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.

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

"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

Week 6: Rigging and Riots

Tis the season to keep rigging, and Bimpe, Kaitlin and Sushma are the lucky recipients.

Natasha's also pulled together a phonetics model sheet (if that's the right term) for the troll's lip sync

Facial references for the Mariachi's

As we're starting to block out our scenes this week we're aiming to have the rigs (and skinning/weights) completed by the end of the week. Amit has set up the file referencing system of any updates to rigs etc will automatically update in our scene.

We're also working on some final clean up for the models - Yannis has had a couple of texturing issues with the ogre that he and Amit have been working on, and after talking to Barry we're going to make sure that all the textured characters look unified.

Ritchie has been working on a separate bump texture for the goats in Photoshop - to make them look like they have paper strips.

Cristina has been finishing up the assets fort he Mariachi's and Bimpe and Natatsha have been finalising the terrain. Amit will be doing some lighting tests with this later this week and starting work on our waterfall.

Looking smug and snazzy

Today we leave you with some textured goat eye candy courtesy of Ritchie Li