I have lived an entire lifetime since my last post. Initially Blogger was to please "Big Z" and get my Masters but now it will chronicle my life and times with and without Nikky and Jenna. Lots to say and show but that's for another night.

I'm done!

Scenes 2 and 7 are put to bed!!! These are the first scenes rendered that have the characters in them. The cabbie moves nicely and so do the girls. Things are moving so swimmingly that I feel like the other shoe is going to drop anytime now. After the scenes are composited they go straight into Premier for editorial and now I have 4 scenes done with only eight to go. Truth be told there are two little things that I would like to fix: the cabbie's neck snaps too quickly at the end of his screeching halt. If it happened right at the stop it would look fine but it happens too far after the stop. I would also like to raise his hand at the end of his movement but I'll only tweak these things if time allows, right now it looks okay. Irony; you can't see him talk from the angle I had to do the shot but he does move his mouth. During shot two, Nikky and Jenna both move nicely and I scaled and positioned the background so that it looks like the car is moving. The lights are also animated to give the sense of movement through moving shadows. At this rate I will be done with everything by class Tuesday. I will do some color correction at the CADA labs but I will be focusing my energies on completing the package: paper, production journal, DVD and other incidentals. Last mistake that I forgot to mention is I have two blend shape nodes that work on the same eye, doing the same thing. There are also shirt deformations that I tweaked during the the animation phase, which means when I build my next rigs more extensive testing is going to have to go into them.

Scene 1 and Scene 12 are put to bed!! I was able to render using the .bat for the beauty and shadow / homemade ambient occlusion renders and I have to use the GUI for the vector renders. I composited them in After Effects and brought them into Premier for the final editorial. Scene 12 got the tagline and logo on it in AFX as well. I'm working on scene 7 which is the last scene where we see the outside of the cars. I have to change the angle from my storyboard but I think the new angle works better. It's interesting to note how much one can tweak a drawing to make it work ie; make hair longer, cars bigger, angles wrong but look right in service to the composition, mood or anything else. In Maya you can cheat a little but things work better when you get things right. What I'm trying to say is this angle and timing of scene 7 looks good because its right.

I'm also keying visibility in this shot because I shift between a geometry version of the cabbie and cab versus the rigged model and the cab. If I was more comfortable making a "God" control for set ups like the car and cabbie rig I wouldn't bother with the switch. as it is its working fine as is. Next up is getting the girls to talk and then animating their movements.

I was going to post an image that I submitted for the showcase bulletin but the limit for images is 8 megs and this bad boy is 28 megs! I'll size it down later or post another one but I'm back because its Friday, Norton full system scan day!!!
More victories. I tried to do the .bat executable and made some mistakes at first, not managing files right, using the wrong flags, forgetting to specify number of processors and maximum memory, finding out that Maya doesn't like to batch render Vector globals and makes unreadable .iff files in their stead. However after these early teething gaffs, I see that rendering is manageable. I finished scene 12 which is the car driving past the screen. I imported an image plane (fashioned in Photoshop using the cutout filter and a number of other tweaks) and constructed three different scenes: the first is a beauty pass, the second a shadow pass using a homemade ambient occlusion render using all geometry shaded in a white blinn, with the camera using a white background, the last being the vector render which I do with the using interface running. In my homemade ambient occlusion, I forgot to change the light and shadow colors to black and white, but I used the multiply blending mode in After effects and things looked great anyway. The car drives past the image plane (matching the perspective of the photo to the Maya grid) but what makes the scene come together is the shadows and the lighting. I could even do a vector render of all the geometry not using outlines to match the cutout quality of the Photshop background or even bring the animation into Photoshop and apply the filter to the animation and re-composite it in After Effects, but this is giving me the look I always envisioned.
In bringing files into After Effects I place the vector render on top and play with the opacity. This is also where I apply the dust and scratches and the motion blur. I will use motion blur in the beauty passes, but I think they will only be partially visible under the vector layers. After Effects doesn't seem to be able to read the first or last few frames of a Maya batch render without getting a parser error. I don't know what the deal with that is but since I'm leaving a little padding it I can work around it. I'm finding there are quite a few work arounds that I have to figure out in order to make everything work but I composited the last scene and added the logo (also made in Maya using beveled and extruded curves) made using a drawing as an image plane. The tag-line was also made (in Illustrator) and brought in and animated. I was really rewarding to see the final animated imagery reach fruition. I'm looking forward to seeing everything else move and exist in the reality I'm creating.

The final rigging has been done!!! The blend shapes are finished!!!

The whole week has been a blur since the last post and if I didn't have this time off this would never have gotten this far!! Thank the LORD that I also have ten days starting with Easter week! As things are right now I'm only one week behind schedule. Rigging problems included shoulder, crotch, buttocks, elbow and other deformations. Skin weighting was a challenge but after I figured how to configure the paint weights tool and tweak with the attribute editor things moved more quickly. Blend shapes took from Wednesday to Friday with Jenna and only Saturday with Nikky. Practice makes proficient. Blend shape difficulties included duplicating with a negative scale causing the blends to flip! Messing with the bind pose and causing the blends to shift. There was also fighting with the blend shape creation and adding option boxes. General stupidity can be added to the list of reasons for gaffs: deleting my head control because it wasn't properly labeled, not saving the right version of files and trying to undo skin weighting, knowing full well that the undo won't work on that stuff. If I now can get the dialogue matched to the characters I will feel confident of this projects completion.

Class yesterday was sobering and put a fire in my belly! Prof. Halbstein asked if I was going to have my thesis done; ouch! I'm still fixing the rigs with their deformations but elegance is creeping into their construction. The IK handles and their controls are working, the skinning is becoming easier, there is more facility with the painting weights and component editor work flow and setting the joints, smooth bind settings and deformations is now a process verses an experiment. At class we were able to fix an eyelash problem I was having and he gave us a useful tool for rendering without the Maya GUI. If you convert a text file in a properly set up project scene folder and rename it as a .bat file it becomes an executable render command that renders all your scenes according to the globals you set up within each of them. Hopefully this will cut the weeks worth of rendering time in half!
Enough blogging time to FINISH the rigs!