Shadow test

This is a test of what I was on about!


as an afterthought I was thinking, I have seen this sort of thing before....

Reworking finale shot

Today I spoke to Luke about an idea I had for when our chicken is transforming into the cockerel at the end. First off I asked him if he could model something else and add it to the character to make that change even more noticeable and agreed that it should be a big tail (or whatever u call it on a cockerels backside). Also I suggested that we show the transformation as a projected silhouette of our chicken onto the back wall of the coop.

Lighting for the stamp collector film

I have been working on lighting one of the shots for Becca and Andrew Monin's film "The Stamp Collector". This is the process I undertook for my first go at this scene:


Andrew told me that he wanted the light to be coming from the window - and because there were no modelled lights in the scene I assumed that this was also the primary source of light (unless he wants me to also have lights coming from imaginary sources out of shot). In the picture above I simply put a basic lighting setup together to get a strong light pouring from the window and casting appropriate shadows. Also I put a string of light in the back corner of the wall to make sure that it doesnt get lost in the black. With my lighting rig i will be faking global illumination for use with the maya software renderer and bouncing light from different axis'.



Now that I have worked more on the rig I have an obviously fuller image of lights. This is still a rig in it's early stages. I have also added some subtle light rays coming through the window but as a whole I do not like the image as it is.


Here I have exaggerated the rays of light - which I like but will have to show Andrew and see if it is what they were looking for in the shot. Until then I will keep playing around and create a proper rig for this scene.

Dropping Eggs

these are the eggs dropping from one of the other chickens in the film. I have animated them rolling down the pipe and I have got the numbers on the egg counter rotating as they fall. I am just waiting for Luke to finish the texture on this chicken before I import her into the scene and animate her.



I have also just finished the animation of the chicken smiling at the egg counter:

Pulling bar finished

Now I will hand the file over to Luke for him to do the secondary while I carry on with the next shot.

Changing Texture

I have tried to brighten up Rey's wood texture for the inside of the chicken coop:



Well that wasnt much use! It's still blending in too much with the colour of the character. This will need more work. Luke says he will be looking at strengthening the colours of the chicken texture to make it stand out more

pulling bar

I am currently working on the shot where the chicken pulls off a bar from the coop to throw down the egg counting hole. So far its looking like this:




I just got up to the point where the bar pings off, ill keep working on it and post again when the shot is done. I'll give myself one more day before I pass it on to Luke for him to do the secondary on the wattle

Laxative shot

I have been setting up a decent lighting rig for the shot where our character begins drinking laxative in the hope of shooting out an egg. This is a render of how it is looking at the moment.


This shot is being animated by Gary but I done the animation for the blendshapes on the face and eyelids. Also the laxative bottle itself was modelled by Luke

turbo shots

this is what i have done so far just to get the poses for this part when the chicken is frantically trying to squeeze out an egg




like i said this is just the poses. I will keep it snappy like this but have yet to add follow through and bounce to the arms and legs

look down pipe

looking down the egg-chute

shot nearly done

This shot is finally pretty much done, now ill hand this file over to Luke to animate the secondary wobble to the wattle



The shot was annoyingly hard to do and took me a very long time to get it looking alright in my eyes. I have also changed the end of the shot (see earlier posts for how it used to look) and the chicken looks alot more scared now.

separating the character from background

More attempts at using the lighting to break the character out of his surroundings because of all the similar colours:


here i tried putting some sort of spot light fixture in the coop, I do not like this at all.


In this one I have a very strong red area light linked to the front slats on the coop, this definitely brings out the character more but ideally a change in the textures would help. We have tried a yellow texture on the chicken as we said we could do earlier and it looks rubbish and gets lost when we aply a straw texture to the base of the coop. I have suggested a white or paler texture to the chicken but Luke seems adoment that he wants to keep it brown. This is a problem because its quite hard changing the colour of wood to anything but brown....

I'm famous

I have noticed that one or two people have pretty much copy pasted ideas from my blog into theirs. In general its quite flattering but fucking annoying. I would create a song about these people (as Aminata done in hers) but i'd rather work on the film for now - you know who you are.

texture change

For a while I have not been happy with the colour of the chicken being the same as the background. Today myself Rey and Luke were talking about this and we thought something along the lines of this colour scheme would be better:


This will replace the brown body on our chicken with a strong yellow so hopefully it will break him out of the background more. Luke has just finished changing the texture so hopefully today I will do a test render with it - I may have to light the shot slightly differently because the saturation on the chicken's main colour has changed.

