before the longwinded twisted tales of my conclusion...some :) the title dan has created in maya based on my own font i doodled in my sketchbook.
the carts wheel texture flickered on and off. The texture isnt keyed so theres no reason for this to be happening. This doesnt happen when its rendered locally ONLY when its done on the farm...but the time difference on both is a major difference.
john's shadows had some sort of Peter Pan effect going on (the shadow had a delay to the animation) Again theres no reason for this as the shadows arent rendered on a seperate layer.
the occlusion pass no longer lined up with the beauty pass so we had about double the scene
the occlusion on Benny didnt work even though he was part of the background occluison layer...there was an occlusion of him there BUT it didnt blacken out the inside of his mouth like it had done with the other renders
frames just not rendering on the farm so you have to delete and duplicate others to stand in there place...theres no reason for these frames failure and its at random which ones the farm decides to ignore.
when a bump was placed on the ice-cream cone texture, the scene file no longer rendered as maya mental ray encountered a fatal error....basically running out of memory, however when bump was removed it did render....pain!
Character Design/Concept
after i felt last terms designs had been somewhat flat...boring...totally without style, i can safely say this term, the design ROCKED. Im very happy i was able to come up with a frankly, disturbingly odd design for the likes of the depressive john, and a fairly odd look for the duo part of Benny...both i think compliment one another through their contrasting elements. The worry for me was...that you wouldn't believe they both existed in the same world, however the colour palette collated the two together within the world. The design....crazy, it pushed my modeling skills further and down a new route which im pleased with as it challenged me. The designs did come with some flaws when it came to animating, but i have no regrets from this experimentation as it just means i'll have to spend a little more time resolving any potential problems with my next project.
Modeling
My modeling skills have continued to improve over the course of this unit. Not only am I quicker (literally taking a quarter of the time it took last terms project AND i modeled near on 2 characters) but also I'm more confident at stepping out and creating something stylized. Im SO incredibly pleased that i was able to realize my designs from 2d into 3d without losing any of their unique qualities and was pleased with the feedback on the overall look of the piece with comments like "whatever that depressed cone thing is...i like it" or "whats with the suicidal clown" brilliant! i didn't have to say anything and yet the total premiss of the character was conveyed through the design....top bombing! Theres nothing more satisfying than that and knowing you pushed the boat out a bit.
Texturing
This has been my main achievement this term. Last term i did a wee amount of UV texturing...it wasn't very good but it did the job. This term, my goal was to understand more of the process, learn it and complete texturing for the project. Sultan's lecture was very very useful as it showed me where i had been going right with my methods, but also showed me key elements i needed to look out for/do during UV mapping that would make the job easier. I have to say a big thank you to everyone who helped me out, giving advise and their suggestions but Im also SO pleased that i was able to take away all this info and do it myself :) I've never textured anything properly before and now i can say i can texture a character, which means i'll be able to texture objects which frankly, are a lot simpler than characters. The amount of detail in these characters also made the texturing stage very intricate as the hand painted textures needed to be seamless so required a lot of editing in photoshop. Haha...lots of improvements there in terms of introductions to new tools. I'd say, UVing is a monotonous job...long and arduous process but hey I CAN DO IT, and its another skill I've got under my belt/i can tick off my list of goals.
Rigging/Blend Shapes/Painting Weights
my rigging has improved since the last unit. Although id had a few knocks from the last project, i was determined not to let them get the better of me and was thrilled that my research into why id exactly had those problems prevented mistakes this time round. Its strange animating with your own rigged character, and no matter how many tests you do for the geometry movement, you'll never really be sure just how successful it is until your into the actual animation stage. Its been great though, as its highlighted a couple of flaws which i need to address for future rigs, such as adding an extra palm joint for more control. The blend shapes were a great demonstration of experimentation and again, highlighted what would and wouldn't work with the characters. Although in my 2d designs, John's mouth was able to have extreme up and down movements, this was not possible with the 3d model as the textures became noticeably stretched. I also need to do thorough testing of multiple blends together as i did have to go back a couple of times and edit blends where a few vertices pinched together....again this was down to time. Painting weights I'm greatly improving on, and was able to complete this within a couple of days for both characters, again the more i practice this the better my skill will be. I spoke to both Dave and Alex Hulse about the problems concerning the rigs and think i know how to solve these over the summer so my characters will be easier to animate.
