End of projects and a sea of red to prove it!!!!!

ok so its the end of the projects so i thought i would emphasise this by uploading a picture of my schedule which i kinda like the sea of red has a nice feel to it. A combination of sense of pride and maybe a little sadness as always at this point i am at a loss. But i never can stop working and will continue to learn new things. So i have a few projects lined up to keep me going.

editing and sound and Conclusion.

ok so the trolley dash animation is finished and it is all put edited together we have now sent it off to our sound designer Richard Gallagher to put the finishing touches to it with the sound. Im happy with how it all turned out and im sure its gonna be awesome when the sound and music is on it.

The project went well and i learnt a lot of new skills and feel like somewhat of a knowledgable guy now. I personally did a bit of everything i did Motion Tracking 2d and 3d,Modelling,NCloth,Character animation,lighting, Special Effects a bit of texturing and my newest venture stereo 3d which has been fun to work with. I think learning all of this and creating a great finished piece makes this project all the better.

I think learning new things has opened up my eyes to what i can achieve not only next year but for the rest of my career in animation. I love what i do and i will keep learning to be the best i can be and therefore for fill my potential.

As for the rest of the group Russell has lead the group well apart from a few errors of scheduling he has worked tirelessly along side myself from the start when we were coming up with the idea and has given me the chance to learn new things and implement these skills into the work. He filmed most of the footage with the help of myself and Arran and has been in uni till late beside myself to get this Done.

Arran has done a great job with the HDR lighting and render passes and has done a good deal of animation and helped everyone including myself with Motion Tracking.

Ladji was a late edition to the group but has done a good job doing the UV textures for Moom's clothes and has textured the billboard and the can. He has done some good animation as well overall he has done great after joining the group late.

Sam has done some good storyboards and some animation but his negativity has been an issue and the fact he took a while to do the jobs we have asked of him.

Joe well i have not seen much of joe to be honest he has done some animation after a long time badgering him to get it done and i saw him for the second time a few days before the proposed hand in but he has done his animation.

Overall its been a good project for myself and the hard work we put in has paid off and long may the hard work continue.

last 3d shot!!!!

ok so i rendered out the 3d shot from maya imported into after effects made a left and right composition then imported it into a third composition called stereo. I then set the channels on the left composition and turned blue and green channels off this should leave the image red. Then on the right composition  i just turned the red channel off. this should make it blue. Then on the left composition click add and they should blend to give the 3d effect.

I then needed to add special effects and background and this is how i did it.


So i have the 3d shot with the 3d effect

I add two white solids and add grain and scratches to them and lower the opacity

Then i got some special effects from Ladji and put them into the comp and lowered the opacity placed them to were i wanted the most powerful effect.

Then i simply just added a background and a bar from the wooden structure of the billboard for Moom to lean upon.

Now i need pieces of wood flying towards the camera but i need these 3d so what i do is i duplicate the video file and make a right and left composition for these then a third one called debris stereo and import these into the debris stereo comp. then i set the left comps channels by using "set channels" and turning off the blue and green channels.

Then on the right channels i turned the red channels off and on the left channel i changed mode to add.

I then i moved the right channel to the right by a little so you get this 3d effect.

I then pre comped that composition and added it into my main scene

This has turned out really good and i am happy and real proud of this i have learnt new stuff to create this and enjoyed expanding my horizons and taking up what was a difficult challenge seem as though it was only a week before the deadline that we decided to have a 3d shot. here is the final shot for your enjoyment put you blue and red 3d glasses on to enjoy the 3d madness.

Rendering

ok so now the last shot is actually rendering after maya being maya and not letting me render in Mental ray i would like to say i fixed the problem but i cant because it simply just started working after hours of trying.

But its rendering now and this is my last shot so im happy with that hopefully the rest of the group will have all the work to edit together on thursday.

Finished Shots :)

These are some of my finished rendered shots im happy with them and all i need to render out just the 1 shot and that is the 3d shot so wish me luck.

Last Shot 3d!!!

Ok so our last shot is in 3D!!!! so i spent my saturday night animating and defining the 3d and to be honest i loved every second and i think this is why i want to do this as a career. So i animated Moom going through the billboard and then the tin can we see in the opening scene falling on his head and this can then beautifully uses the 3d to come at your eyes. here is a playblat for anyone who has blue and green any glyphic 3d glasses.

3D!!!!!

ok so a week before the deadline we find out how to make things stereo 3d so we get the idea to do our final shot in 3d. So i took it upon myself as i was already doing the final shot to make it 3d so after playing around with the 2d camera set up and with the scene we get the elusion of 3d this how the scene is set up the billboard NCloth is behind the tv screen and when Moom going through the billboard he will be out of the screen in 3D!!!!

. here is a few still image tests from the 3d camera

ok this is for those of you who have the Green and Blue Anaglyphic Glasses

And for you special people who have the Green and Magenta Anaglyphic glasses check this out

pretty cool now i have to animate Moom for the final scenes and try and get the most use out of the 3D for better affect.

ok so we need a billboard. I will do it good :P

ok so our final shot includes a billboard so i offered to model one with my basic modelling skills the use N Cloth to create the smash. So on a beautiful saturday i started modelling the billboard that went better than i expected and after an hour or just over. i had a billboard

Ok so now i need to get the NCloth sorted so i got the polygon cube that makes the banner and made it an NCloth object.

