Camera Traps and Tempestuous Goats

Another glorious Friday has been cast upon us, bringig us ever closer to our fast approaching deadline and our rapidly diminishing sanity!

As a priority these last couple of days Kaitlin, Sushma and Natasha have been setting up / rigging the cameras that we will need for our shots. So once the animator goes in to the scene file all they'll need to do is work there magic and hey presto! Scene done, camera hassle free! (in theory, don't quote us on that).

We're hoping this will cut down a lot of our time, as the animators can focus purely on animating and not the cruelty of camera's especially as they'll be locked off.

Working on the scenes this way has also lead us to question a couple of our environment compositions and models - the mountain in particular. We've been toying with expanding it so it fills the layout a bit more.

Before!

After!

Yannis has been putting the finishing touches to the trolls texture, and we're now locked in a this tone or that tone dilemma, but we'll be able to make a final decision once the environment texture is complete as we'll need to make sure the troll isn't being swallowed up by it and stands out!

This.....or,,,,

That.... #animatorproblems

Sushma's still working on the rig, and due to its complexity she's having a couple of issues with geometry deformations - but Bimpe and Natasha will be testing it this weekend hopefully with the trolls actual movements in mind to see whether these will have a major effect.

We're not too worried about this just yet as well always knew we could afford to have the troll come in a bit later, as the goats were first on the list for animation.

Bimpe's been making some final (hopefully) tweaks to the goat rigs after some control issues (cause these goats have no shame). We're really keen to make these as perfect as possible as they involve the most animation, and they're so colourful it'll be hard to miss them! These will also be tested again to make sure they're working ok.

Goat's just wanna have fun...

As the weekend approaches, Friday's GLORIOUS piece of Going Live eye candy is a quick rendered shot of our very happy and smug mariachi's.

Rigging heaven.

We can finally almost say that all rigging has been DONE - once we start animating we may see a few things that need to be tweaked in the master file, but we've been testing our rigs and so far we've make all necessary changes.

Bimpe's been working on the blendshapes for goats. They brought up a couple of rigging issues due to the blends being added after the bind, but after some detaching and a bit of repainting these have now been sorted out - which means a bit more testing.

Natasha and Kaitlin have been setting up cameras in the scenes to assess whether we may need extra assets to fill the scene, there have been a couple so far, but we've been able to re-use and tweak some of the assets we already have - like the rocks (especially because Natasha had previously made them in a range of shapes!)

This also alerted us to a couple of changes that needed to be made to the matte painting - Cristina has increased the width and filled the skyline with a few more shapes.

We're also making the final tweaks to the textures by placing our models together and looking at them under lighting. For the Troll Yannis has softened the bump map and tweaked the tone of the diffuse map so now it fits in a lot better with the rest of the characters.

Ending the day with a bit of Mariachi turnaround eye candy courtesy of Amit

Week 7: Gotta Catch 'Em All... Billy Goats!

It's a (very) stormy day in dundee, but we've braved the elements (kind of) to regroup and talk next steps.

We're in heavy testing mode right now, making sure all our rigs do what we need them to do and eliminating what we don't want them to do! Bimpe has finished the Mariachi's rig and blendshapes and they're going through their second round of testing by Ritchie and Yannis. Kaitlin and Amit have almost finished up with the goats and Cristina will be testing these. Once Sushma's troll is ready Natasha and Bimpe will be using and abusing it.

We've also still got our heads in the animation phase and after some of the changes we made last week we thought it would be a good idea to reassess who would be animating what.

As we now have chief animators for each character we decided to pimp out our scenes like they were Pokemon cards.

Chief Character Animators:

Little Goat - Cristina

Middle Goat - Kaitlin

Big Goat - Natasha

Mariachi's - Yannis

Troll (dived up) - Sushma / Bimpe

Once all the rig tests have been done we can pretty much crack on with blovking our scenes and assessing any issues or changes we need to make. We've already anticipated a few camera angle wise, and after a chat with Barry he also suggested we may need to increase and diversify our assets so our scene doesn't look too bare in certain shots like the below.

We've got quite a few things like rocks etc that Natasha has modelled quite differently, and we could probably make a few modifications to Kaitlin's trees just so they were a bit different if we were to need an extra bank of images.

We'll only really be able to access this once we're in the blocking process.

Barry also mentioned colours - we're currently working to the matte painting that Cristina produced and so far we're really happy with this. Again once we start dressing the set and marching our character through it we'll be able to fully access what made need to be changes, be it the landscapes textures of the characters.

We've been doing some quick (and Maya crashing) renders to get a look at our textured models together - Natasha will also be using this for the colour script. 

Ritchie's done an awesome job with getting the goats paper texture to where we needed it. We still have a few bump mapping and colour tweaks to make with the goat so they all look like they belong to the same universe, but Yannis will be continuing to work in this.

Goat bump map

Mariachi Madness

Yes, Fridays are FUN with group one.

Natasha's still working on pulling together the 2D references for the characters, so we had ourselves a good old fashioned photo session to help with referencing the larger movements of the troll and the mariachi's.

