In week 10's session of Animation 102 it was a review of our tasks such as the short story. I showed my work on my first attempt and it did receive some positive feedback including a good use of the three frame captures in when the character was turning around. However I was informed that the furniture seemed to be moving around a lot in the piece and Adam suggested that he had a nail placed in the furniture he'd used for his short story to hold everything down. This though was a good use of feedback as I had booked the camera today for refining my work along with the set.
I had feedback on my second run and jump attempt, and once again I would need to consider the height of the jump. I was beginning to feel like I was getting mixed messages when Stephan mentioned how the build up before the jump was too slow when last week I was told I needed some build up before the jump. The rest of the group then showed us their work and I was astounded by Ollies animation and interpretation of the irritating insect when the armature was squashed by a bigger armature I wondered if he'd used green screen but I reality he simply created a small model out of wires.
Johny then talked about the module hand in and told us it was entirely up to us about how we may hand in our work and that our chosen work would be handed in as a showreel of our best 6 animations out of the exercises. I was still feeling conflicted about how to submit my work in the show reel what with Johny telling me it could all be stop motion based on our skills set but at the same time couldn't help but wonder if Joe would've wanted some Maya in the mix as well.
In terms of Maya I decided to have a go at the constraints trick for approaching the lifting box exercise. However with my focus on the Intro to the making of I had forgotten a few things so I asked the Maya expert James to give me a refresher course so that I could do it myself.
He showed me the basics of the constraints and that the key was the locators which were located in the create option in the toolbar. This could be grouped or parented with the hands of Buckid or with the corners of the box. However James told me it would be best to parent the locators whilst the hands were set on IK blend mode not the FK mode, other wise it wouldn't work. The locators, rig and box could be parented into groups in the translation area of the workspace, but for the box to move I would need to have them set to freeze transformations.
Having had this refresher course I translated this to my second attempt at lifting the heavy crate in Maya, though James helped me with some of it I had animated the actions before. I didn't include the walk as Johny told me a walk wasn't needed in the animation and I felt it was probably best to leave it for stop motion animation in terms of walking.
The key frames were rather hard to add and some aspects of the rig seemed off such as the full rotating of the hands before it picked up the box. I knew I would get feedback on this but given this was a first attempt at the constraints it would help me refine the process.
Johny and James then brought our attention to an element that would help in our final submission. Previously we had rendered our work using the Arnold renderer, but we could still submit play blasts providing they were high quality. The trick to this was in the playblast settings, we had to make sure the quality and scale were set to 100 and 1.00 the encoding setting was to be QT and the traditional H.264 render style. I tested this on my box lifting piece and it worked very well it was like I was looking at a high quality render. This would save time and trouble on Arnold and my mac from overheating.
Looking back I would think I've received good useful feedback on my animations as I continue to improve and refine my work for submission. If I had enough time I would attempt another animation using the constraints to see if I could improve upon the first attempt. In hindsight I should've asked for Johnys opinion on the showreel in terms of if it had to be a mixture of Maya and Stopmotion or all one media as I still have concerns.
In conclusion I will need to improve upon my constraints exercise and look into refining my short story. I shall also look into doing a stopmotion version of the heavy crate to see which would be the best for the showreel. In future I shall see if I can have more time to do more on the constraints element of lifting the box.
I had feedback on my second run and jump attempt, and once again I would need to consider the height of the jump. I was beginning to feel like I was getting mixed messages when Stephan mentioned how the build up before the jump was too slow when last week I was told I needed some build up before the jump. The rest of the group then showed us their work and I was astounded by Ollies animation and interpretation of the irritating insect when the armature was squashed by a bigger armature I wondered if he'd used green screen but I reality he simply created a small model out of wires.
Johny then talked about the module hand in and told us it was entirely up to us about how we may hand in our work and that our chosen work would be handed in as a showreel of our best 6 animations out of the exercises. I was still feeling conflicted about how to submit my work in the show reel what with Johny telling me it could all be stop motion based on our skills set but at the same time couldn't help but wonder if Joe would've wanted some Maya in the mix as well.
In terms of Maya I decided to have a go at the constraints trick for approaching the lifting box exercise. However with my focus on the Intro to the making of I had forgotten a few things so I asked the Maya expert James to give me a refresher course so that I could do it myself.
He showed me the basics of the constraints and that the key was the locators which were located in the create option in the toolbar. This could be grouped or parented with the hands of Buckid or with the corners of the box. However James told me it would be best to parent the locators whilst the hands were set on IK blend mode not the FK mode, other wise it wouldn't work. The locators, rig and box could be parented into groups in the translation area of the workspace, but for the box to move I would need to have them set to freeze transformations.
Having had this refresher course I translated this to my second attempt at lifting the heavy crate in Maya, though James helped me with some of it I had animated the actions before. I didn't include the walk as Johny told me a walk wasn't needed in the animation and I felt it was probably best to leave it for stop motion animation in terms of walking.
The key frames were rather hard to add and some aspects of the rig seemed off such as the full rotating of the hands before it picked up the box. I knew I would get feedback on this but given this was a first attempt at the constraints it would help me refine the process.
Johny and James then brought our attention to an element that would help in our final submission. Previously we had rendered our work using the Arnold renderer, but we could still submit play blasts providing they were high quality. The trick to this was in the playblast settings, we had to make sure the quality and scale were set to 100 and 1.00 the encoding setting was to be QT and the traditional H.264 render style. I tested this on my box lifting piece and it worked very well it was like I was looking at a high quality render. This would save time and trouble on Arnold and my mac from overheating.
Looking back I would think I've received good useful feedback on my animations as I continue to improve and refine my work for submission. If I had enough time I would attempt another animation using the constraints to see if I could improve upon the first attempt. In hindsight I should've asked for Johnys opinion on the showreel in terms of if it had to be a mixture of Maya and Stopmotion or all one media as I still have concerns.
In conclusion I will need to improve upon my constraints exercise and look into refining my short story. I shall also look into doing a stopmotion version of the heavy crate to see which would be the best for the showreel. In future I shall see if I can have more time to do more on the constraints element of lifting the box.
Comments
Post a Comment