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.