ARGH

So I was overwriting my backup copy of all my work to my external hard drive (u know where this is going) and instead of overwriting the folder it just made another one and renamed it. I didnt want this so I just deleted the folder that was in there already and thought ill just copy paste it again. When I deleted it, a message said it was too big for the recycling bin so it had to be permanently deleted so I just clicked "yes" thinking it was just deleted an old backup I had of the folder. IT WAS THE FRIGGIN ONE FROM MY PC's HARD DRIVE, and that meant all I had left was the backup of the folder (which I last backed up about 10 days ago).

Thankfully though I have a software called Easeus Data Recovery Wizard which I downloaded to search for recoverable data even if it has been removed form the recycling bin! my whole day has been dedicated to getting this work back from the realms of kapoof and now I have managed to recover everything. However this has set me back one day on a busy schedule but if anyone is reading this I cannot recommend this software more to anyone, it has saved god knows how many hours of work


I will definitely back up more often from today

Remaining tasks

This is a list of what still needs to be done, I will present this to the group tomorrow and finally sign off tasks to people and set appropriate deadlines


I have broken each shot down to show how many seconds it is and also colour coded the shots as:

Red - Hard
Orange - Medium
Yellow - Easy (but not too easy!)

moon

This is an image of the moon I made. It has 1.3 million polys and has specular, bump and translucence maps. I have also assigned 12 normal maps to it to really bring out some of the details I have done in zbrush.


this is easily the best thing I have ever done..

Comparing to the concept

This is a comparison of my lighting along side the original concept piece made by Luke last year:



Not too far off, i didnt pose the character to the same as in the concept on the left but you get the idea. Also it just needs the straw and the scene will almost be complete....perhaps a water bottle too like in the concept

lighting of the coop

Like I have been doing with the previous shots I have been lighting as I am animating using a lighting rig I created especially for the inside of the barn. I have also created a rough crescent moon just so its clearer as to the time of night/day. I am still waiting for either Luke or Rey to create a straw texture for the floor of the coop.


I have done my absolute best to break out our character from the brown textures in the background using backlights and other stuff but I am still not happy with the fact that our chicken is the same colour as his background. This will be sorted out soon enough hopefully when we have the straw in the scene

Talking about the film with Luke

The other night I watched back through our rough cut of the film a few times and just got to the point where I realised there was just far too much going on in the film's intro as it is. With the farmer hopping out of the truck and walking over to the barn where he forces the door open and blah blah blah....this is just not pivotal to telling the story of our chicken.

Today I spoke about this to Luke and he agreed, I have now suggested we cut out the bit of animation I done with the farmer forcing open the door (there is a video of this shot on one of the earlier posts of this blog) and also the shot Gary animated where the farmer is walking from the truck to the barn. Instead we can show the name of the film on the sign (see Luke's blog) and after that have it fade to black and have sounds of the door being forced open, then a large BANG where we will cut straight to the inside shot of the barn and our chicken pops his head out.

Stretching

This is what I have been working on for the past few days. I used step keys to flesh out the key poses and then done the in-betweens and so on. This was good at first but when i converted the graph editor to curves, the chicken spazzed out all over the place. Also the stepped keys made it hard for me to add and control the weight and bounce of the character. But still I dont think this is too bad for now, I still have more to do it to it but have to move on to the next shot if I hope to animate the rest of the film



This is some of the spazzing out I was on about (below)

Blend shape editing

I have had a slight problem with the blendshapes of the eye sockets for the character. The problem that keeps arising is when I mix more than one blendshape together the eyelid bulges out of the mesh. Luke made the original blendshapes and didnt know this would happen but I have fixed the problem now


BAD BLEND


FIX



GOOOOD BLEND

blah blah blah

blah - biddi blah blah blar


some dos coding I have utilised to aid our rendering

still animating

Yea pretty much chiselling away at the animation shot by shot. The scene I am working on is one that we think is going to be the hardest one to do so I have just finished some key poses and a few in betweens. I've never animated in this way (with stepped key poses) so i'll see how it turns out.

Lighting as I go

While i am animating the shots I am also lighting them aswell so they are ready for rendering as soon as I am done


before


after


even after-er

Luke changed the colour of the zeros to red, i think this was a good idea to make the numbers more obvious but they are far too red as they are now

Rough Cut

still cutting everything together for what we are now calling our rough cut of the film. I have done it so that we can simply drop in playblasts with different shots straight into the file to get a sense of the timing and shot flow.