Then i selected the vertices down each end of the banner and added a Transform Constraint this then essentially pins each end of banner.

Then i made a polygon plane and used the split polygon tool to split the plane into 2 and then i used the detach component button and then i selected all the faces on on part of the plane and pressed detach to separate these.

I then selected vertices on the inside of each half and merged vertices. I then selected both halves and used triangulate. selected them again and pressed smooth.

Then i selected both again and created an NCloth then went to vertex mode and selected the corner vertices of each half and added a transform constraint to pin them in place.

I then went to edge mode selected the edge of both halves and then pressed To vertices this selected all outside vertices. Then i deselected all the vertices that i did not want to weld together.Then pressed weld adjacent border.

I then selected the weld constraint and lowered the GLUE STRENGTH and then added a sphere to test it out and made that a passive collider.

I then key framed the sphere to collide with the billboard.

It has a way to go to look perfect but its getting there.

ok after adding a few more constraints this is a lot better 

Moom Dogs

This is the Object in which Moom reaches which leads to his demise it is a can of 'Moom Dogs" created by russell Pointer these Moom Dogs are the most sought after hot dogs on the Moom world market. I modelled a can and ladji made the texture to wrap around it.

Notepad baby!!!

ok people so i researched n cloth and also got some brilliant guidance from Alex Hulse to come up with the decision to make a notepad and use N Cloth for one sheet of paper so we made a notepad and then a sheet of paper and ring binder then made a invisible model to go between the binders to use as a constrain. Made the sheet of paper a N Cloth then parented it all up.

this is what i got

Then me and russell made a list and scanned it in edited it in photoshop and then i textured the notepad he is what it looks like.

I also did a wind N Cloth test to test the capabilities of N Cloth for future reference.

N cloth

ok so we have a list of shopping in this film and somehow we need to simulate the paper moving with the movement with the hand. so it looks like some n cloth tutorials  for me to research this.

reaching hand shot!!

The new shot i am animating is Mooms POV shot of his hand reaching towards the object. This is a weird one to animate because of the stretch and the trouble he is going to get the object. he stretches fingers and arm and maybe needs a shake to his arm to emphasise how much of a force Moom is using to reach.

heres the first playblast :

This is ok but just does not embassies Moom stretching to the limb to get this product.

Formative Assessment

So today we had our formative assessment and to be honest it was a great time to just step back from the project and review how we are going.

Overall the feedback was good with there just small points about editing. These are the main points of the feedback

Tasks:

start experimenting with editing

keep adding stuff to individual and group blog

experiment and try out some compositing  techniques

explain software pf track

Now its time to get down to some real animation and get that finished. :P keep going and keep animating. determined to make this a really good production. :P

New scene - List scene

This the next scene i shall be animating where Moom is looking at the list and then pulls down the list from his face and then looking each way.

First live action animation test.

The first test with live action and animation motion tracked an all. :P

Camera work and character Animation

This is a bit of character animation and the camera work for one of the early scenes in the film. The character sees what he is looking for but its on the top shelf!!!!!

First attempt at Motion tracking

This is my first attempt at motion tracking using the software PFTRACK firstly i took the footage and i used the Track and solve option and it automatically tracked the footage and set tracking point data. Then when this was finished it also set a ground plane and initially the ground plane was to high so moved it down and added some some 3d objects into the tracking data and it placed them near the tracking points.

I then exported this from PFTRACK as an .ma file and opened it in maya where i placed some spheres in the terms of perspective.

Heres the Maya 

Playblast

More Character Animation

This is more Character animation for the project.

Character Animation

I have the opportunity this project to really go back to what i love doing which is Character Animation and i  have started some quick tests just to get a head start.

This is a quick test and there will be many more very soon.

Ok so this is a test animation of moom becoming shocked now this version is just at its starting point then there is anticipation down then back up with squash and stretch for the shocked pose, followed by resting back to a neutral position of shocked. It looks good but i think improvements can be made.

Now this test animation is similar but when Moom goes down for anticipation and between the strong pose of the squash and stretch shocked pose he shakes his head. I think this is a lot better it is a lot more consistent with the cartoony style of animation i wish to portray in this project and is a lot more fluid.     

  

                                     START

                        ANTICIPATION


SHOCK(SQUASH AND STRETCH)

                           SETTLE

Green screen tests

On Wednesday 2nd of February we had opportunity to use the Green screen Facilities in the tv studio.Although my group needs only a small amount of green screen footage i decided to just familiarise myself with the process.

So i did some filming and used the green screen and then used the colour keying Software in After Effects to test the quality of my work.

I simply imported the footage into After Effects and used the Key light function and it keyed out most of the areas of green.

Location,location,location

On Monday 31st January Me (Gary Ralphs) and Russell Pointer went searching for possible location spots for the live action filming. We needed a hill of some sort for the trolley to go down and pick up some momentum and some steps also for the trolley to go down. After a very long walk around the borough of Greenwich we found some good spots for filming.

                  
                                                    Possible Momentum Builder

                                                       Me Screenplay Writing