Samir Ansari

All done!

2008-06-13T22:12:00.000-07:00

FINISHED! argh what a relief, although I really enjoyed all this crap towards the end when it got busy. I enjoyed seeing the film come together slowly into a finished piece. We had quite a few problems today in terms of sound and all that. I was meant to meet the sound guy at 12:30 in college to get the final sound cut from him but when I got into college I saw what he had and there were still a few adjustments for him to make. While he was doing this I went upstairs at about 1:30PM so that me and Luke could encode the film out and burn it to a disk however I left one of the files we needed at home on my hard drive. I quickly drove home and picked it up and by the time i got back in it was about 2:15PM....because I hadnt slept the night before I got very worried that the 4PM deadline was drawing near and we still had not burnt our film onto a disk and the sound wasnt ready for the final cut! and then to make problems worse, by the time the film was finished encoded it was about 3:50PM and the college computers wouldnt burn it onto my disk for some reason. In the end we had to burn it on Ian's laptop and finally handed in our film slightly later than planned.

I enjoyed working on this film and ofcourse there were some times better than others. If we had more help from some of the other group members towards the end of the project myself and Luke would not have had to work through the night days on end trying to get this done. But to be fair many of the things we needed at this stage were areas which they did not have much experience in.

Over the next few weeks me and Luke plan to polish the film for the degree show. Also I am going to light the truck scene from scratch that Rey gave me so that it can make its way back into the film (we had to cut it out for the submission because it didnt look good)

Almost there

2008-06-13T07:58:00.000-07:00

it's nearly 8AM on the day of the hand in and me and Luke sill have a bit left to finish off. While he is finishing off photo-shopping the background plates I am finishing off the lighting and rendering f or the remaining scenes. All is looking positive for us to hit the deadline but I am just concerned about the folders we are meant to be handing in - to be honest I really havent had my mind set on finishing those instead I wanted to finish the film but I will be doing those while these shots are rendering.

EDIT: it's now 09:36AM and Luke has just fallen asleep on the sofa - what an arse. While hes asleep I will composite the shots in premiere and cut them together. I have arranged to meet James Murray (the soundman) in college about about 12PM to get the soundtrack off him. He has been working on it since tuesday which was his deadline

Renders

2008-06-12T10:18:00.000-07:00

ONE DAY LEFT - and today will be a long one. These are the shots I have rendered so far - I feel that my choice of using background plates and rendering the character on a separate layer has really helped us out in terms of render times. All the shots below were rendered in the Maya Software renderer only

Light rigs

2008-06-11T05:22:00.000-07:00

I'm currently working on the lighting setups for some of these remaining scenes. In very few cases I have been able to copy a lighting rig from one scene to another but even when i did this i obviously had to make a few adjustments on the backlighting and so on...

These are a few screen shots of some of the lighting rigs I have created:

Interior of barn

Inside of coop

Generic chicken laying eggs

Pulling Bar

Main chicken lighting Rig

Eggcounter lighting

Hoover Shot

Lighting and animating

2008-06-10T15:19:00.000-07:00

There is still a bit of animation left and also I have to light many of the remaining shots! as a relief Luke will be doing the secondary on the remaining shots and he will also be working on photo-shopping the background plates I have rendered to tweak them. We asked Rey to finish off working on the exterior shot of the truck coming over the hill a couple of days ago - he also said he wanted to light it. I saw a few tests over the past few days and it wasnt looking too bad. The only problem was that he has made the intro scene a bit too creepy and horror like and didnt really suit the film anymore. However he done some very nice smoke on the truck but it really needs some more tweaking. Today he brought in a render he done of the sequence and unfortunately it wasnt looking to great and he admitted to it. After thinking about this with myself Luke and Rey I suggested to them that we take this shot out and think of a different way to introduce the film. They agreed with me because one of the only reasons we kept this shot in the film in the first place was that it looks nice but infact it has actually become the opposite. We will however work on this shot in the 2 weeks we have for the degree show and I will light the scene myself.

