of days once it's all done.

Lighting

So the texturing for scene 1 is done, and scene 2 was textured really quickly by Maik and Malachi. Dave lit most of scene 1 and myself, Joe and Malachi chipped in to light the second scene. As I knew absolutely nothing about lighting I asked Dave for his opinion because he has a lot more experience than me and is pretty good at it. He said that realistically we needed three lights in the scene which was enough for all three of us to do one each. The file was uploaded to adrive.com and I downloaded the file and put my light in first.

It seemed like a good idea to refer back to the painting for inspiration for lighting. The scene was obviously set outside, but it occurred to me that there strong areas of really light and really dark on the statue. The source of the light seemed to be coming from above to the right. Below are a couple of shots of the model Maik created for the scene, which looked utterly spot on! How he's done that I will never know, he said something about NURBS which scared the life out of me so I stopped asking.

There was a problem though. When I downloaded the scene I just couldn't download all the textures. I don't even know why, maybe a problem within adrive, but me and Maik attempted to fix this problem with no result before decided that we would just have to light the scene without textures. The main difficulty this provided was that when I did mentalray previews of the lighting the sculpture didn't show up. But I applied a white lambert to the sculpture so that it was easier to see which fixed the problem for now.

I started by making an ambient light and placing it directly above the sculpture to see how it would look. It lit the scene fairly well, but I wanted to recreate the same shadows on the sculpture that the painting showed, so I continued messing around with different light types.

This was another attempt at moving around the ambient light from the front.

This was a low intensity area light from behind which obviously is no good because it's so dark!

And this was a spot light from the top that I played around with for a while, but I still couldn't get it to look right. So i decided to go ahead with the ambient light from the top, as I seemed to be much more effective. I tried experimenting with the intensity of the ambient light, and below is a shot in which I set the light too strong. 

I moved the light a lot higher up and only turned the light down a little bit, so it was much more like natural lighting, and below is a screenshot of where the light was placed.

This is how it looked after:

This seemed fine for now, and I needed to allow for Joe and Malachi to add more lights so I couldn't make it too bright. However I ran into a problem, which was that I completely forgot how these lights would affect Goon in the scene. The intensity I now had the ambient light set at was far too high, and was lighting Goon really harshly. So I had to turn it down a lot to make sure Goon wasn't being bathed in raw sunlight, and he now looked like this:

More Texturing

I did the texturing for the bench in the scene in much the same way as the light switch. The bench was modelled by Maik. I automapped the UVs and the came out really squashed which just wasn't going to work:

Instead of matching and sowing the UVs, I stretched them out to roughly the proportion of the bench and applied the wood texture I found from cgtextures.com. It took me a while to organise the UVs because loads of parts were blended into each other which made things a bit hectic. What I did instead was selected all the UV points for the top, bottom and side of the bench and clicked cut UVs. Then I selected "shell" selection in the UV editor and moved all the now separate sections around to get them organised, which then led on to me scaling them to look more like parts of the bench in the UV editor. It sounds easy-ish in words but it got it wrong two or three times before I got it to work.

Again I created a PSD network and applied the wood texture in photoshop which looked like this:

The UVs working much better being stretched out and the bench actually looks pretty good! I only did one of the pieces of wood on the bench and then duplicated them so that the bench was once again complete. Then I clicked all the bench parts and combined them so that it was one object again and it was finished!