Whey

We're working on a pitch for Nickelodeon for this project. Nick seem to like our idea so we're going ahead creating an animation for a possible TV showing. I'm working with my mate James on this project so head over to our blog at http://nickprojectjamesandcharlie.blogspot.com/ for this project.

New Things To Do

Working on ideas for a pitch and advert for mens aftershave. Been looking into programs and plugins which could be helpful including RenderMan.

Interesting

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2008/hammond-bloody-omaha-p1.php

This is more to do with using Adobe After Effects but shows what you can do with the program- sweet!

Looking back on my work- hardware

I’d hoped to import my gorilla into Vue 5 and render it from there as I’m far more familiar with the vue 5 render than in Maya and I can produce far better renders in Vue 5. However, creating the scene I made within Vue 5 took around 3 hours to render a single frame making the idea of importing the characters into Maya unrealistic as I would need a cluster of computers to deal with the high CPU/GPU demands of the program.
I resolved the matter by importing the single frame into Adobe After Effects and adding the character over the image. This worked out ok, but it’s apparent that two different shaders have been used in the same scene- the Maya 8 shader (the gorilla) and the Vue 5 shader (the background).

Looking back on my work- problems

Looking back on what I've got completed I'm happy with it. From the project I've learnt that I work best as a group as there is always more support when you need it- rather than waiting for classes to get help. I’ve run into a lot of strange problems but with help from my teachers and mates I’ve managed to fix them or work around them.

One problem I was having was that when I re-opened my saved files they would open highly mutated versions of my models- Maya document files ‘Girl 6-13’ saved as normal but when I opened them later they were all corrupt so I had to start over from editing the 14th version of the girl to the 5th version of the girl I had which wasted lots of time. I found the reason why Maya corrupted them is because I had deleted the subdiv of the girls leg which only showed the result of deleting it after the file had been saved and reloaded, so you could delete the subdiv at any time and only realise that deleting it corrupts the entire model after you close Maya and re-open it- a very annoying bug.

Some other problems required me to do workarounds as it would take too long to fix them. The gorilla character I made wouldn’t let me paint more weights because of an unknown part in the history- deleting ‘all by type> history’ fixed it so I could paint weights but also removed lots of polygon faces and so I couldn’t fix it as I was already too far into my project- If I fixed it and created all the missing faces again I probably wouldn’t have finished the project (some 3 hours) before hand-in time.

What I did

The brief was to create a character and demonstrate it using an animation with supported development work. I’d hoped to over deliver and animate a short story to help the demonstration of what the characters can do but because of all the problems I had with creating the models I’ve only just finished the walk cycle today- the hand in date! I’m glad the brief didn’t specify a short storyboarded animation which I was aiming to deliver at the start of this project.

done

There we go. It's 12pm, and Maya is finishing the final render. I have just over 4 hours before this has to be handed in so i'll spend some time here reflecting on my work for extra brownie points and listening to music.