Anyway these are of the shots I have completed of the last few days:

Chicken flirt

and heres a render of it when I lit it:

Scared Chicken

And here is a render after I lit the scene:

I really like how this came out, i tried to exaggerate the blue coming from the sky in the background to complement the orange light of the fire from the boiler. Also I placed the fire itself very close to the character and got it to physically emit light so now there is an orange glow to the scene and also the reflection of the fire in the chickens eyes.

Lighting

2008-06-09T16:04:00.001-07:00

I only have one more shot to finish tweaking with the animation and then my sole priority will be lighting. I have already lit the majority of the scenes I just need to look at them one more time for continuity in the lighting in sequence - for example preventing one shot being much darker or lighter than the previous ones when they shouldn't. This is one of the shots I am looking at:

Gary has really let us down with the animation, we were relying on his help to finish the animation in time so we could give it to our sound guy in time. He Failed to do this and stuck me and Luke with a whole lot of extra work which has now slowed us down considerably.

Compositing hoover shot

2008-06-09T07:47:00.001-07:00

I have rendered out the sequence of the hoover shot that was animated by myself and Luke. I have been working on the compositing of the layers - I have decided to have one character pass and two background plates to give the look of the shot a bit more depth.

And this is the rough composite - The wood will need some colour adjustment and I think the character is casting too much shadow. I will come back to this shot once I've finished some other bits so I can come back to this with fresh eyes

well...

2008-06-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

I have just been working on lighting for all the shots in the film and also finishing off the little bits of animation here and there. The picture above is of what I am currently working on. I will later work on the lighting for the background plate for the shot

Chicken laying eggs

2008-06-07T16:12:00.000-07:00

I have finally finished animating this shot where the generic looking chicken lays a few eggs. It is very simple animation and I tried to make the sequence quite funny

Also today I have created a new lighting rig for our character separately. The way I was doing this before was to just make all the lights in the scene and link which light specifically affects the character, the bg etc....but now I have actually just made a lighting rig specifically for the main chicken so then i can copy this rig and import it into the other shots. This is the result of my new lighting rig for the character:

I am very pleased with the result, to achieve this I used different types of lights to do different things. I used point lights for sharp shadows, a spot light for a dappled soft shadow and i used ambient lights with the shade turned down to zero to brighten up and de-saturate the shadows to give the impression that light is bouncing from the environment.

shadow shot update

2008-06-06T20:36:00.000-07:00

This is what I have been working on for the transformation shot. This will be a silhouette projected onto the back wall:

Like I said this shot is supposed to be a silhouette of our character transforming. In order for it to work I had to break apart the coop and position a directed spot light in the right place.

It was quite hard arranging it to be just right so the shadow on the wall wasnt too long and cutting off our character's head. Also I assigned a background shader to the coop so it doesnt render out but can receive shadows. I have given my file to Luke so that he can do the secondary on the shot while I move onto the next shot. In the meantime I have done a rough composite of how the scene should look with the shadows and coop background plate:

(that bit at the end was a cockadoodle doo)

Lighting barn interior

2008-06-06T19:01:00.000-07:00

This is the result of a LONG time lighting this scene - I think it has turned out quite nicely as an establishing shot of our barn. When I began with lighting this scene I had all sorts of problems such as textures and even geometry just vanishing when trying to render. Some of this was due to particles in the fog interfering with depth maps and such. In the end I managed to clear all this up and feel that this has been the most challenging part of the whole film for me so far.

Animation

2008-06-05T03:26:00.000-07:00

Over the past few days these are the animations I have been working on. They were relatively simple cut-aways of our chicken looking at the other chicken flirting and then his reaction:

Boiler lighting

2008-06-03T18:58:00.000-07:00

The boiler in our film (modelled and textured by Rey) was designed to look menacing so I have tried to emphasise this with my lighting of it. This was one of my early attempts of lighting the boiler portion of the barn:

I liked how the fire came out but everything still looked very dead. This is what I have done to it now:

I have added much more light and made sure that the shadows still sit in the little corners. This was rendered without an occlusion pass - if we have enough time I may add one but I am liking how it looks at the moment.

