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.

New schedule and a welcome

Well here is the new schdeule, all of the pre production is done as well as the production stuff. However Lewis and I were wandering when percentage we're at with the animation. Since we've done all the 2D animation of the audience, we now only have the 3D part to do, so we decided that it's about 20% done. I have to figure out how to do this running cycle which is proving to be quit an itch in the butt, but I found a tutorial that seems good enough. Next after that I'll need to find a way to create a water droplet which will act as a drool from Durg....should be easy enough I hope.

This rave on air thing is worrying me a bit but I ain't that worried about it, but it's the fact that I got a crack version of DVD Encore 2.0 and it doesn't work! I can't even uninstall it, repair it or modify it! Those damn error messages keep popping up! Sigh anyways I'll break through it one way or another, but on a happy not I was able to complete an animation for Durg. It needs tweaking but I'm really happy with the movement. A couple of guys from class, looked at it and laughed, so I'm glad I got the appeal down. That's it for know I'll be sure to post up Blots running sequence, see ya!

Storyboard Redraft

This is the redraft. Jared said that we need to incorporate the 2d into the 3d more effectively. The vector render seeme like a good idea, but it would cause some complications with the look and we simply don't have the time. After racking my brain to no success Lewis came up with the idea of making the audience somewhat fake, like they weren't really there but on a TV screen. So, when Blot comes to throw the knives he can't find them, so he goes behind the television to get them. This is when we switch to the screen of the audience and slowly zoom out to reveal that they aren't really there, but on TV. So Blot then gets back up on stage and the storyboard resumes normally. Now this is the version I drew yesterday but I think Lewis demonstartes the actions way better than mine. But I put mine up still so you yourself can compare. That hat's off to you Lew, now let's finish this off!

Refence, Stage Action!

Well here's our stage Lewis's is more complete however for some reason the version he gave me doesn't have all the textures. I think the lighting is overall good, except I think it can be tweaked even more, which is why I put up some references. Anyways Jared said the vector rendering is a very creative idea except it may not be the way to go, if we wanna get that quality of animation from our 2d. This is something we have to be cautious about.

The Vector Render

Here is an example of intergarting 2d into 3d. This is vector Render. I spoke to Tom Stockeright about this and he suggessted this. David Ross hepled me with the settings on our maya enviroment stage howver it messed up and closed. So Tom decided to take his own model and turn it into what you see before you. I personally think this looks really cool, however. This Vector render doesn't support any textures you put in the enviroment, you need something another for it to support the textures. Tom only has colours on it, he also has glowing but again it's not supported. Anyway give me a shout and let me know what you think. I also give credit to Tom for making this 360 short animation.

The four animations...wow

Yeah I decided that I'm not gonna do something rediculous and upload 15 animations. I'll just upload my best 4. There was a 3rd character that I did but, his animation actions are the worst out of the two. Only show the best of your work, that's the golden rule in your showreel, right? Anyway in our next post it will hopefully involve some, pictures of the stage itself and hopefully some animation tests as well so stay tuned!

Check my schedule

Well this is my schdeule if you can tell, here's things so far. Lewis and I have pretty much done all the pre production stuff, designs, storyboards animatic and the like. After staying up till 3:30am inking all of the audience for Daryll I'd say that I've finished it too. The deadline for it is today, so I'm glad that me and Lewis are done with that. Just as a side note though, I don't think I could be a 2D animator, I mean as fun as it feels for the first 3-5 pages, it just gets downright BORING! drawing the same character over and over again. In fact it's funny because when it comes to illustrating characters, drawing the same one over and over again trying to figure his, her or its personality, then it's cool.
Anyways, back to the audience drawings I've make some less than a second quicktime movies of animation and I plan to post all 15 of them....yay. We plan to fit these into our film, which lasts 17 seconds according to the animatic. Back on Friday I believe Jared told us about using the toon shader, however due to Lewis losing his texture data on his usb I'm not sure if we are going through with that still. Though it would be nice to animate using that style. As for the animating there are essentially 2 characters to animate, Lewis was trying to find a way of changing the colour of the Max for Maya rig just to tell the difference between the 2. However I was thinking that we coul use the Moom rig to make more of an impact. I've spoken to Dan Dalli he states that it's possible to scale them however, there is a danger that it could mess up the rig completely and you'd have to go in and disconnect the rig. He said you could do it by finding the main handle which is at the bottom of the rigs feet and scale it. However I really don't think Lewis and I will have the luxury of compliacted problem solving at this point, time has gotten even shorter.
I'll discuss it with him for sure, but I think it will be a mutual agreement to just play it safe.
Oh yeah, on our schedule, the production section we don't have to worry about...my bad yes we do, but the modelling is done mostly only one aspect remains, the texturing. That's coming along fine so far, we just need to go in and ensure everything is cool, the time for play time is finished.

