Blockout update

After speaking with my tutor Paul it has been decided that instead of continuing to block out the whole of my film, I should spend the remainder of my time focusing on perfecting one scene, The scene I have chosen is the part involving the turtle, As it shows interaction between two characters and would still keep the narritive of the film going. I am also going to include the part where he jumps towards the nut, and part of the reaction. This is good that I dont have to carry on blocking out the other scenes, because although I would have loved to do the intire film, It does not take anything away from the film, and will allow me to focus on just one aspect and making it as good as I can, instead of hurrying to try and finish the whole thing. I will be focusing on timeing my chosen scene during the next few days and tightening the animation.

group work for james, compositing his frames

Today I recieved the scenes I will be compositing for James, I wanted to do these fairly quickly as I have my animation scenes to start tweaking, So I did them the same evening he gave them to me. Ive never used toonboom before but it did not take me long to get to grips with the colouring system on it and I managed to get all the scenes coloured in a few hours. Here are some images of the compositing process.

model turn arounds

This is a fairly big post, These are the finished model turn arounds I have been unable to upload untill now. They show both the smoothed and proxy versions of the model aswell as the wireframe so that you can see how clean, or unclean the mesh is in both versions. They are done using playblasts so the quality is not perfect but it should be good enough to judge from. There is also a poly count in the corner of each playblast for each version.

jump block out

This is the blockout for the monkey jump, Again the timings are off, But I am focusing on getting all the key poses done, As I can then move on to timing and spacing the keys once I have something to work with. As of today the only things left for me to block out are the biped walk off screen, which is only a few seconds, and the scene involving the boulder. So I am currently over three quarters blocked out for my final film. I know there are several things wrong with the jump, all of which will be resolved in the finished version, such as the delayed landing etc.

quad walk monkey 1

This is the first block out I tried, the other quad tests I did before this one was unfortunatly lost when my laptop crashed. This took me around a week to do, as I did several practise walks which were lost. I think overall it is good first quad walk, as their are many different aspects to be taken into account when animating a quad. The problems I have noted for the time being are that the legs kick out to much and the action of the feet leaving the ground is not smooth enough. Also the monkey does not always move consistantly forward. My tutor Paul had quickly viewed this piece in class and said that the reason for it sticking slightly is due to me having key framed the walk on two's, rather then fours, which he suggested would make the action a lot smoother. These are all points I will be working on to correct once I have the initial blockout complete.

turtle smash rough blockout

Recently blogger has not allowed me to upload my movie files so I have been unable to keep as up to date with things like test animations and turn arounds of my finished model which I will eventually put up, Here is a playblast of the block out of the turtle smash part of my film, The timings are off but I have been trying to get the key poses in before I tweak the times.

uv mapping again

I just realised that when my laptop crashed it took with it my uv mapped monkey, so ive just had to go back and redo it again, ive not unwrapped them, because it would take a long time and im planning animations, if I have time near the end to spend a bit more time on it then i will.But at the moment my priority is my animation.

more animation planning

here is some pics of me planning out some of my animation scenes, they might be a bit awkward to see as i worked on an a3 sketch book, but i scanned it in anyway:)

Group work, Jay's model update

At the moment I have blocked out around 3 quarters of my film, ive come up to the part were there is a close up of the monkeys face, and when I tried to add blinks to the blockout the eyelids were slightly effecting the left leg and a finger on the right hand, so I will have to talk to Matt about what may be causing it as he was the one who fixed my models eyelids, at first I thought it was a paintweighting issue with my monkey, but everything seems fine, so the problem must lie in one of the four duplicate models matt created to enable my model to blink, and as I dont know what he did to create them , im not going to interfere about with it incase I make the problem worse.

It doesnt look like a major problem to fix though, all being well, as for the turtle model , there is a strange problem that happens whenever I rotate it, the model starts turning black, at first I thought maybe Jay had accidentally impported a light into my scene when he gave me the model but thats not the case, so its going to have to go back to him so he can fix it, as I need the model asap, other wise the scene with him in will be cut, which I really dont want. so these are the problems which I hope will be fixed soon, other then this the work is going good.

Group work,Dave update

Dave let me know yesterday that he wont be able to finnish all the textures for my set because of time restraints, but I have seen the head model texture on his blogger which looks great.I asked Laura if instead of doing my end credits if she would be willing to have a go at the other few bits of texturing for me, and she said she would, so the majority of the texturing of the set will now be done by Laura.

the graph editor

I did a quad walk which me and other class mates looked at yesterday.And today aswell, ive gone and fixed the problems which we saw, also im having to carry on the walk cycle to the tree without looping it in the graph editor, we took monkey for a loop walk today but for some reason the forward translate wouldnt work right, so instead of spending days trying to figure out why we said it would be easier and waste less time to just go and finnish the walk of myself, which is what I shall be doing tomorrow, I had to use the graph editor to fix certain parts on the hand slides, as even when I copyed the values across the hands were still sliding through the floor, the graph editor is something I try to avoid if I can because it confuses me, but there was no other way to solve this problem so i stuck it out and managed to understand it better. here are some images of my walk being fixed

Group work, Jays turtle model

This is Jimmy the turtle that jay modeled,rigged and textured for me, their are a few problems with the textures changing colour in the render, but im sure thats easily fixed, im very happy with the model that jay has done for me, he did it very quickly and i was able to carry on my animation planning with no waiting around for the model. heres some images.