Week 11: Render Me This

Soooo were are definitely nearing the stage where we can start rendering our first shot!!

We're churning out animated scenes like theres no tomorrow (a slight exhaggeration but one that definitely one that fits the context) and should hopefully be done by the end of the week.

Sushma has suggested everyone playblast their animated scenes so we can then stitch theme together and view them as a whole. This is definitely a great step to take as we need to make sure all our animation scenes are consistent and that our individual animating styles don't differ to much from the scenes that follow each other. We've already noticed a couple of instances of this with the troll so we've been working together to tweak these.

HAPPY FACES!

This will also be useful so timing - to see what shots we need to cut down and so the music and narration can be edited to it. Annnnddd this. Also works as a second animatic. Huzzah.

Bimpe and Natasha have pretty mych finished their scenes so Amit will now be talking them through the render set up process so he isn't left to tackle this alone once all the shots have been completed.

Also now that the scenes are coming together we've been re-reviewing the goats textures - as the troll now compliments the environment almost perfectly. We've   been tweaking the saturation so that the goats still pop, but don't look missed matched with their setting.

Feel free to stay tuned for the stitched together playblast when its ready!

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 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