Monday, April 16, 2007

I'm done!

Friday, April 06, 2007



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.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007



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.