Inside coop lighting

2008-06-03T18:48:00.000-07:00

From the introduction shot of our character where he pops his out out from his coop I have decided to slightly change what is behind him. I have pushed back the rear wall of Rey's barn to add more depth to the shot. I have been working on lighting the entire interior of the barn:

As I mentioned in the post earlier this is also going to be a background plate. This means that it will only need to be rendered once and the best part is that we can manipulate this frame to however we want in photoshop. The picture below is of the plate when I added a layer of occlusion and other slight tweaks in photoshop to make the image fit the scene better.

Compositing

2008-06-03T18:29:00.001-07:00

For this shot I we are having our character pulling off a bar from his coop. In the background of this shot you will see the rest of the inside of the barn so I decided instead of rendering out this background every time I will make a background plate which we render one and composite our character and bars ontop of that - this should save alot of rendering time but came with a few of it's own problems. This is a render of the background plate I have done with a rough lighting setup:

and below is a still of our character in his coop

when i composited the two shots together i got this:

if you look closely you can see that there is a distinct dark edge to where the two composites meet on the bars.

This is not good! I was looking around and found this button in photoshop -very useful indeed!

now that line is gawn!

corrections to the lighting of the Stamp Collector scene

2008-06-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

I showed Andrew my lighting setup for the interior in his film and he really liked it. His ownly feedback was that he wanted the corners of the walls to be darker. Originally I didnt want to add an occlusion pass to the scene because he told me he was concerned with render times, but after talking about it again he said he wants me to add that pass. This was the result:

Andrew liked this but said that he wanted the top corners to be much darker than they currently are. I was having problems with making them darker because I had to delete the roof so that the occlusion in the ambient occlusion pass could enter the room and not leave me with a black image. Instead I then tried to delete a back wall instead of the roof but i still wasnt getting very dark top corners because of the light pouring in from the window. I felt I had to resort to a more un-orthodox method, I decided to make 2 large planes and got them to intersect the top corners of the walls. I then lowered the opacity on these so that they would cast a shadow:

This left VERY heavy shadows. I tried to make the material of the intersecting planes a ramp shader going from black to white (making the transparency systematically get more opaque as it gets to black) but because I was using depth map shadows this did not work. In the end Andrew told me that the room wont even be seen from this angle so it irradicates the problem straight away!!! but still I learned something today :P

Shadow test

2008-05-29T16:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-29T14:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T17:10:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T16:18:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T15:18:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T17:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-23T16:50:00.000-07:00

looking down the egg-chute

shot nearly done

2008-05-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-16T19:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T13:39:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-12T09:30:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T06:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-09T05:04:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-09T04:29:00.001-07:00

blah - biddi blah blah blar

some dos coding I have utilised to aid our rendering

still animating

2008-05-08T16:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-01T10:43:00.000-07:00

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.

Meeting with Mike

2008-04-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T16:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-20T09:31:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-17T12:52:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-13T15:21:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-10T10:42:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-09T06:29:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-05T12:16:00.001-07:00

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

2008-04-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

yea, couldnt resist really....

preparing the farmer for the film's poster

2008-04-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

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...

2008-04-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

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.

Dof pulling focus

2008-03-18T07:17:00.000-07:00

This is a new technique i am trying out for the pulling focus of the depth of field. I have rendered out a clump of moving grass on a seperate layer:

And then I rendered a still of the rest of the scene which already included the depth of field.

