Conclusion

Well that's it, my second year is oficially over. I'm quite satisfied with how the project went, I think it went a whole lot better than our previous group project. This excercise gave me a good oprotunity to animate once again, which seems like a very rare experience to me. Durgs character, which is lazy, goofy and un restricted made it good practice for me except he is a nightmare when you try to get him running. At some point his legs always seem to buckle because of the knee controls, which is a pain in the ass as far as I'm concerned. Which is why we decided to make it a midshot instead of a wide shot. Time was running short and we neede all the time we could get. The sprinting of the arms wasn't bad though, that was easy, the only thing that made this project a real ass itch, was those error messages that popped up. The process would go start up maya, work, error, close, repeat. It would do that so many times, that I think Lewis said to me that it happened 7 times in one day!
However in the end we got it done and I'm quite happy with it except for the speedy backgrounds...but anyways I''m happy that we were able to put is some form of 2D work in there, so our plan worked in the long run.
Well this is it, the final 3rd year and I'm not looking forward to it, I don't even want to think about it. But as of right now I'm signing out, peace!

Final Vid baby!

Well hear we are our final video. I's ok, I'm happy with it it according to my standards. We asked Dan Shuffle and a few others what they thinked and they liked it. The only thing is the backgrounds of him running towrds the screen, especially the part with the knives suck. I was trying to create an illusion of traveling forwards, howvere we only found out afterwards that there was a better way. However I...well we'll bothe just take it as a learning experience and do better next time. Leave your comments and let me know what you think, but don't be too harsh please.

Schedule 4

Well here we are the 4th post baby! I managed to get all my animations done but not without a few annoying troubles Lewis and I had to put up with along the way (mostly my fault) and Lewis managed to get all the shots rendered, which I'm well happy about. Tomorrow should be I hope smooth sailing from here...who I'm I kidding I mean should be a little less strenuous from here, since we are mostly going to edit. The animation is 100% and our post produvtion is around 40-45% on my part, so we'll plan to hopefully complete it tomorrow, if not then definitely thursday which is when we'll be putting up our final schedule. There's one thing that worries me though and that's the 2d animation. Lewis says that all we have to do is import it into After Effects but nothing ever goes smoothly. Anyways things have been agonising but we're pulling through, so tune in on wednesday.

The Crashes again...

Well here there are, the new hopefully improved chrashes. Since my photoshop has a very limited amount of text type I tried to make them diverse as much as I possibly could. I'ts a breif post today so here they are, what do you think?

New Schedule and last Stand

This is our third schedule and our animations are about 90-95% complete. All I have to do now is just do Durg spitting or more like leaking from his mouth and him sprinting then I'm done. Since my computer can't handle the process of maya, I'll have to do it as soon as possible and I'm planning to do bot of those animations in one day....hopefully. After they are done we'll put them in the already lit environment stage and set up all the cameras and positioning, rendering out each shot and putting them in to Premier or more likely After Effects to set up our movie. I hope we get to do all that on tuesday or wednesday, if everything goes ok. Thursday will be just tightening everything and making sure everything looks good, especially with the 2D audience in there. After that if we can we'll render it to DVD and that will be that. Just so you know a run cycle is one of the most challenging animations I've done, although I do remeber David Ross doing a run cycle so I'll ask him for some tips. Last thursday was quite productive, I managed to get Durg to sit up and freaking out with the knives coming towards him. Plus me and Lewsi picked out some sounds for us to use in our final piece. This is the last week and my animations skills are crappy as....well....crappy, but I'll give it my all if I don't I may ot get excepted into the 3rd year.

My Schedule for the final week
1.Finish two aninations ideally on monday or tuesday.
2. Put animations in already lit environment and set up cameras.
3.Render out each animations and put them in After Effects, I deally should be done on wednesday.
4. Put in sound effects, editing music etc.
5.Render movie on DVD.

Good luck to us both.

Gimme a hint of blue and a bang!

Yup yup the same thing again. Lewis asked for a hint of blue, so like a friend I gave him some blue and...I gave him a bang sign aswell. I doubt my Maya will be working at the moment, but this is all I can do for now until I come in tomorrow. This is gonna be a tight schedule and just in case you don't know what this is for, it's for the sequences where Durg is running and when he runs into Blot, or is it the other way around? Anyways yeah here you go Lew!

Speed in Colour!

Here are some more Lewis. Wow that was really breif.

Mach Speed!

Well I know I jsut published a post about 40 mins ago, but maya absolutely will not run on my PC. Don't what has changed in the past couple of days but it won't do it for me anymore. So I decided to make some speed lines for the Durg running scene. Lewis suggested it if it wasn';t possible for me to animate, so right now this is the best I can do. Sorry Lewis but if I'll keep trying maya but if it won't work I'l have to do it in college. Anyaways here's the speed lines.

My PC doesn't like me

Hello, this is just a quick post today. Things have been a bit of a nighmare lately, mainly because my PC has RAM issues right now. It all started when I downloaded a crack version of DVD encore and since the installation failed I can't unistall it, because it's a crack. So after that I needed to get a trial version which was no problem but I needed a converter to change my movie file to an AVI because encore doesn't support MOVs. So I got an AVS video converter but that just seemed to be faulty, everytime I tried to convert my file the program would not respond and close. Then ever since then my PC has been running slow, I'm doing everything I can to free up space, but it has it's moments when it runs good enough but then the CPU usage goes to 100%. It's basically bruck up, when that happens. However the good news is that I'm able to animate to some degree, I dunno but for some reason my version of maya doesn't seem all that compatible with my PC, could be because it's vista. I have some reoslution issues with maya, try to put it to full screen, the main worspace window just distorts and the same for the 4 views.

However I've been able to do some animations such as the close up run of Durg which needs tweaking and the run cycle which is hard so I'll save that till last. I also must keep in mind that most of the shots are only 1-3 seconds at most so probably intense tweaking isn't all that important. I still got some things to do so I hope my PC can hold out till then. When the close up of Durg is done I'll do a post of it, until stay tuned.