Last assignment for PostProduction. Another rushed job..

to compensate for the lack of fish posts in the past 12 months, I filled this one up with too many :D

a really, really lame way to make one of the last posts of the year. but this might have been my weakest class of my entire College career thus far so I guess it fits ://

Posed Chirop. Slaved for weeks on creating a manual/dynamic system for the feathers, fingers and tail so that I'd have nice secondary in the animations. Then I do a 360 and find that my IK Splines twist whenever they reach 170-190 degree rotations. Noticeable at 2 seconds, the mesh literally flips itself over 180 degrees. 

A pile of props.

rocks and grass and rocks and grass



Progress!

			3D	Polycount	UV	Texture	Rig	Software
ENVIR	Mount			150,000		PAINT		MAX+zBRUSH+MAYA
		Background Sky		xx		PAINT		MATTE PAINT
		Grass		30ea		PAINT
ENVIR	Cave			400,000		PAINT		MAX+zBRUSH+MAYA
		RockDebris		3000-5000		PAINT	5 VARIATION	MAX+zBRUSH+MAYA
ENVIR	Cliff			400,000		PAINT		MAX+zBRUSH+MAYA
		RockDebris		3000-5000		PAINT	5 VARIATION	MAX+zBRUSH+MAYA
		Background Sky		xx		PAINT		MATTE PAINT

Production Shopping List Progress                                                           Tim Clark 04/12/2014

Texture test for environment#1. 

 Environment#2, the cave. Basic UV, but will remake all of this.

  

Environment #3, will also need remake

Environments, rough pass. Something I've been working on slowly, but has been secondary to character rigging. Getting more confident with the clay polish tool; hard to juggle between keeping the topology manageable, whilst retaining detail in enormous environments. 

Chiropteramon, the rigged digital monster.

It's taken an age, but I'm comfortable that I have finished that rig for my friend the Chirop monster. I say finished, but it's more like, reached a place where it can be animated. 

There's a decent amount still to do, attributes which will control things like the parenting of the legs and maybe some blendshapes... definitely some corrective blendshapes. I've still got that issue with cloth and constraints disappearing on subsequent reloads, and no one knows why... A few skin weights still to be painted too. Maybe one day i'll do a flyover of the rig in a video with explanation? Seems like it might be redundant so it'll be an if-I-have-free-time addition to the blog I guess.

Cloth test shows that things work, though there's some ugly scrunching. Something I'll have to deal with next semester I suppose :/

Still have that issue with cloth folding in on itself around the elbow. I want to constrain it with a joint or something, but skinning and cloth don't really mix well. And after the fiasco with wrap deformers, it's not something I want to try too much of. Blendshapes?

Dynamics and Me, the love story.

The craziest, funnest thing I've found. I wanted to do a bit of dynamic hair and I found the goldmine of all tutorials by Zeth Willie. A rigger, Naweed Khan used Zeth's system in his fat Bat rig and the system looks to be really intuitive. The system lets you toggle dynamics on and off; and lets you manually override everything, so it's great for things like hair or tails, so you can animate your stuff as you regularly would, but you have dynamics on top just to add another layer of pretties.

Charlene's fab hairdoo is gonna be crazy

edit: The system isn't foolproof wich sucks. The twists in rotation are awful. But I will fix it.

It takes a lot of courage to post animation that's not finished yet. But alas, it is Semester#5 and that's all a little blog like you is gonna get ;w;

so this one's dedicated to Davis and Veemon who taught me the power of courage back in 1998~

Ugh I hate the working title for my film but I have 0 ideas for a better one.

Making this kinda thing is just too hard. 

This will be another post about nCloth simulations. and why students should have more sense than to try them.

SO. My last tests taught me that the one continuous wing mesh wasn't going to work, and neither was having low poly wing segments which I'd bind with nConstraints. However, nConstraints seems to be the way to go. So I've retopologized my wing so that all the vertexes match up, and here is round two.

The simulations work fine, but I have breaks.

A few more tweaks, but still with the breaking...

Also the largets of the three wing membrane that stretches from the body (cross the elbow) to the "finger" (digit 5) is too easily deformed and compressed into itself. I need to modify the topology to mimic a setup like this one which is very pretty. Another problem is that during fast movements, the cloth separates from the body, which is hopeless because everything I do will need to be fast. 

Third big problem: whenever I save this stuff, it forgets the constraints. I open the scene to nContraint nodes which are empty, and nCloth that just flops around. 

I used THIS neat tutorial to do the nConstraints and nCloth, though all the bits about wrapping the simulation have yeilded 0 success

Intro Credits~

Another assignment, this time: Intro Credits.
A bit of silliness which will have to be removed; I like the format cos it gets me pumped to make a film, but they just don't flow well into the film.

Watch as these get scrapped in favour of something much more time consuminggg,.

Closing Credits

are these the true credits for my final film?? Or just an evil decoy... Only time will tell.

Something from After Effects which isn't a steaming trash heap. Even though it's like the roughest thing I've ever made in my life.

nCloth with edge dynamic constraints.

Binding the cloth to segments of the wing.

Preliminary nCloth simulations. Nothing communicates "I've worked all day filling this bucket full of tears"  than a few simulation test videos

Jesus save me

Some more awful PostProduction work. More colour keying. 

I think I tried to have too much fun with this stuff, rather than focusing on making it look nice.

This is one of my better ones though. Manually extracting stuff and masking it out frame by frame is ridiculous. Seriously, like 10+ hours of just masking? o.o

spin me right round bb, right round~

Charlene turnaround~ Pretty happy with this girl, she's not nearly as much of a pain as the monster is. 

Chirop turnaround. Need to change the head feathers and redo the wings again. Which means re-UVmapping. This creature is a mess. I think I might show some of the cloth tests.

Animation, albeit, rushed and in need of polish.

It pains me to put animation work on the backburner, but rigging needs more attention~