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.