BYE BYE BLOG

Thats it...its all over! films are finished blogs are finished, hopefully im not finished!

All i can say now is roll on degreee show, I WANT A JOB!

Compositing

Two more days to go and i am finishing up the compositing for the scenes the lads have given me!I have had around roughly 12 scenes to composite and the remainder of them will be done by des or ash as soon as they are rendered out!

Credit_Video

Credits_animation from Ross Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Credits

I have been blitzing through some credits for our film! its actually quite nice as it has given me the opprtunity to do a little anmation. below is an image show part of the sequence and when possible the video upload will be on the site.

Video

Untitled from Ross Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Opening shot for film

I have been working for the last two to three days compositing a scene consisting of models produced by ian, some by myself, ash, and texture work by MOSTLY rey as well as some myself. below is an image of the scene composited in after effects.

When i can i will post the video file, its just taking ages to upload.

Time to Blitz

Now that i have all my textures complete as well as the textures given to me by outside sources...'Thank you Rey' i can now start to develop scenes. I have been quite lucky and been given full responsibility over the complete layout of the opening shot! i hope to have it done within the next 5 days

EVERYTHING IS TEXTURED!

I have finally finished texturing the interior and my parts of the exterior (just the cafe). Desmond can now render with the animation that ash and des have produced so far! Sorry for the quality of the shot below!

Lighting tests!

These are the results from some render tests within our environment, please take into account that the environment is not fully textured! there is very limited lighting and the overall render takes around 1 minute on my home machine and about 40 seconds in college! happy days!The settings were posted previously for the ambient occlusion.

Rendering

For the last couple of days i have been experimeting around with rendering an render layers to establish how easy it would be to render ambient oclussion as well as our colour pass. I was fairly successfull and the entirety of the render takes around about one minute a frame. Below is a screen of the settings established in maya.

Environment finished

The environment has been being worked on for a while and has been taking a back set every 5 minutes for something else. Considering there wasn't to much left to do on it, i have got the remaining UV mapping and modeling finished in less than a day, considering ive had most of the creative control over the look of this film, i have laid out the environment in a way i feel will best suit the story! A majority of it has been modeled myself, but me good mates ash, Desmond and jenny have modeled the following :

Ash - Menus, Reserved Signs
Desmond - Lights, Cutlery, Espresso machine, Till, Pots
Jenny - Plants

next things on the list are texturing, and establishing render settings! As you can see i have been playing around with ambient occlusion in these renders below, it is a a render setting that i will experiment more with for the final look of the film!

Desmonds old man done

Des's Old man is now textured! after an intense amount of stress surrounding him i might add! Looks good though! one of the UV texture maps is shown with the rendershot. The next thing to do is establish some render settings for the film.

Waiter is finished

After a short spell of texturing the waiter is finished! in my opinion he has turned out better than hoped! well done Adam Smith for such a lovely model, with such nicely laid out uv's 'thumbs up' dude! heres a pic with the texture applied, as well as the main texture map.

Rigging and texturing finished!

At long last all the texture work and weighting of the old lady is finished! it has been passed down the chain to ash for him to now work on the animation! Below is a screen of the old girl showing the rig and texture via a single pose! I have also posted the main body texture, this does not include the hat/hair/eyes/belt/and glasses that have also been done by myself

Chew test number 3

The knew chew test with textures and the knew rig. Its a very random post but is here just to show that the knew set up on the old lady works. ide also like to point out that only a handfull of the textures are done on her up to this point and for the next week or so i shall try and finish them!


OL_chew from Ross Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Schedule!

I also forgot to add that a schedule has been drawn up by the group. Although we all contributed, a majority of it has been produced by Ash and Desmond.

The interior

Back from dissertation hell, and back on track. Here is three days worth of modeling on the interior environment! it is as far as i can go at the moment as we need to meet up this coming Wednesday to block out the interior so that ash can begin some basic animation will me and desmond go away and actually place the assets in their rightful spot.

Dissertation finished

After a three week extension the dissertation is finished. if im honest i think the film has taken another hit because of it and the speeed of which i am working needs to be doubled.

A test with a bit of depth

This is just a little mess around ive had with the character as she stands at the moment! obviously their are areas of her model still missing and areas of her not yet textured. But for now shes looking quite funky.heres a render test i have done with a bit of lighting and depth of field, it is a shot from the film, and i am reasonably happy with the result! obviously its not the finished piece but its a step in the right direction.

There may be trouble!

I have run into quite a BIG snag! My blendshapes have encountered quite a massive error and will have to be re done. What has happened is that the movement on the jaw does not effect the mesh when a blend shape has been applied. This can be fixed via the meshes input option, but considering that the head has been combined with the body, the input does not recognize this as the origin for the blendshapes and as such will not do as its bloody told! I am having to redo all the blendshapes which is a pain. Unfortunately i cannot get a screenshot showing the where the error has occurred, so below are images showing the knew blendshapes as they are.

The good old tongue

I have rigged the mouth. I used clusters on the tongue and an IK spline to give the animator the opportunity to play around more freely with the rotation and movement of the tongue. Below are images showing this.

The jaw rigged and ready!

The jaw has now been rigged quite nicely. I have rigged it so that the animator has the freedom to rotate the jaw on the X,Y, and Z axis. It should provide some nice movement. Below are images showing what has been done.

Set driven keys

Set driven keys give the animator an easier time of controlling your rig. I have created set driven keys around the fingers and feet, this was at the request of our project director. Below i show the image of the full body rig, and the set driven keys that are assigned to the curves shaped like hands.

The Rigging

I have almost finished the layout for the rig. I have included curves that act as controls for certain areas of the rig, such as around the arms, the waist, the jaws, legs, etc. This will make it easier for the animator to work with! the following images show the layout of the rig!

This Weeks Agenda

This week is going to be a challenging one in regards to my 3D skills. I am setting myself the target of properly rigging a character, This may over run this week as it is an area i have not tackled since the first year of my animation course!

DISSERTATIONNNNNNN!

Oh my goodness gracious me, this is having a major effect on my film work! i am not impressed with the speed of which i am churning this dissertation out.

mouth_test_2

Chew_Test_2 from Ross Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Mouth test

This is a quick animation test i have done using the blend shapes made so far. Understandably Ash the director is not to happy with the lack of movement in the face, and as such these issues will be corrected and shown within another animation test.


mouth_test from Ross Wilkinson on Vimeo.

Testy Testy

I have been steaming ahead with the blendshapes and am acumulating a nice collection of them. As i am nearing the end of the blend shape proccess i have decided to in my spare time prroduce a 'chew' cycle that should prove to me and our films director whether or not these blendshapes are ok for our film.

The love of a good texture!

I have completed UV'ing the old lady and am now ready for the next thing on my list, which would seem to be blendshapes. I will be giving myself A fair bit of time to produce these, maybe a week and a half possibly two considering the sheer amount we have!

My old girl is nearing the end

Here she is almost finished! all i need to do now is model the inside of the mouth then move onto UV's! You can also see from the images that the hair has changed. This was as it will be alot easier for me to put a texture on the hair as a separate mesh than to do it as part of the body mesh.

model update!

Here is the model as it stand in the new year! i am dissapointed with the progress i have made, even taking into account the christmas holidays.