After this i composited the two together and started by blurring the background and keeping the grass in the foreground in focus. I then incresed and keyframed a blur on the foreground grass and systematically reduced the blur of the background scene. This is the result:

grass test

2008-03-15T12:21:00.000-07:00

I had a quick go at positioning some grass in front of the camera for the opening shot. This grass will not be animated but we were thinking to have this static grass more in the background and have only a small clump of swaying animated grass directly in front of the camera.

this isnt looking too bad at all but large chunks of grass may affect render time. At the moment this scene is only taking approximately 33 seconds per frame to render (excluding depth pass)

farmer NOW finished

2008-03-13T13:56:00.000-07:00

I thought I had the paint weighting of the farmer completed but today me and Luke looked at it and there were a few problems, namely the jaw. For some reason it didn't seem to be connected to the rest of the rig. Also the tongue wasn't following the head. I have now fixed these problems and have also set a limiter to the mouth so it now has a limit to how much it can open and how much it can close.

As soon as we sort out where the camera will be in the establishing shot i believe i am ready to animate the farmer - finally

paint weighting farmer

2008-03-12T18:17:00.000-07:00

I have finally finished paint weighting the farmer that Luke modelled, textured and rigged. This model was extremely hard to paint weight because it had a very complex array of joints. Also the model was quite low res so I couldn't achieve much detail or control when painting the weights onto the vertices. In the end I found a way to duplicate the model and smooth it - I then assigned this to it's own layer. This enables us to switch between the high poly and low poly versions of the model.

Motion blur

2008-03-08T04:52:00.001-08:00

I have been looking at incorporating motionblur into the opening shot of the film. Here is an early test I done:

(Environment and truck modelled by Rey and Luke)

The affect is too blurry I think so I reduced the affect of the motionblur. I also changed the colours a bit so that it matched the original concept by Luke more solidly. This is a test render of a section from the opening shot with a touch of motionblur and no DOF (will add dof at a later stage)

we still have yet to add the other elements of the scene such as the electric pylons ian has modelled and also a few more things such as grass.

more dof

2008-03-08T04:29:00.000-08:00

I seem to have found a solution in my search for efficient dof (depth of field). I have found a way to render out just the depth map of a scene (the Z-channel) which looks like this:

(environment and truck modelled by rey and luke)

Objects closest to the camera appear white and furthest are dark. The plan was to then use this channel as a guide for the depth of field affect in After Effects so that the whiter objects are less blurry than the darker ones. However I had major problems with the compatibility in after effects because in maya the only formats that can output a z channel are mayas native "iff" format and RLA. Unfortunately after effects does not recognise z or depth channels from "iff" images so I was forced to use RLA. This is bad because our custom renderer we are using does not export RLA images. I then tried to export a depth pass just using the maya software renderer in RLA format but after effects couldnt handle the file properly and refused to recognise the Z channel!

I then came across a very good compositing package. I found out that this software has much more compatibility than after effects in terms of the z channel so I began playing about with it and eventually achieved a natural looking depth of field affect in an amazingly fast render time (literally 1 sec per frame). This is the result:

Depth of Field

2008-03-01T15:15:00.000-08:00

I have continued to work on the rendered look of the establishing environment scene modelled by Rey (Truck) and Luke (Environment). I have been experimenting with getting a decent looking depth of field focus affect on the camera and keeping the render time as low as possible without sacrificing any quality. This is a result of some early playing about, I haven't worried about the lighting just yet but will begin working on it after I get a good focus affect

Rendering workflow

2008-02-09T15:23:00.001-08:00

I have worked out and written up a workflow that our group can follow outlining what layers to be rendered, what order to layer them in, how to layer them and which renderer to use:
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Rendering

The rendering will be done over seperate layers for the establishing scene. We will be using a combination of Mental Ray and a custom renderer. In the Mental Ray passes we will be rendering the colour pass, fur/hair, paint effects and fog or lighting effects. In the custom render pass pass we will render that ambient occlusion, shadows and final gathering. We will then layer these attributes together to make the final composition. The order of the layers whould be:

- (MR) Colour pass and Paint effects or Hair/fur
- (MR) Fog pass (luminosity)
- (Cst) Ambient Occlusion Pass (multiply)
- (Cst) Shadow pass
- (Cst) Final gather pass

(MR = Mental Ray / Cst = Custom Renderer)
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Fog test 2

2008-02-09T15:15:00.000-08:00

This is another test I have done with a more successful result:

And the result is:

To get the above result I got the fog layer to affect the luminosity of the colour layer and then got the Occlusion layer to multiply itself with the first 2 layers. Apart from the cube in the foreground being very dark the objects in the foreground have the correct amount of density for their distance to the camera and still have their Occlusion.

