3 Days to Go: Because We Are Awesome

Today is a great day...

Today at 8.30ssomething pm we finished our animated short (before being swiftly asked to leave the building...the building was meant to close a 8pm. oops).

It was a long process (we almost lost Sushma to the troll and sound along the way), but eventually after effects / premier pro co-operated and we we made it.

Most of today was spent making final tweaks to the audio and re-editing it to fit the final animation. We were all able to make final decisions on extra foley sounds as well as tweaks to pitch - and we think that this has definitely made all the difference. 

This was probably the first time all of us have seen the final thing with all the final sounds and for most of us this is also the first time working on an animated project so we're really happy with the end result.

These characters have taken over our lives and we're more than excited to get them back, but definitely sad that its almost all over (cheesy but true cause we're cool like that).

Our final presentation is all finished, so we're pretty much prepared for the final meeting with Axis on Monday :)

100 rendered and feeling smug

Week 15: 7 Days to Go: Banter and Bold Declarations

Yep, that's right. we have a week to go until the final deadline and things are still ticking along.

The last couple of weeks we've really been bogged down with rendering - renders taking much longer than expected, renders coming out incorrect or renders not coming out at all (being held captive by a hungry render farm).

                                Where are the rest of our indirects sob sob

But our spirits have remained high! This is a really important stage and one of the key things to making sure we complete this with some sanity is to stay calm and full of humour (which we definitely are - there was also a game of chess to stretch our creative muscles and assess our next plan of attack).

All the scenes are almost rendered - although due to time constraints we've had to drop the AO passes - and for some scenes where we haven't had time to re-render the diffuse/indirect passes we've had to just use a beauty pass - which sadly gives us a bit less control during the compositing stage - but we're still trying to ensure that it all looks good.

In terms of compositing, we've got a little pipeline going on, so were we're going through 3 key stages:

1. The initial file set up where all layers are applied
2. The more snazzy effects like heat haze are then added
3. Finally after editing, the whole thing will go to Amit for one last round of colour corrections and a couple more snazzy things

Upon reflection there are definitely a few things we would have done differently had we had the time - such as making firm decisions on what would be rendered out (for example where there is no camera movement we only need 1 still shot, not up to 100 extra frames of the same thing :( ). But these are definitely good lessons to take with us for future works.

But on the great plus side, we're still coming up with new and simple ideas to create short cuts for ourselves. For example Ritchie had the great idea of creating 1 generic After Effects file with the heat haze effect to be imported into whatever scenes need it. This definitely saves us a lot of time, especially for those who don't yet know the technique for creating it!

Thank you muchly Ritchie!

Playing and having a Blast

We are nearing final stages of this projects, and we're still finishing/tidying up animations, but its really important that we get a look at how all the shots look together!

We'v been working on the shots individually, and we're aware they everyone has slightly different styles/experiences so we''ve playblasted the shots (the ones that are finished atleast) to see how it all looks!!

Yannis has almost finished working on the music - its in the final editing stages, but Sushma has edited this all together for now.


Still lots of bits to work on, but so far we're all really happy with how this is turning out and the renders are looking good! Amit's planning on doing a test composite of one of the shots over the weekend to get a feel for what we'll need to do, and he'll feed this back to everyone so we can start work on it.

Sushma looking happy before the Troll turned on her...

It's all plodding along, but it will probably hit overdrive in the next few days are we whizz around (and sleep very little) in order to get everything finished! We know it's important to get as many hands as possible on compositing so we avoid it all ending up in Amit's lap!

Our animations bring all the rigs to the yard...

Another solid day of animation, with lots done and our first rendered scenes coming through!

So lots of visuals to swoon over.

Everyone's working through these quite quickly, which means Amit will be getting a lot of shots to prepare for render/compositing - so Bimpe is aiming to have all her shots done by tomorrow to start helping with this process, Natasha will probably be helping too as she has almost finished her shots.

The scenes are shaping up really well, and we're making a few camera tweaks where we feel is necessary and Ritchie is wooing us with his animated shots.

Look how shiny!!

This is definitely an animation eye-candy day...

After Maya trying to betray us, we're making triple sure that we're backing up all the files on our master hard drive and our own uni-servers.

We would like to top this successful day off with a quick tune from our mascots / Team Juan theme tune (thanks Taylor)

Week 10: Animators are us

With a song in our step (Taylor Swift in particular) and a graceful air of accomplishment (following our 48hr AniJam stint) we are in animation 'heaven'.

Everyone's cracking on with their scenes and we're hoping to have them blocked if not finished by the end of the week / start of next week.

It's going smoothly so far - we hit a few of our hiccups early on meaning we needed to back track a bit with things like rigs, but everyone now seems comfortable with what they're doing. AND we can now use Atom to copy over our animation cycles so all is well so far!

