Blue screen of death sketch

10 commandment old man sketch

Old man - peasant - ten commandments character

another sketch based on Dory - finding nemo- Pixar

Davo's Doodles

So here's a new sketch for you...

So recently handed in my final animation for my final major project, as i was too busy to post up on my blog whilst i was working on the final outcome i need to update  this now. Where did i leave this last, oh yes, i was working on the blocking of all 3 scenes, have a few problems tweaking and getting the smoothness correct, found that my character was very 'jerky'. After going through the animation curves in the graph editor and smoothing out the curves, this seemed to help do the trick, also by deleting keys that were unnecessary.

The most complicated scene i thought was the laugh scene as it took me several attempts to get it to where i was happy with the roll, i used my cousin video reference and also recorded myself rolling around as you can see on these videos.

i went over and over these video, concentrating on certain aspects etc watching how head moves, watching the shoulders etc, so that i could tweak my character as much as necessary.

i EMAILED A FEW PEOPLE FROM THE INDUSTRY. hear are a few names that got in contact back with me

Jean-Denis Haas (ILM)

Dee-jay Nicke (Animation Salvation)

Arslan Elver (Framestore)

Mark. C. Harris (Pixar)

Ricky O'Donell (RJDM)

Andy Georgiou (RJDM)

All these people i have to give a massive thanks for helping me improve and critique my work, to giving suggestions, feedback, queries, critique. Especiall to Mark. C. Harris who helped improve my character model by suggesting how he would improve it personally, he gave me a list of suggestions and when i followed them everything seemed to fall into place. Also with Dee-jay nicke, i managed to recieve a video lecture and feedback over 'skype' this was extremely helpful as for the whole hour that he helped me with my horror scene i saw such a vast improvement on my work.  i managed to record the call onto my livescribe pen whilst taking notes and tweaking my work.

problems that i encountered, hmmm this was extremely intense, as it was the last push to put al my work together, managed to render the first two scene which was great a few days before hand in so all i needed to do was finish my final scene animation and render it. As i was tweaking the last few bits and making sure the animation was more fluid and smooth i managed to obtain a lot of help from a friend who's computer i could render my work on. jess was a great help to me as if i didn't have her help i dont think i would have been able to render my work in time. So because of this also i could crack on with last minor touches.  once the environment was rendered i was ready then to render my character layer.

In each scene that i did, we encountered error after error, whether it being the skin texture kept corrupting, or maya crashing, Render passes was my main cause of all my stress as for some reason the layers and passes were just not working correctly, we went over and over again how we could solve this, we manage to render AO, diffuse, matte and masterbeauty. Problem was tho that the diffuse layer wouldnt render the skin texture neither them matte layer.  as you can see in the rendered image below.

masterbeauty

diffuse

the diffuse layer was just not picking up the skin texture or the eye texture.

I then had to make a decision to just use the masterbeauty layer as otherwise my work was not going to look right, which is a shame as the passes would have been very nice, but at the same time the masterlayer im very happy with.

the overall hand in result i am extremely happy with, would have never imagined i could produce something that made some of my friends cry because they were so proud of me.  that was the best feeling  ever.

i feel like i have come on so much over the last few months with all my problems and stresses and this project has kept me on my toes and kept encouraging me to strive to keep working hard. especially after i recieve an email from a proffessional animator, makes me inspire and determined to get to where i want to be more and more.

there were a few rushed bit and after handing in my final project i realised a few mistakes and errors that i didnt spot prior to this. these are 

transperany of the hair, the pillow is missing in horror scene, the popcorn pans to the right slightly but for some reason i dont know why that is as there was no set keys for them after they fell to her lap. laugh scene rendered to wrong camera for my character so only the environment moves with that camerazooming in. 

i am working on all of these problems and it will be all perfect for my degree show and show reel overall im over the moon with the way it has turned out. will upload the final piece after this blog entry. over and out.

update

havent updated for a while been busy tweaking my animation and using the graph editor to smooth my curves, here's an updated video of my cry scene, hope u like

audio from columbia/ tri star pictures, directed by Howard Zieff, My Girl

having a little break from animating decided i would do a pen drawing of a lil mosquito, only a quick doodle nothing amazing really.

So blocking hmmmmm

So i have started blocking, this is how far i have got, i need to complete 10-15 seconds of quality animation, i have started a couple of scene so that i dont get bogged down with one and i can go back an forth, hope you like. I will post up the stepped version and then the spline version so that you can have a look at both, i would really appretiate feedback email me

amy.davis1604@gmail.com

this is the stepped version, reference - using sound clips from beethoven 1991, and halloween 1978

and then this is the splined version

 Try to create TV static lighting:

played around with lights and i found the best one to use was the spot light and projecting images through it.

 i wanted to create an image sequence to loop through the scene, so it would constantly be flickering light. the best solution was for this to create a folder of source images all named the same with a number after them e.g tv1, tv2, tv3 ...  after the all had been renamed i then selected the spot light uploaded the first image to the spot light selected image sequence so that the sequence went all the way through to the last image which for this was tv17.

i then had a look on a few different websites, books and forums in search of how to loop it so it would constantly chage throughout and the best answer was as follows:

 this was a screenshot of me testing different images seeing if they had enough colour change to them to be noticed.

 i then copied some MEL script from a forum, unfortunately this did not work,

then i found a forum that explained it a lot easier so this was the MEL explanation i used, which worked brilliant:

A very small script that lets you have a loop in your image sequence. It checks the framenumber  and when it reaches a certain value, it goes back to the first image of your sequence.

Usage:

-add a file into your light

-tell it to be an image sequence

-edit the expression (by right clicking the purple image number box and selecting edit extension.)

          (in this example its file48)file48.frameExtension=frame; into :

(in this example i have 304 image files that are s sequence, you have to edit this to the number of images you have. The variables $teller and @teller2 are just names, you can name it whatever you want.)

int$teller=frame;

int$teller2=$teller%304;

if($teller2<304 {

file48.frameExtension = $teller2;

}

-that's it

 im basing my character on my cousin, she help me by acting out my story, will be following this for reference

night time lighting

at the moment i am currently working on getting the night time lighting correct to set the scene,
i had been playing round with the different types of lights and settings of them for ages, then i worked out a clever way, which is much easier.

 so useful tip:

less lights is more!!!!
create a sky dome textured with environment sky, with my room i have modelled i create a window deleted the face and put the area light out side in-between the sky dome and the room, makes it look like lighting is going through the window, gives good effect.
use area light  change colour to a dark blue intensity between 0.500 - 1.000
and then change the camera attribute editor environment colour to a navy/blue colour, u will get a good lighting effect then.

this image has just got the moonlight lighting the scene:

this is the light of the moonlight and the tv - used an area light scaled it to the size of tv screen, toned depth-map shadows down and played with intensity. to create these 2 images

these are my final blendshape and cluster tests, im really happy with them (if it doesnt work try refresh button)

this was my final sketch for my character for my uni project - professional brief

this is my final rendered modelled character