Fog

2008-02-09T14:52:00.000-08:00

We would like to get fog into the scene but may have to render it on a seperate pass. This could prove difficult because the fog has to be denser on further objects than it must be on objects in the foreground - and then theres the middleground also. This is a quick test I done to get a successful fog pass using a colour, AO and fog pass.

I then layered the fog in between the 2 passes and got this result:

This is not the result I was looking for. I have completely lost the background because the occlusion layer softened the 2 distant objects so much that the fog completely wiped them out!

Working out an efficient layer system for rendering

2008-02-09T14:36:00.000-08:00

As I have said earlier we are planning on finishing the establishing scene of the film first and leave it to render as we work on the rest. I have been playing about with the lighting for this scene and adding elements such as global illumination and ambient occlusion. Now I have been working out how to layer these attributes together once they have been rendered. Below is an example of a colour pass which has no indirect light bounce (final gather) or self shadowing (ambient occlusion):

and this is the AO pass:

Through some tests I have found that the best way to layer these would be to use After effects or Premiere to 'multiply' the AO ontop of the colour pass. The multiply action will erase all the white from the AO pass and keep the black, which will be the shadows.

Lighting

2008-02-04T13:36:00.001-08:00

These are a few test renders for the lighting I am working on for the opening scene with the truck (which was modeled by Luke and Rey. This is the untextured scene at the moment, I just blocked it out with colour so I know what goes where. Im not very happy with the colour of the sky at the moment but I assume that I will be replacing it with a sky texture later.

Grass

2008-02-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

I have been working on making the grass for the opening shot using a technique Rey showed me with hair follicles. So far this is the result:

Hair follicles are appearing to be very unpredictable for making the grass seem like its swaying, ill have to spend alot more time to make it look convincing.

Sound

2008-01-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

Today I also sent our animatic to a student who studies sound design to see what can she do with laying over some sound effects for us

feather test

2008-01-24T17:11:00.000-08:00

I have been working on something that we can use for the effect of falling feathers. I did this using maya's ncloth

I will ask the group what they think and see if we should use it.

Feathers

2008-01-22T08:33:00.000-08:00

We were thinking about how we can make the chicken model look more....displaced because Rey and Luke thought the model looked too flat with only the textures on it. For a while we have been trying to come up with some sort of feather system for the character and have come across a few plugins that are available on the internet (but you have to purchase them). To overcome this we have tried our own attempts and have emailed Alex for some assistance. This was what I came up with when I used hair follicles

Animatic

2008-01-10T17:52:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been working on organising and adding music to our animatic. I have also been editing it to make sure the story flows. The video below is of our animatic without the sound effects (which I will be adding soon). The shots in this animatic were worked on by myself, Rey, Gary and Luke

UV mapping

2007-12-17T15:44:00.000-08:00

I have been UV mapping Rey's model of some machinery the last couple of days

rendered look

2007-12-11T07:48:00.000-08:00

I have been looking at more technical aspects of the film such as rendered look and lighting. I will be doing this for now until the rest of the group work on pre-production. So far this is a rough test for tube lighting in the barn

more concept

2007-12-10T13:57:00.000-08:00

this is another piece of concept I am working on for the truck in the intro sequence

colours

2007-11-21T06:14:00.000-08:00

A few more basic colour concepts

Colour charts

2007-11-20T07:35:00.000-08:00

This is a colour swatch I have made for the lighting in the film

I am still working on the rest of the swatches. I plan to do another one for the Interior environment and external

Animatic

2007-11-20T07:33:00.000-08:00

This week Luke, Gary, Rey and I have been working on the animatic. we have been animating the blockout in 3d to give us an idea of the movements and timings. I would post playblasts of what I have been working on but blogger will not let me. I will try and post them when I find out what the problem is.

