PRJ350 - Week 14 Progress Journal

What a long, miserable day.

I've spent the last six or seven hours having to render out the first 140 frames of my animation one-by-one by hand, because if I don't, the volumetric "god lights" don't work. It is absolutely maddening, tedious and incredibly boring but it is nearly done.

So, what's changed since last week?

I spent a lot of time cleaning up the poses in my animation and fretting over what to do with the opening of it - the walk and his "surprise" reaction just never worked right for me, and it was getting far too close to the end to fix them. It was upon reflection to this problem that I had an epiphany.

I don't need them at all.

If I start the shot out with the goblin already looking at the sword, we get it. We understand the setup right from the get-go - he's a goblin, this is a sword in a stone. We know how this story goes. I needed to give him some time to consider the sword, to think about it and to ponder his approach, but trying to tell the story with him walking in was trying to tell too much. I needed to introduce his personality in his walk, his mood and why he might be feeling that way, then show a drastic, big change of emotion followed by another drastic change of emotion, from sad to surprised to cautious, all at once, and that is really, really hard. And really, really unnecessary.

I proposed the plan to Pam Matheus and Antony DeFato, both former Disney animators with excellent senses of story and timing, and they agreed it was the right decision. DeFato even brought the idea one step further - start the shot with the camera tight on the character so I could really play up his thinking process, then pull out to reveal the goblin's motivator. Genius.

I deleted my walk and surprise keyframes and got to work adding a good animated hold, using his eyes and slight shifts in the direction of his head to really try to get the subtle animation in to show his thinking process and then proceeded from there. Additionally, I spent a huge amount of time working on getting the spline pass done this week, all while working on wrapping up other assignments (expect more blog posts in the next few days as I finish work for my other classes). I really, really wish I had a few more days for this, or weeks, or months, but I'm happy with what I'm getting so far, and very happy with everything I've learned from the project. I know it isn't the strongest piece in the entire class, but it is the culmination of months of hard work, and I stand behind the result.

I'll have the final posted here in a few days, once I've had time to composite it, build in the title and credits screens and do the post-processing. I'll also follow this post up with a post-mortem, most likely, to review what went well, what didn't and what I'm taking away having gone through the process twice now. For now, I've got to render out the last of the frames (11 left to go, thank god), start the compositing and get some rest before the last big push of the semester.

PRJ350 - Week 11 Progress Journal

Animation Blocking

I spent some time working on getting the base poses down for my character's initial walk-on before I realized I was being too hasty - I wasn't following my vid ref or my thumbnails, and with the complexity and length of the animation I had ahead of me, I really needed to have a better roadmap. To this end, I took my original vid ref into photoshop and began tracing over each major key pose onto unique layers. Doing this gave me a better insight to the lines of action in the pose and was a much more accurate and quick way to sketch out the poses then it would be to do so by hand on paper just using the video as reference.

Once I had these initial sketches, I composited them to the sheets above and printed them off. I also began adding them to Flash on the original frame numbers so that I could watch how they moved. This is a lengthy process, so I only got the first portion done, but it is very effective. One benefit of this process is I can quickly and easily play with timing, rather then trying to push and pull dozens of keyed object keyframes in Maya.

Once I have a little more time, I can start playing with the timing and get the rest of the frames in, but I wanted to make sure I had a chance to work on getting initial poses into Maya. I brought up my animation file and worked on getting the first pose right - it tends to be one of the most important ones. In the case of my animation, I actually started with the second pose, the first that the goblin is fully on-screen. I can work backward to have him walk on, but I needed to ensure that I had the right starting position figured out.

I then worked on following my thumbnail roadmap, being careful to exaggerate each pose to really enhance the action and to fit better with the character's proportions and anatomy, and really try to make sure I had the right arcs in place for the IK hands - a tricky process. I got the first part of the walk in, his notice and take and his approach blocked in after long hours of moving him around, and already am noticing severe issues with the skinning I'll have to address - this was part of my plan, as I knew they'd start making themselves more noticed once I started the actual animation, and I'll be working on them soon enough.

All told, things are coming along well, and the animation is working out okay, although I'm already noticing major problems with the timing. The beginning of this week will be spent getting the final models for the props in, getting the lighting resolved and blocking in the next portion of the animation. I'm right in the thick of crunch time now, so everything has to really count, but I'm really excited to see the little guy coming to life.

Projects 350 - Week 4 Progress Journal

At the beginning of this week, I had started with the UV unwrap process when Mark Peasley suggested I revise some of the mesh to optimize it for deformation before going too far into the unwrap. As much as I wanted to just get the model unwrapped and start painting the texture, I knew he was right, so I made sure to put attention into the trouble spots on the mesh, which is where the majority of my attention went this week for this project.



I made sure to add additional loops around the facial features that were going to see the most deformation, as well as optimizing the joints.



I added additional loops around the ball of the foot area, as there was going to be substantial bending here and it needed to work naturally. I also added a "patch" around the knee to help keep the form from flattening oddly when it was bent.




The elbows received the same treatment. I also made sure to optimize the loops around the knuckles and wrists.

I still need to go in and add the geometry for his single glove, but that's a trivial matter of just extruding and pushing the mesh and then pushing a couple verts around to clean it up.



I've also begun testing out my first foray at rigging in Maya, and already really like the setup far more then its Max counterpart. I've got a ways to go, especially getting the IK-FK blends set up properly and the facial deformations in place, but I've begun the research and sketching for that process, as well, and should be good to go in two weeks time.

With that schedule in mind, getting the model unwrapped and a base texture down in the next week or two is a goal I can handle. Getting a block model built of the environment, the props built and the initial shader research all in the next four to five weeks is do-able, and I'll be starting my animation planning in that time frame, leaving me plenty of time to complete the project and hit all of my goals, providing I don't hit any major technical or personal snags along the way.