"layout"

Obligatory 250 words::

Was looking through my files to find which layout was the one I was going to post. In the past 5 days I've recompiled 5 totally different versions with all sorts of changes in an attempt to find one that works and appeases the most people. Progress is soso. Most of the shots I'm happy with; the cameras are sloppy, but they're progress and at least I can feel that they're getting somewhere; the final showdown scene has been a steaming pile since August and continues to be so. Today's version is a chaotic wrestling match out of the cave that doesn't make much sense but it sets the board up for the tumble off the cliff; so it's not the perfect solution, but it's a compromise that I think will work with the right cameras.
One of the key critiques I've received is that cameras are a bit too sludgy, floating around and snapping in unrealistic ways. Something that I'll need to pay attention to is ensuring that the camera moves feel more realistic, and less 3D. In order for the animation to read convincingly, I need to "shoot the film as if I were shooting it in real life". Basically, I need to cut back on the big orbiting shots that I fall back on for any/every action scene.
Likely will spend this week accumulating more feedback, tightening up these shots and getting a version ready to be shipped for music;;;;

October

Revised Layout 22/02/2015

working on figuring out this ending. After 8 months of trial and error it's still seeing changes.  I'll never win

Animatic~

Final Animatic. Still a few meh moments. The intro doesn't read well, though that should hopefully come once stuff's rendered. I need to rework the sequence of shots around the map. The cave scene scares me because of the violent camera moves and how much poly collision I know I'm going to have, though the animation will be fun~
The ending (sequence on the ledge) is in its eighth or ninth iteration, and it still feels sloppy.

Basically, everything in this that I did right, I did it right my first try, while everything else has been a mess. 

Blog overhaul!

Remaking the interface to make it more ~~widescreen~~

While I love this layout, it's calibrated for my old screen which was like a 600x800 relic from the ruins of Ur, I've forgotten how to code so prepare for a sloppy blog interface until I relearn HTML, or settle on something /good enough/

Reuploading all of my videos to VIMEO, so that things are better quality. Upload limit is 10 per day though; so it'll take half a week to reinstall and reformat all of the videos that I could find on my hard drive, 

God bless past me for organizing all my stuff since semester one in neat little folders. 

Dynamics and cloth testing

Solution to my nCloth woes: instead of doing a general edge->edge constraint, everything is now vertex to vertex. There's a few tricky spots around the tips of the wings where it's been fly-awaying, because I messed up during a retopologize back in October, and it's much too late to redo anything now. But, that's brought under control so no worries. 

I needed to pin the elbow/membrane, which I've done with a block of nConstraints. The elbow pin can be moved around to accommodate for changes in the elbow rotation, which means I have control over the membrane stretching.

Also, fixed the disappearing constraint issue. It was a rigid body that was being created when I made the initial constraints, which was interfering with an existing one I'd already placed on the model before going into nCloth. 

Deleted them both, remade the constraints, and now I can safely reference the .ma file without having to worry about cloth dynamics going astray. 

Also, dynamics test for Charlene's fashionable new scarf. I can't get rid of the poly collision because the rigid bodies and the nHair don't recognize one another. So counter animating will be necessary.

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,.