The finished animation!

Yay I'm so proud. I think it's pretty cool for my first ever proper little animation. It's short and sweet. My character took a long time to animate as he has a humanoid body and is mostly unbalanced. I really love the overall final composition and look forward to making many more animations in the future. I will be practicing my modelling skills in Maya this beak and hopefully making some nice portfolio pieces to go along with this one :)

FINAL POSTER - WOOH!

On the roll

Wednesday afternoon - I have mostly completed my composition in After Effects. I'm just doing one last render at the moment of the mermaid rock as I feel this bit was skipped over quickly and I want to make sure it's clear that there was no real mermaid and just a silhouette which was a rock and foliage. 

I've spent HOURS editing in after effects. I knew I would thouugh so I've managed my time to make that possible. 

I've added a lot of fade transitions between scenes as it shows time has passed and helps the different scenes blend smoothly and more logically. I've also added some light leaks between the transitions for effect. I feel it adds some depth and dynamic to the overall animation. 

I've made a pretty cool opening title scene with an old film and light leak overlay. Not crazy about the font for this context though so may download a new one. Minor details I know, but if I have time definitely worth doing. 

What other layers have you added Ally? Good question sir. Vignette, ambient occlusion and depth of field for various scenes. I've also animated the depth of field to change focus onto the rock mermaid in one of the last scenes which really adds to the story. 

AND

I've added a camera flash to two different scenes. I duplicated and masked the layer, turning down opacity so the flash is reflected in the water. I then used liquidfy to distort the flas reflection in the water.

ALSO

A black layer with a circle which is feathered off to make the viewer understand they're looking through the robots lens - his point of view. 

I now just need to add my ending bit which is almost finished rendering and put the credits in. Then make the poster.

ONE LAST THING

Sound and music. I've spent a few hours playing in garageband already and downloading different camera flash sounds. I'm not 100% happy with any of them yet. I hope to spend tonight and most of tomorrow perfecting the sound and music. 

So this was my update at where I'm at. I'm definitely feeling the stress and pressure at the moment but feeling super pleased with how polished things are looking at glad I'm not still stuck on rendering my master layers like many people are at this point. Very grateful for x-grid, it rendered all my depth layers yesterday so quickly and was super helpful. 

Ambient Occlusion

Currently rendering my Ambient Occlusion Depth passes to make my animation look pretty. I then need to go and render the depth of field passes.

I find rendering really stressful but I'm getting through it. Wish I knew how to render out the beauty layer with both depth maps as then I wouldn't have to keep setting the Macs up for over night rendering.

Playblast!!!!

Small and no texture, just a very rough look at what I have so far for the hand in.

I've started doing my actual renders for the final though and they're looking amazing! Super proud. I think my environment looks so pretty and will really make the animation something special. Will have to do a lot of cutting and tweaking to get my animation looking right though. Is a lot longer already than what I expected.

You may notice the ending isn't in the playblast. I've been blocking it out as I've been rendering. I didn't bother putting it in as I haven't even sorted the timing yet, just blocking it out frame by frame so it would look fast and silly.

Animation time (finally)

I began animating and it was a nightmare. I spent several hours watching tutorials, putting my model in the scene to find my scene was 1000x larger than the scale of the model and having to downsize everything and setting up a custom control to set key to everything (which is so helpful. Took me about 10 minutes to do and I'm so glad that I took the time to learn how!)

It took me 5 hours to animate the first five seconds of my scene. I was panicking and very worried. It'
s so much harder to make a character look unbalanced on water than you'd think. However, I showed Szilard and he really liked the little playblast I had done so far and said you could tell I'd put a lot of time into it. He also reminded me the animation only has to be a min of 45 seconds. I thought it was 1.30min so I'm really relieved. Short and sweet will be my style to this.

Looking at the playblast now I'm pretty proud. It's just amazing to see this static character I've been working on for weeks finally come to life. I almost forgot his purpose was to tell a story.

I've gotten more confident with the animating and more familiar with my rig now although the claws have been a nightmare to animate and his controls aren't as easy as I'd thought. So my work flow has sped up a lot and I'm now half way through animating. Actually I'd say a third of the way through now.