Right now the major thing is animating and putting the sequences together, in Premier or After Effects. As for today we'll do some scanning, discuss and update our schedule, complete the texturing then start animating.

Things Have changed

This is a quick post after Lewis and I discussed about wether or not we should go 3-D instead, we decided that it would be a wise decision based on the fact that we simply do not have that amount of time. We both have tasks assigned to us, Lewis has already begun animating with the default character, (can't remeber his name) and I intend to start doing the animatic, I've already cut out the neccessary pictures. This will be a good way to see if our animation really reaches 30 sec or not. As for Daryll's animation I have finally done one of the actions for the for my baggy caharcter. However, there was a problem with the line testing and I couldn't seem to login to test so that didn't work. Hopefully this week will turn out to be a little more successful Since I wanna get it done ASAP. After the animatic I'll go staright into the animating, oh yeah and I have to deal with PPD, Contextual and my show reel....Blah!

Final Storyboard

Well here it is the final storyboard. Not much to say about this here, but I figured that since we'll be doing an animatic I might as well add some notes on the actions, Lewis can have the say of course if he doesn't agree with anything or if he can come up with something more effective.

Shot 1: The lights click on followed by applause.

Shot 2: Blot comes in from the right, whips his left arm acoss pointing to the wheel. Durg laugh in the background.

Shot 3: At this low angle front shot we see Blot take out two knives.

Shot 4: We take a 3/4 close of the knife coming out.

Shot 5: We see Durg slide onto view from the right, laughing again.

Shot 6: Blot jumps in air and trhows knives.

Shot 7: Side view wide shot of Blot speeding past the knives.

Shot 8: Close up of Blot's eyes focusing on the wheel.

Shot 9: Durg, taking deep heavy breaths and strange grunts begins to drool.

Shot 10: Close up of saliva building up and spilling over the tongue.

Shot 11: The drool becomes big and splashes onto the floor.

Shot 12: Blots spots the puddle and begins to panic. This shot will zoom in and rotate a bit with focous lines in the background, (see shot 17 to know what I mean by the lines.)

Shot 13: Blots foot slips on the puddle, this will be a brief close up of the action.

Shot 14: Blot goes flying towards Durg, wide shot.

Shot 15: POW! words get bigger and smaller.

Shot 16: They bot get up Dazed.

Shot 17: Knives coming at them, from a front view, with focus lines.

Shot 18: Blot and Durg stare at the knives, then fade out with sha-wing SFX.

Storyboard decision complete!

Well me and Lewsi had a discussion about how the storyboard looks and we both like the look and feel of it. Since both our boards looks mostly the same, we decided to do with what we have. We've picked out what shots will be used and thrown away, so I'll be in charge of creating the final storyboard. This thursday I will starts the animating of Daryl's audience animation. Lewis also said that we can pull it off by animating straight onto Flash by the WACOM Tablet. We discovered one in the 2nd year CVA room, howvere we don't know where the pen is. But Since Lewis has Flash at his house I can go there and complete the work if need be so we'll see how it goes.

Storyboard Version 2

Well after me and Lewis had a talk on Thursday. We thought about how the storyboard should be since we thought that it mght be a little too long. Now I know that the cartoon is meant to be like the flinstones you only see the characters from one angle most of the time and its very rear that you see them from the front. But I think that it's always boring and it get'd repetitive, of course we both discussed this too. We thought that we should keep that sort of 3/4 veiw for the most part, but we did some exaggerated shots with the revealing of the knives and when Blot is running. Anyways this is how it goes down.

1. Blot is reveled byhe spotlight.

2.Blot introduces the wheel and his dumb counterpart, Durg.

3. Blots takes out two knvies. The camera is at a low front angle wide shot.

4. He takes out a third, through his mouth. Close up shot Front.

5. Durg slides on to view.

6. Blot throws knives.

7. Blot sprints past knives to get on the wheel.

8. Close of Durgs focus on the wheel.

9.Durg drools.

10. We follow through as the drooling becomes a large spit puddle.

11. The spit splashes.

12. Blot sees the spit and panics.

13. He slips.

14. He flies through the air.

15. Blot hits Durg.

16. Blot and Durg get up very dizzy.

17. The knives approach them.
18. The get stare helplessly.

That's about it I'll see what Lewis thinks of the this.

Neil's Flash Test

This is just a little something that last for about....well a a second. This was done on Flash, today. It's been years since I used this program but I'm just now starting to learn a bit of the basics. Hopefully Lewis and I can beome more comfortable with it to do our animation, however we need to decide on what scenes to use for the storyboards, but for now let me gloat at this, fantastic A* animation.