So another project comes to an end...

This has been a good project. I'm pretty happy with the final project, and I'm getting to grips with different styles. I'm way happy with my rig, loads of control, pretty robust (although the IK and FK handle has a few problems). I painted dem weights, it went ok, but I really needed more time to iron out all the problems.  The addition of a twist control in the wrist solved a lot of the problems with it twisting into itself. The actual geometry of the model has a nice feel to it, and although I can see a few areas where it could be tightened up and improved it certainly does the job. Using mudbox to draw on expressions allowed for a diverse amount of expressions without actually having to implement blend shapes etc. The main issue with the piece is that due to time constraints two shots had to be cut. One more expression shot and a shot of the bad guitar playing a chord, which would establish the poor tone just before he presses the switch, and make more contrast when he makes it sound good all of a sudden. Hard to explain in words, but it would have made the film better. I feel like that cut expression shot would have really finished off the film, and I may well add it after hand in to give to the client.

The curse of the broadcast guidelines

This is how I'm told to do it:
ten seconds of black,
ten seconds of coloured bars with tone
twenty seconds of clock
film
ten seconds of black
and the film should start at the timecode 10:00:00, with the bars, clock and black before then (so like 09:59:20 to start).
What the hell does any of this mean? I don't really know. I get some bars and tone and a clock from moodle. This is good. Ten seconds can be put in easily. Fine. Now to change the timecode... OH WAIT YOU CAN'T DO THAT. NO YOU CAN'T. Premiere wouldn't let me change the time to any more than 00:10:00. I don't understand. I try googling it. I try experimenting. Nothing seems to work. Bad times! BAD TIMES!
"WHAT AM I GOING TO DO?"I say "DEADLINE IS TOMORROW" I add. "OH NO"! Oh no indeed, me. Oh no.

Luckily, I've recently been involved in an alternate reality project, acting for some broadcast students. They're lovely people. I mention my problem to one of them. He offers to help me out. He has final cut. He puts it into final cut, changes the timecode, and we're exporting within about two minutes. I should get a broadcast student on staff. They're useful.

So at about this time I've also got to sort out my showreel. I took a look through all my work, and made some decisions. I've not got all that much work, especially not when it comes to my character modelling specialism. I've got pretty much one failed character and one successful. Better not to put in the failed one eh? So what we end up with is a much more general showreel than I'd normally do. I put the focus on few pieces, including some 2D work, and it ended up being about 37 seconds long. The first piece is a short animation I made during a lecture in the first year while the teacher was talking. It's a man whose head turns into an owl. That is in there to establish a playful tone to my work as opposed to showcasing any particular skills. The second piece is my first ball with tail. Although I ended up re doing it because it didn't fit the brief (as it was too animal like, as opposed to ball like) I much prefer the first version, as it has much more character. Thirdly is my two dimensional walk, which is a hulking guy smashing his way towards the camera and off. It's a bit sketchy but it shows my understanding of weight rather well I feel. Next is my chop shop project. I show the final concept art followed by the turntable of the high poly model. I picked this because the final project has a pretty good quality to it, it's not perfect but it is clear and a pretty good example of modelling for me. Next is the guitarist from the Crunch Time project. The first image is one of the final pieces of concept art, then a turntable with the model, and then a posed version of the model. This shows both modelling and rigging, which is nice. Then I show an extract of the animation from the Crunch Time promo, which has a nice example of lighting and animation as well as reinforcing the modelling and rigging. Finally there are a couple of shots from the compositing project, which I thought worked particularly well. This is to show of my lighting ability primarily.
So the actual reel demonstrates animation, modelling, rigging and lighting. So despite the fact that I want to be a specialist modeller I have made quite a nice generalist reel. That's fine for now anyway, I need to do more work to put more in.
For the interactive DVD I also included a couple of my shorter pieces of work, so that's the very short compositing tutorial result and the Crunch Time promo. I also included a slide show with some examples of my drawings.
For the music I picked from a Taylor Eigsti record. He's a rad Jazz pianist and I feel like his music is really easy on the ears for anyone. There are three pieces in total, one for the reel, one for the main menu and film selection menu, and the third for the slideshow.

I also forgot to put my name anywhere in the reel.
Whups!