Once I've finished animating I need to go back and add the polaroids and water effects. Hopefully this doesn't ruin everything and I don't have to change the timing of my animation to make it work. I'm thinking a wave deformer on a flat plane will be good for the polaroids.

Also - my rendering times were horrendous. About 5 minutes for a really small, low quality render. Not ever 720p. So I removed the vray grass and it has improved remarkably. There is no longer 'calculating time' before the render. I'm sad to see it go, but my tutor reminded me that I'm not being marked on all the little special effects but rather the animation, character and story telling. So that's what I'm focusing on although I'm a sucker for special effects :(

Also, my tutor looked at my head texture, clicked one button (break connection) and the reflection problem was fixed! Thank you! I knew it would have been something silly llike that but I never would have thought of that. Very happy that's fixed.

Here is a high quality render, showing the beginning of my animation. My character slowly walks up to the water as you can see in the short playblast above. I'm yet to put the polaroids, water effects, animated fog and lights in the scene.

Putting the character in the scene

 Having a texturing problem with the head. I used mental ray here to see if it would resolve the problem. It took 10 minutes of rendering time just for this small res image so definitely not a realistic option. I think it's trying to reflect the grass around it? But I can't for the life of me work out why. I'm currently blocking out my scenes so I will continue doing this and will get tutor help from the extra tutorial on Monday.

 You can see the water is flatter and greener now but still looks too blue to me. I think I will adjust this after I've put the lighting in as that will effect the hue.

Also just playing around with finer details such as the grass. I really just need to get to having my animation blocked out and ready for the playblast which is due in less than a week :o
I can then go back and add those little details to the environment. Was thinking of painting textures on flat planes of leaves and algae then placing them onto the swamp water so it has more of a realistic, dirty look.

A handy tutorial for later

Playing with the fog and background. Lots of fiddling required!

Building the swamp environment

I've begun building the environment and am hopefully not too far from finishing it also. 

I made a diffuse and spectacular map for the dirt, so I'm quite impressed with the texture and how realistic looking it is!

I have a flat plane for the water at the moment. I put an ocean shader on it and did a render (didn't save it, sorry) just to experiment and that looked good. I would need to play with the colours and reflectivity to get a more swamp like looking water. 

I have been using paint effects and converting them to polygons to get some of the shrubs, mushrooms, vines, trees, flowers and grasses. I'm not sure if I will put turbulence on them to make them blow in the wind yet as I know that can really slow down rendering time and I'm not sure how easily I can test it. I'm also using Vray Fur for grass on the terrain. Still want to experiment with that. I have put a sky dome on it with a dull looking sky colour as I feel that matches the swamp well. I'm going to experiment with using a fluid box in the skydome and using matte paintings of trees on the flat planes in the background. I also want to put fog in the scene but this may slow down render time so will take some experimentation. 

Next steps:

• Fluid box for animated clouds
• Shade water
• Matte paintings of trees in background
• Fog
• Turbulence on plants and grasses (wind)
• Lighting
• Test character in the scene

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/fog_density/fog_density.html

 - Fog tutorial.

Rigging

So I haven't posted onto my blog for a while as I just wanted to get through rigging and have it done. I ran into MANY problems, as predicted. Which included the legs bending the wrong way, head not turning properly and hands not working (I rebuilt the hand to be more logical.) Smooth skinning was NOT working for me so I used parenting to fix the distortion. Trust me, there was some serious distortion. Then I couldn't get the rope arm working. I used smooth binding on it but it wasn't moving with the body. I spent ages trying to figure out what was doing it, then my tutor came along and fixed it by moving it out of the hierarchy. So simple! Very relieved to have that fixed now.

As you can see, I've set up many controls for my character, including fancy Ik and Fk switches to turn them on and off for the hands. He has a master control, feet, knee direction, hips, body, neck, elbow direction, wrist, eye direction and claw controls. So hopefully he's good to go!

I do need to test him though just to be sure, I really need to get onto that. Also I couldn't set up a lens control as his head components are merged together and unmerging them messes up the hierarchy. Onto building the environment now.