Were also giving each other feedback on scenes before they are approved - mainly to make sure were all going in the right direction and then Sushma will be the overall overseer to make sure its all cohesive!

We're now being extra careful with the references and rig files as we've already had minor hiccups in which the tweaked rig file was causing the mesh to split in the shot/reference file - but Sushma's managed to rectify this!

We've had so VERY fun results so far with some of the animations especially because of the nature of these characters and the story, so we can afford to exaggerate some of the moments and really let the personalities of the characters shine through.

And now a word from our friendly and sugar hungry animators.

Natasha:

I'm animating the big goat - i've been blocking his walk cycle for a couple of weeks ow whilst we sorted out some of the issues we were having, so i'm managing to get through it all pretty quick. I was having a few issues with his knees not doing what I wanted during the walk cycle but I solved this with some hefty clean-up and managed to force it to move the way I wanted and going back to delete extra animation frames!

Yannis:

I'm working with the mariachi's animation cycle which will loop throughout allt he scenes. I'm planning on using Atom to import their animation sequences onto their reference mesh - so far we've tested this and it' worked well. Their movements are dependant on the song - which ive been recording this week - so i've done a basic cycle and will adjust this to the music once i've worked on the production.

Cristina:

I'v e been animating the shots featuring the little goat at the moment. I'd initially worked on its walk cycle a few weeks ago, but will need to redo this due to issues we had with the rig at the time. At the moment my only real issues are the speed of the moments so i'll been doing a bit of clean up and some work in the graph edit to smooth these out.

Sushma:

I am also working on a shot involving the little goat and its confrontation with the troll. Luckily I have had no issues so far, but I have had to make a few adjustments to the troll as it has been affecting some of the scenes others are working on. The troll hates me.

Ritchie:

At the moment I am animating the troll's running sequence. It's quite a complicated scene so i've been acting out the motions myself as a reference. I've been able to finish this scene rather quickly as a result. I also need to get used to working in the graph editor to adjust it in terms of speed and smoothness.

Amit:

As i'm not doing animation, i'm currently working on the lightning and prepping completed scenes for rendering. I managed to fix the lighting apocalypse issue we had last week. When we referenced it into a shot it was blowing out even when there wasn't any lighting in there.. must have been a glitch. I wasn't able to fix it in the master file, so had to go back to a previous unaffected file and reimport it.

I'm also keeping an eye on the render times - the test scenes are currently taking just over a minute to render - but this is without the characters or animation, so we'll probably be looking about about 10 minutes per shot - which is what I was expecting.

Bimpe:

I haven't got too many scenes to animate as I will be jumping on to rendering and compositing with Amit as the completed scenes start coming through. But i'm currently working on some of the more expressive and close up shots for the troll and mariachi's. I wanted to use references to make sure I was getting the basic movements right for blocking - and Yannis kindly offered his acting skills.

So far i've had a couple of issues with timing and over animating which has made the scenes look a bit blocky and jumpy but once I cottoned on to it I found it easy to just go back and delete. Also, we're all noticing that are scenes will potentially come in a but longer than we believed it shot would be - but hopefully we'll be able to cut these down in post.

Welcome to the Pinata apocalypse

And another chapter of our glorious 3D animation saga begins!

This next week is gonna be a really key week for us, to make sure that we're not rushing rendering / compositing  (and basically finish everything), all animation needs to be completed and finalised by the end of next week.

No pressure there. We've got this.

All texturing for the assets and landscape is finished (no more tweaking!! We hope) and the same goes for the Troll rig despite Sushma and Bimpe's best efforts to keep perfecting him. He has the most complicated scenes so he really needs to be handed over to the animators now so they can start work and so we can all sleep easy.

Kaitlin was having a couple of hiccups with the UV maps and textures for the plants, but she's managed to sort this all out with some really good results.

She and Natasha have been dressing the scene ready for Amit to add some lighting and Gamma correction (woo Gamma!)

Now... this has had some very fun (apocalypse-esque) results.

Prepare your eyes for the GAMMA GLORY!!

Glorious.

In terms of sound design, Yannis is in possession of a glorious guitar and will be working on the music over the next week - he's already played us a little demo of what he's thinking and we're all really happy with it! So it's allll coming together.

One of the key things this week was figuring out a way of copying an animation sequence from one scene to another without re-keying everything. We'll really need this for scenes like when the goats walk past the troll - it means we can just copy the walk cycle from the chief animators and key frame the extra character in the scene around it.

After a bit of searching, confusion and general hunger, Yannis came up with a great way to do this. He's also tested this quite thoroughly which means it should work with the animations we're attempting.

Huzzah.

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

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