Render Render Render Render Render Render

It is render time. My problem here is that I have tried rendering all our shots out in AfterEffects and then putting them into Premiere for editing and sound, but they do not fit. The first reason for this is the aspect ratio we rendered in. I picked a non standard aspect ratio because it worked better for the client, but that was dumb, because it didn't work in Premiere then. Dumb.

The second reason for this is the codec I kept using. I kept using apple intermediate codec, which worked fine and looked great until you put it into something else, like Premiere and AfterEffects, where it basically squishes the video. Again, my fault. Dumb.

So I tried a couple of other codecs, because I still couldn't remember the right one, and kept having the same problem. In the end I asked someone and they told me straight away. I should have just done that in the first place. So while this was going on I'd been doing all the editing in AfterEffects anyway, which is a long and laborious process when you have many audio tracks and shots to deal with at once. When adding in extra tracks things often go slightly out of sync, which is way frustrating. There was also a problem with the frame rate of the piece as I animated it. I did it in 24 frames per second like an idiot. This meant that when I put it into AfterEffects things were at slightly different speeds to how they were animated, meaning I had to stretch out some of the audio. It fits pretty well in the end but it's not perfect.

OK, so now the actual film is finished. It is finished. Properly. Well, not properly, now there's the broadcast criteria to fulfill. And they're dumb. More on that next time...

Animating Time

OK, so the next step is animating. The shots I'm responsible for are the reaction face shots and the radical guitar playing. I re did the textures very quickly and it looks a lot nicer. Basically what I did was take photographic textures, put some opacity on the block colour textures I'd done already and place the photographic textures underneath. This means it retains the simple cartoony style but gets a slightly charming feel. He looks like a doll a bit. I did put a skin texture underneath the skin, but he looked terrifyingly creepy. I took that off.

So this is the animation I came up with. I animated to sound in the document and this is what I managed. It's not perfect but I'm pretty happy with it. Also I lit the scene. I basically used a two or three point lights in each scene, and an ambient in a couple of shots. I also used spot lighting in one shot.

For animating I recorded the guitarist while he played (me for the bad guitar parts, I'm the best at playing guitar badly). That way I knew pretty much where his fingers should be going. Of course it's not exact, because he's only only got three fingers. He wouldn't be able to play this part if he was real. You would be silly for thinking that. Although there was that one guitarist who played with three fingers... 

Oh yeah. Not sure that's relevant, but Django is da bomb.

Rad Guitar Pose

Getting there, rig's working fine, guitars look rad, although it makes my rough textures on the character look even worse. Get the animating done, then better textures, then render, then done! Easy! A few geometry problems were highlighted by the rigging process, mainly around the neck area. I shall be more careful next time, but none of it should show up in our animation.

Geezus Kriest!

So basically, problems. Problems. Millions of problems. Well, two.

• So I bind the skin to the geometry, it's all mental. Basically I figure out that the tutorial I'm using hasn't told me only to bind the IK spine and the main arm parts, because now the skin doesn't know what to do, as it's following two or three different sets of joints.
• Now all the joints are working pretty much as they should, I've been manually and automatically smoothing sections and parts of the body that I don't like the deformation on. However, I haven't figured out how to make it able to deal with major poses. For example, for the animation he's going to have to have quite a few twists in his arm to hold the guitar. This results in this kind of shenanigans

SHENANIGANS!
So my tutorial book about rigging, which is really good for skeletons and controls systems has pretty much abandoned me at this point, with about a paragraph on manually painting weights and the rest about the various automatic tools which all seem to end up with results like this

So here's where I have to use my initiative and all that crap.
Pfft.

Finishing touches to the model

So I finished up the controls system, and I'm pretty damn happy with them. I cleaned up the file and locked out all the stuff the animator shouldn't use to make it more happy. The next thing I did was pop over to mudbox and get some quick textures together. I wanted a kind of sketchy look, which I managed quite easily. I also increased the detail and sharpened up the model a little here and there while I was at it. This is pretty much the last chance I'll have to mess with the geometry after all.

So here he is. I'll definitely texture him a little better when I have time. Now I've got to get down to skinning etc. Which I'm sure will be a super quick and easy process. That last sentence was sarcasm.