Animation
the biggest disappointment of the unit for me. I always wish to have more time on this area and although we scheduled between 1 and 2 weeks for this, it was down to a matter of a couple of days So why the error in timings? Well other units unfortunately took up a couple weeks of our time, although we knew of these deadlines, the contextual studies unit in particular hasn't been the best of deliveries so that took about a week out of the schedule. Rave on air - this was a fantastic opportunity for the animation course to show its talent and the day was very successful. However it has come with sacrifices as about another week of time was taken sorting out dvds, displays etc for the event. Dan was organizing this event from the start but he was let down by people who promised to share the responsibility. As such, he had to pick up the slack on the exhibition, and i in turn had to pick up the extra jobs for our project which set us back further. Neither of us had ever UV textured a character before so this job took longer than scheduled. This was also down to the intricacy of the textures that required editing for a professional standard, whereas it would have been done quicker had the textures been simple block colours. However i love the overall look of the characters so i wouldn't want to change that.
Frankly...as it stands...i have two completed characters that are ready to animate during my free time and whilst their rigs may require a little revising, their ready to go!
rendering
as far as rendering goes...it has been the biggest pain in the arse EVER! firstly down to our issues of timing...or lack of. Secondly there has been some big bad issues going on with the render farm. Dan and i sent off jobs to find they'd been repeatedly killed or that they took a minimum of 2 hours to actually start....then got killed. This was not due to a whole host of jobs on Vanguard either and it was only when we got the permissions changed from ICT we found out why. Currently Vanguard is set to kill any jobs where there are unassigned shaders...so any textures that are part of your files that arent assinged to objects will mean the job wont render. A frankly silly setup of the farm which Jared agreed and will hopefully be changed after the meeting coming up over it. The render farm was also shut down over the course of a day due to water leaking in the room and being deemed a health and safety issue. Our files were unnaccessable as they were on the Vanguard system so all we could do was try rendering the one file we had locally and leave it for the rest of the day....which frankly led a to a disappointing result as it was unfinished the next day. The renders that had got cancelled due to the shut down. Next morning we set off more renders which were repeatedly killed with no defined error message. After speaking to ICT it was identified that the maya command port was crashing and they had no idea why as much as us. We got Alex Hulse to check through our scene files and apart from splitting up the work a little more there was nothing else wrong with them so all we could do was wait.....and wait.....and wait. Finally the renders went through and it would have been a blessed joy if not for the following...
ANNOYED....DISAPPOINTED...PULLING MY HAIR OUT
In the end, we got there and im just pleased the projects fianlly finished. Its not what i expected it to be but it does demonstrate the idea and all the hard work we put into it. Over the summer i would like to return to this project and see it reach its full potential as i believe it will be a valuable contribution for my showreel.
scheduling
scheduling has been a process which i think is vital to person like myself. At the start of the term, i was determined i wanted go over the allocated times on tasks but in realituy its been a different matter. Its funny to see our initial scehdule predictions compared to the later versions with what really happened. The main changes in time happened with the UV texturing and the animation. As we hadnt done UV texturing before, it took longer than the predicted 3 days, and so the animation time suffered. As well as this, the schedule does NOT take into consideration ROA and contextual studies unit which took 2 weeks out of cva 205 time, a big hit to the work flow, especially since Dan was running the event. If we'd sorted out our resourse leveling earlier it might have helped, however i think we both knew that we were behind schedule and we worked as hard as we could to get back up to speed. A lot of things were sacrificed, the rigs were kept simple (possibly a blessing) and there were no facial controls, the animation was stripped and we had to change the story to compensate for the time we had left for animating. The schedule does not indicate the amount of test work myself and dan ran before we began certain tasks including the lighting and the rigs so we werent caught short later on, and any potential problems could eb easily rectified. I dont think our scheduling was the best by any means, but now im more confident with mms project, i intend to rigiourously schedule myself next term to limit these mistakes happening again.
summer aims?
concept - keep experimenting and designing those wacky characters
modeling - work out how the heck to do proper eyelids without the painful struggle
rigging - improving...general learning
animation - the graph editor...stop relying on sooooo many dam keys and learn how to USE this helpful tool go back and re-animate john and benny and do this duo some dam justice!!!!
texturing - keep going with it, experiment
lighting - the whole shabang...well learning to light a simple set
PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!!