2007-11-13T12:37:00.000-08:00

These are some more drawings, the ones in the top right were done by Rey

character posing

2007-11-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

over the past few days I have been posing the character into actions that we invision him to be in our film. I then dropped them into the scene to get an idea for the scale.

Weighting

2007-11-06T14:05:00.000-08:00

Luke has done a rough model of our chicken for me to play about with and animate. He has put some bones in and I am weighting it at the moment

Robber Chicken

2007-11-06T14:00:00.000-08:00

These are a few more of the sketches I have been doing for the storyboard, they are rough sketches of the chicken dressed as a robber trying to steal an egg

Orville

2007-11-01T15:55:00.000-07:00

This is a sketch of the chicken flying down the zip-line. Although i know it looks alot like Orville I hope the group will be using it in the storyboards

Storyboards

2007-11-01T14:06:00.000-07:00

I have began drawing ontop of the 3D renders from the blockout for the storyboard. So far I have these images done:

More to come.....

Possible title for the film

2007-11-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

Get Layed

We know this isnt gramatically correct but it is a play on "Lay" and egg as opposed to get "laid" which is an entirely different thing

Restarting the storyboarding

2007-11-01T13:50:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of days I have been working with Luke to get the camera shots in the 3D blockout of the barn looking good so we can draw ontop of them and collate them to make the storyboard. These are a few of the many images I have rendered out - these do not include the drawings we will be putting ontop of them later:

Modelling

2007-11-01T13:40:00.000-07:00

As I said in an earlier post, we thought it would be a good idea to actually start modelling certain props and sets that we know would definately be in the film no matter what. This will save us time in the long run and will provide us with a rough 3D blockout to work with for the animatic.

I started to model a rough blockout of the interior of what the barn should look like:

I tried to keep with the mis-angled look which I loved in Luke's original sketches and concept for the film

Change to the opening

2007-11-01T13:34:00.000-07:00

After doing the storyboards I posted in the last blog I had an extreme change in view as to how the story should actually start. I was very unhappy with the way the truck drives to the farm and all of the shots before we would even get to the chicken coop. I decided that we should get much more to the point with the film and perhaps start in the farm straight away because I felt all the rest was unnesesary and too time consuming for a 2 minute short. The next day I spoke to the group about my thoughts and most of them agreed with me. We then spoke to Jared Taylor who flat out agreed with me and said to the group that we should approach the film in this way. So it was back to the drawing board, literally.

With this new change in direction I have also drawn up a timeplan for how I think the production of this film should follow (click to enlarge)

Storyboard

2007-10-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

I have started storyboarding based on initial ideasfrom the group. So far I have done these pages:

more to come...

evil gate

2007-10-13T15:41:00.000-07:00

today i had a go at doing some concept art on the gate to the farm which the truck will drive through

thats about as evil as i can make a wooden gate for now!

watermill

2007-10-12T17:15:00.000-07:00

Today I started modelling an asset for the farm - a watermill:

I know it is very early to start any modelling but I am doing this on the side to help with generating ideas for more concept art. I believe that I might aswell get one or 2 of the assets out of the way which myself and the group know will definately make it into the final piece

Group Discussion

2007-10-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we also had a very long group discussion about how we would want the film to start. At first we had one idea and decided to change it so we could add more depth to the character. After much debate and disagreement we settled on a few ideas which we really liked.

it has begunnn!!!!

2007-10-10T07:43:00.001-07:00

I will be working on Luke Efrussy's film about a chicken who cannot lay an egg. I have started by doing some concept for the farm. I done a digital painting of a skyscape and a silhouette of the farmyard: