Something else...

Something else, I worked on a little while back was the first test shot once again. But this time with the carriages added and a higher quality on rendering and lighting so its looking fairly nice. Unfortunatly I only have the image files and have nothing to composite them together with but shall do this tomorrow and upload.

However, despite this not being uploaded as of yet, the team really seemed to be impressed with the effect and the shadows work well how the light disappears and reappears between each carriage. Its really nice and I was certainly impressed.

Untitled from Liam Kirkman on Vimeo.

Experimenting with Rain for final composition

Today, I was having a little fiddle about in After effects trying to get a good rain effect. It involved a few effects added into the composition; a basic rain effect, plus particle effects added to make the splashes and to add to that I masked out some of the foreground under the umbrellas. More time is being spent on trying to get the splashes and splatters the right speed and not too floaty or fast.

Due to the upload system of this. The video is low res and quite hard to see the rain. Best viewed in full screen. For now test shots are okay (but not great) with this system but I am contemplating a Vimeo account.

The controls so far


The result of all controls on 1

Mouth Closed blendshape

Some Simple blendshapes..

Made some eyelids yesterday or day before i think



Suprised look, Eyebrows up and eyes fully open


Quick test of eyes blinking

More to follow, working on more blendshapes today and also attending the after effects help session this afternoon with matt, hopefully he can help me with compositing my test shot of the train. Its a simple enough job but I'm not very familiar with after effects software so a a refresher session is what I need.

Thought I would post an update. I'm currently trying to work on the blendshapes for the face. Luckily I don't think I will need to make many.

However, there are no eye lids for the imp model, So i have to try and create some and on top of that the eyes arent perfectly round, there kind of oval shaped so its difficult to animate the eye lids properly.

I have also researched a bit into how we blink, such as how often and how fast, Using reference material (video of me blinking) and also some articles found on the net explaining what happens when we blink and why.

Hey you guys!

Baby Imp would like to say hello!

Today I managed to get nearly all of the weighting issues sorted and Paul gave me some good advice for weighting and rigging in general which I am grateful for. He also advised me certain parts don't need to be perfect because we will never see the Imp stand up or walk for example, however should we need to make him stand up it will be fine.

Just a quick update, I'm reworking the rig from scratch, Loading from when i had just worked out where the widgets should go on the body for the imp and then rigged it.

No pictures neccesary, but, I thought I would just say I'm currently working on the exclusion points again (nothing more tedious then this job). After that painting weights again.
Moving onto blend shapes sometime maybe starting tomorrow and working on it at the weekend.

...Continued

I can't find out anywhere how to change the elbow joint so it is working properly. I did find out, that because it is yellow it means it is a linked control, which makes sense but still can't figure out how to 'unlock it' so to speak to change the value.

Unless I find out how to do this soon, What I'm going to have to do is to re rig it from an earlier save (thank god for paul and simon teaching us to save incrementally) and then to go ahead and exclude the points Again! Then paint the weights Again! and maybe just maybe I can finally get on with some blend shapes.

The only silver lining is that, I now know all the problems that exist with this method so I can avoid/fix these as I go through the process of the set up machine rigging.

Solve one problem and another one is created -__-

After a short while and some assistance from Simon, I finally managed to sort out the weighting issue. I managed to get it so moving the elbow and shoulder joint didn't affect anything like the waist or head. However in an unusual turn, quite literally the elbow joint decided to flip itself on the rig for which I cannot actually change back. I worked out the problem and how it needs to be solved, all that needed to be done was entering value 1 into a settings box instead of the negative 1 that was there and it would be fine. Although I cannot physically change this which is an annoyance.
Its extremely unusual as a keyed value would be orange, a locked value would be grey, but this one is yellow and I don't know what that means.

TO GOOGLE

Arghhh Rage!!!

Seriously annoyed with this now. Having major issues trying to paint the weights for the character. Everytime I take the influence off 1 part of the arm it moves to another part of the arm and its a vicious circle I dont know how to get out of.

The orange circles show the points I'm trying to remove from being influenced by the left arm, But I can't for the life of me get it to work. Going to ask Paul tomorrow if he's around to see if he can help me out because this work needs doing asap and I'm worried how much longer its going to take :/

Just been working on the Imp today using the set up machines built in tools for exclusions to help with realistic deformation. Managed to get the imp sitting down looking quite sweet.

Next stage is to get it so I can move the arms without the head deforming extremely badly, so i think that will require weight painting to be done during this week ready for tuesday. Once weight painting is done and everything moves okay, i will create some blend shapes of the imps head for opening and closing mouth, eyes blinking etc (however more in depth then just the few i just said)

Update

Today Neil and Paul seemed to like my progress with the train completed and the preliminary test shot put together. However I am still a bit behind with the rig being completed so that is number 1 priority for this week. If I get nothing else done but the rig is ready to go then I will be happy its finally out the way and Aaron can animate it and Erica can UV map and texture it.

So going on what I've said I'm no just editing the joints so that it doesn't deform in an usual way

Current state: Bad Deformation

Getting Better: Not as bad a deformation on the top of the legs joining the nappy, Still needs work though

Thats me for today.

Test Shot

This is a preliminary test shot for our animation sequence. Somethings need to be refinend like timing and the camera movement. There is some flickering of the tracks which may not be shown in this low res video, however it is an issue. To resolve this it may be necessary to remove some of the sleepers towards the far end of the track.

Train more or less finished.

Here it is. The more or less finished train. I posted a few stage by stage shots on facebook for the rest of the group to see and they approved which I'm happy about. This may still need a few small changes, for example the underside may need a tiny bit of detail but that depends if were still using the original shot.


I believe Erica had not alot to do so as far as I'm aware she is modelling the carriages so she can use this for reference for the size.