Meeting with Mike

Its been a while since I have posted last but I have been very busy working on the film. We had a meeting with Mike Hirsh last week to ask him with he thought of our shot flow and general direction with the film - his main point of feedback was to redo our animatic. This was very important because many shots in our film have changed quite a bit since our last animatic in January. Since this meeting I have been working away to pretty much redo our whole animatic and also find some relevant music and sounds to compliment it. Also, before our meeting with Mike we decided to cut the robbery scene because it wasn't really the point of our story and we probably wouldn't have enough time to do the scene justice - in it's place I have instead added a short piece where the character attempts to throw bits and bobs down the egg chute in an attempt to bump up his egg count. I will post the new animatic when it is done.

(just some sketches for working out alternative shots to the ending of the film)

More lighting

This is a quick shot breakdown I done for the scene I have been animating. I have rendered the images with all my lighting in it to see if the light matches up and flows well with previous shots



(The shot above will contain another chicken laying eggs, still waiting for the model)


Again this will have another chicken in it.

The lighting seems to be still a bit dark, I will finish the animating first and then come back to this with fresh eyes. With this scene I also input the correct degree show settings for rendering to widescreen (something which I stupidly forgot to do earlier!). It was a huge mistake forgetting about this because now all the other shots we have worked with such as the farmer opening the door and the truck coming over the hill are all framed wrong so I have had to fix all the cameras and adjust their framing.

Lighting setup

This is a comparison of my new lighting vs my old lighting:

OLD


When I used to light scenes I would just chuck global illumination and/or final gather at it and see what sticks - the result was an image as shown above. This image took about a minute to render and didn't look too bad at the time. Below it is my latest work on the scene.


NEW


Quite a large difference I would say. Over the course of this year I have learned so much about lighting and virtual lenses in maya - this not only vastly improved render quality but also dramatically reduced render times. The shot above only took 35seconds to render at production resolution. A big shout out to Rey is deserved for his fantastic texture work with this scene and his model, also to Luke for his character modelling.

Video:



I have not yet animated the secondary on the characters.....giblets, I will leave this until later. I am also still working on the lighting as I animate and am making the scene much brighter - for some reason when I uploaded this video to this post it came out VERY dark. As you can see behind the character everything is black, this wont be the case when we render it properly.

Animating and cuts

I have been working away at animating more for this establishing shot of our main character and the surrounding chickens. Originally we wanted to have a point of view shot with a shaky camera - however it did not look as good as we had hoped, so after trying different ways of introducing the other chickens I came up with this:




but this was also shocking... After thinking long and hard about it I broke this scene into quick shots:



The empty boxes will contain the other chickens laying eggs (I am waiting for the models and rigs to be completed before I actually import them and start working on them). I am still trying to keep our character as.....chicken-like as I can. As you can see in the scene I also have a lighting rig in this scene which I have been working on as I have been animating.....

I was playing around with a way to show the egg counter and initially came up with this:



I didnt really like this so i kept working on it and came up with this instead:



I showed this to the group and they seem to like it

head pop

I have started work on another scene:



I tried keep in tie with the whole chicken thing and gave him very snappy neck movements, the giblets ontop of his head might need some tweaking but this seems to be coming along well.

Just an idea i had for re-working one of scenes....originally we had this as a POV shot of our chicken looking at other chickens in the barn. However I thought about having the chickens he is looking at as his neighbours and he just looks over to each side as the camera moves to see the other chickens - ignore the drawings on the planes :P

animating reference

This could be almost used as a reference for animating the chicken last strain and transformation into the cockerel - there are quite a few similarities (such as this character growing some sort of horse's main on his head when he has transformed :P)

Test Render

This is a render I have done of the sequence, I have added lights to cast the farmers silhouette on the door and shadow the face. Through strenuous trial and error tweaking I have knocked the render time down from around 3 minutes to just 38 seconds per frame! (this is at production quality and PAL resolution.) The lighting may still need some work, I think the hand is too bright at the moment:



I need to sort out that handle, its not moving at the same speed of the hand at some points but the animation is almost there (though I said that in the last post).

update

As you can see above I am running out of good titles for the posts on my blog. Anyway this is an updated playblast for animation in the shot I am working on. I have replaced the temporary door handle with the one that Luke has just modelled and transferred the animation over to it. Also I have added a quick cut on the camera to the shot that will come directly after this scene. This cut was just a guide to show timing, I do not intend the animation of the farmer standing in the doorway (after he has just kicked the door open) to be used at all. We will be working on that scene a bit later on.

more

I have fixed a few things in the animation such as the flop of the hand and have nearly finished animating this shot. In this shot the farmer is attempting to open the door but it is jammed. This will then result in him kicking open the barn door angrily (havent done this bit just yet :p)

trying again

I have started that little bit of animation again and have changed the angle of the camera also. Perhaps the other shot looked a bit more dynamic than this one, but this is proving a far more efficient way of animating with this rig and incorporates the IK more than the last playblast I done.



By the way the door handle in this is just something I put together as a guide to animate with, Luke is modelling a proper one while I work on this

ANIMATING

Ive finally got my hands on animating! this is a rough playblast for the beginning scene where the farmer is trying to force the door open, its an extremely short clip but it is a start



Its not looking too bad as a start but myself and Luke are having quite serious problems with the IK/FK blend feature on the rig, I think i may have just animated this the wrong way round and should have keyed the IK BEFORE the FK.....even so I think ill start again so I dont run into too many problems as I get further with animating this shot.

Couldnt resist!

yea, couldnt resist really....

preparing the farmer for the film's poster

Today I was playing about with a few poses for the farmer to cast a scary looking shadow. We were looking to use this for the backdrop of the poster for our film:

Hmmm...

It has come to my attention that a few people have been looking at my blog and using some of the techniques I have been working on. Because of this I have a few edits to older posts which contain information and guides which I wish to keep to myself, my group and anybody who would be happy to ASK me beforehand.