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.

Week 8: That time when we dreamt about Maya

After a meeting with Axis and a revisitation of our timeline - we're aware that were running a couple of weeks behind due to the issues we've had with rigging, so this has held up our animations a little bit. But were refocusing our energies slighly to nailing a couple of key tasks to get ourselves back on track.

1. Animation Targets
We've set a target of 4 seconds of animation per week per person - the most seconds a person has (yay Sushma) is 13.5 seconds so that means we could potentially have all animation blocked in 3 weeks with a week or so for polishing.

2. Cameras
We've already started making adjustments to our cameras with a few extremeish angles - like dutch ones, but well also be making sure we're being creative - but not to complicated with the moving cameras. We dont want to just add something in for the sake of it, its movement will need to be relevant to the scene and the character.

3. Unification
We're continuing to work on the textures of our characters - the Mariachi's are the most complete and we'll be making little tweaks to the troll in particular to make sure the styles are all unified to them. All the eyes will be the same shape and we'll be making sure that there is consistency and similarities between the animation and gestures of the characters - Sushma will be overseeing all the chief  character animators so we can ensure that there's 1 person looking at all of these and making sure they all fit together.

4. Environments
We're still working on these but we want to make sure we don't get caught up on it. We know there's still a way to go in terms of making sure it fits into the same universe as the characters - well be making sure we do this through our texturing (using similar ones to the characters) and making our scenes look a bit more complex.

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In other news the chief animators will be working on some test walk cycles - again this will help us to start unifying the characters further.

Natasha's already started some work on this for the biggest goat, and has been blocking in the first and last poses and a bit more character for it.

We also been taking a closer look again at the textures, and Amit has been Gamma correcting them - as a result some of the tones have changed slightly so we'll be sitting down as a group to make a decision on what tones we'll be tweaking so everything looks like a set.

Pre-Gamma Correction

Post-Gamma Correction

Sushma's troll rig is almost complete and Bimpe's been testing it - Yannis has worked on the blendshape so Bimpe will also be adding all the attributes and driven keys. 

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

"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