For the troll we were focusing on the scene when he jumps over the bridge. So we put Amit's parkour skills to the test to capture these.

 Natasha will flip the images when she's drawing them so they fit the trolls entrance on the storyboard.

Yannis will be animating the mariachi's running away on at the end, so we did a few test sequences with them.

We felt that a couple of the earlier sequences were a bit noisey - there was a bit too much going on which would make the scene look a bit too confused and cluttered, and would be tricker to animate! We would have run the risk of models merging into each other.

Now we think we've pretty much got the sequence we want, its a bit more linear, but gets across what we're trying to achieve - and its funny. Huzzah.

All in all, fun was had by all!

grrrrrr

Reflections and Rude Awakenings

So our early animations have brought up a couple of issues which was good to know now rather than a week before the deadline!

There have been a couple of issues with the little goat rig, and although the referencing system seems to be working like a charm and upating, a few major changes need to be made to the rig which has been really affecting Yannis and Cristina's early walk cycles which can only be rectified by starting from scratch and re-importing the update rig (sad times).

After a quick meeting we decided a few things.

1. It was best to push back our animating process and spend time actually testing the completed rigs and making any major changes earlier on so we don't risk having to completely redo scenes later on.

Bimpe has finished working on the Mariachi's rig so Yannis and Ritchie have been testing these out and pushing their limits to pick up on any deformations, control issues, attributes that need locking etc.

Cristina has been testing Kaitlin's goat with some glorious /creepy results.

We'll also do the same for Sushma's troll when it's completed. Kaitlin's set up a doc of things to cross-check, and the checkers can alert the lucky riggers to any problems for them to fix up quick smart.

2. We'll be dedicating 1 animator to one set of walk cycles for our characters - this way we can ensure that all the walking styles are consistent! We'll also be making sure that each walk has it's own 'personality'.

3. We're also going back to basics (kind of) Sushma has suggested that we do 2D references for our shots - for the goats in particular - this will give us a bit more direction, and really help in establishing the individual walk cycles for the goats. Natasha has started work on this as she has a lot of experience in this area - so far she has hand drawn these and will animate them in flash.

So it's all re-shaping up... Bimpe's run into a couple of issues with the blendshapes for the head cause Maya is cool like that, bu deformers will be her friend.

Today's glorious animating eye candy - courtesy of Cristina

Chasing Waterfalls

Time to play with WATER.

Amit's been working on a couple of tests for our scenes waterfall and river! The river has definitely been easier to achieve - this was made with an animated bump map, he also threw in some test rocks to see what the effect would be.


We're all really happy with the results on this one! Amit's going to make a couple of tweaks (colour wise etc) and play around with the lighting. We'll also test it against the rest of the assets and characters to make sure its not making too much 'noise' and distracting from the story.We're not to worried about where the river currently starts as we'll be adding in a misty effect!

And on to our glorious waterfall.


After a group chat about it we still think theres a bit of work to do on this one - again we want to make sure it doesn't distract and we need make sure the water flows in a way that it looks like it's coming  from a distance (so the splashes shouldn't be to prominent). Yannis also pointed out that we need to tweak the edges of the landscape to reflect this aswell and create more of a perspective.

Also Amit made this using Maya 2015's Bifrost, so we can't really use this as we're working in 2014. There was the suggestion of rendering it off and adding it to our scene but there were scaling issues when Amit first tested this, and mountain and waterfall would end up tiny tiny tiny...Touche Maya touche

All in all it's definitely a really good start, and getting an early look at these tests mean we can start making the relevant changes to fit the rest of the scene.

Today's eye candy is a rough comp that Amit's pulled together of a quick render of our landscape.

"I'm a vegetarian but whenever I look at the goat it makes me hungry"

Sushma's genius quote of the week.

SO, today has been all rigging, animation and...N-SYNC, pure pop bliss to carry us through this animating filled day.

The referencing system is all good to go and Amit gave us a little run through just so we're all clear on what goes where etc. We also finally put all our characters and the landscape together in the scene to make sure all the sizing was correct (had to do some scaling for the landscape).

And as all but 2 of us are complete 3D animation novices, Sushma also walked us through rigging the camera so we're not stuck playing around with it for hours on end.

Top tips: 
- Rig the Camera to a locator
- Place the pivot point off center (for more of a real camera on tripod look etc)
- Animate in 2 panels! 1 with your camera's perspective the other in Maya's perspective so you can see what the hell is going on.

Natasha, Ritchie, Yannis and Cristina have started work on animating their scenes (and making the Goats dance to Spandau Ballet), and are looking at a couple of references for a quadruped walk cycle.

What's probably been best about these initial blocking sessions is that it's allowing us to start testing the rigs and quickly pick up on any issues there might be, which can be quickly rectified and updated via the referencing system. 

Huzzah.

Oh and we've also been spying on the enemy (aka Fincher, aka Group 2)

Today's animating eye-candy - a rigged and almost ready mariachi courtesy of Bimpe