No homework to show for Kinematics this week. We actually did the assignment in class together so that the instructor was sure we could do it. It was all about setting up arm/hand controls with IK handles, groups and the add attribute to create World Space vs. Chest Space and allow you to have the arm/hand move with the body as it moves but detach the arm from that constraint when the animator needs to control the arm/hand to pick something up or just move independently. I wish I had learned this trick before I set up the model of the Dandelion, it would have been exactly what I would have used to detach the spoor pods and have them float in space. My workaround worked just fine, but this would have been much better, more accurate and saved me probably a days worth of animating. Good tool to know!
Whew. Okay, I did manage to reanimate the entire Dandelion sequence this week and got most of the Dynamics put in. I’m not going to bother showing you the latest because you’re only seeing what I’ve already posted. I reiterate, Referencing = Evil. I need to learn a lot more about it before ever trying to use that again. But it’s powerful so I will take the time to figure it out. Just not on deadline! Once all the Particles are built I’ll start to light the scene and get it rendering next week. I only have two weeks left to finish this and I’m not confident I’ll pull it off with all the other homework and personal projects but we’ll see. . . we’ll see.
‘The Little Mini That Could’ continues to grow and shape itself. Still working on all the little body details. Got the front done, cleaned up most of the lines and I’m starting on the tailgate next. Just threw a mirrored side on real quick to see how she’s looking and obviously have some seam issues, but overall, she’s starting to look very, very familiar. Whew. And yes, for those that will point out my syntax, she is a girl. I can’t help it, inanimate objects are always male or female to me. What can I say, I have an imagination. =)
So we delved deeper into sprites and expressions this week for Dynamics. My poor instructor, I think I must have sent him at least 10 emails trying to understand the extent of cycling sprites with one particle and multiple emitters and one texturing sequence. It didn’t help that he’s slammed on a project while I’m pestering him for answers. Fortunately he was kind enough to listen and answer everything calmly and with great patience. Here’s just a partial example of what I had to grasp and make work:
I was feeling pretty proud of the fact that the fire textures I used for the sprites I created with Fluids. My first exposure to that world. Thank goodness it’s laid out exactly like Dynamics so I was able to muttle my way through. Here’s the low rez fire composited onto a low rez still for reference.
Today I learned why referencing = evil. I chose to try it for the first time on the Dandelion project because I wasn’t finished texturing my model and wanted to incorporate it into 7 different shots and thought it would be so convenient to make a change and have it ripple through all the scenes. Well, after spending two weeks on the animation and beginning to work on all the particles I realized I needed to adjust a small detail on the geometry of the model. No big deal, just duplicating a piece that was already there and then tweaking and adding it to the hierachy. And, of course, I saved the original version, juuuussstt in case. I’m just shaking my head in shock now. It did indeed upload the file and ripple through all the scenes. It also deleted all of my animation keyframes for all 7 shots. I lost everything and get to start all over again. And no, putting the original file back does not bring back your keyframes. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Here’s the last version I had before losing the animation.
So we focused on building a more advanced rigging for the foot yesterday in Kinematics. This reverse foot allows you to use a heel, ball and tip of the toe to control better contact with the ground. I was able to get the rig up with no problem but still working on the attribute to add in a roll and do a set driven key so that as you move the leg forward or backward, in a walk cycle, the foot is already rotating properly. Unfortunately, I’m stuck on setting the key. It won’t let me set two joint rotations, only 1, yet in the script editor it shows it taking the command. Arrggghhh. I need to keep playing and figure out what I’m doing wrong, but for now, like modeling, I’ve got to move on to other homework.
Continuing work on the Mini Cooper. This week we discussed making tires and with that lesson, as well as a great tutorial I found on-line I was finally able to get a handle on creating an object that repeats itself in a circle (the best trick was using instances when designing the single division so you can see how things are laying out), but I’m not happy with where I’m leaving the body layout today. I have too many vertex’s that are really sloppy. It looks more like it was carved from clay rather than a perfectly symetrical piece of steel. I think I started in on the details a little too soon without really locking my lines well. I need to go in and delete some extruded faces and take about 4 steps back and redo, but for now I’m putting it away and moving on to other homework.
For Dynamics this week we’ve begun tackling the world of sprites and going deeper and deeper into expressions. The examples don’t look like much but they still took me a day and a half to create. The more complicated one was the snow because you have to build the geometry of the buildings so that the particles have something to collide with. As you can tell by the black and white snow pass, my snow balls are a bit too large and out of control but I wanted to exaggerate my example to my instructor because when I attempt to use the Hardware Renderer and geometry mask it does work, by not allowing any of the particles to break through the geometry, but it doesn’t mask the background so there’s no way to composite properly unless you do it in layer passes which I don’t believe is how your suppose to do it. Hhhhmmmm. . .
Anyways, I had to crank and not spend too much time stroking these animations because I need to get my other homework done and then get back to the personal project. Busy, busy, busy!
Hoorah for Daylight Savings Time! It bought me an extra hour to sleep so I was better able to tackle the blocking for this animation today. I was indeed able to use reference to bring in the Dandelion, allowing me to work on the model and texture later without having to reconnect it within all the scenes. I did run into a few snags with it though, discovering how to create separate groups to animate and control the joints, but fortunately I was able to figure it out quick enough and make it work for my project. So next up will be more tweaks to the animation and start adding in the Dynamics, which of course, is the whole point of this personal project for that class.
After that I’ll create a lighting rig for each shot and then <fingers crossed> if there is time, create the textures with UV Mapping and set this baby to render in time for compositing in After Effects. Need to drop in that extreme depth of field to bring it all to life. But for right now I’m just glad I finally made some progress on this. I’m WAY, WAY behind!
If you actually pay attention you’ll notice that I didn’t post anything of the Dandelion Animation last week. That’s because I spent two solid days on the texturing and got absolutely nowhere. Well that’s not true, I actually made great leaps and bounds in learning but I just don’t have anything tangible to show yet. My goal was to learn UV mapping on my own and hand paint the texture and wrap onto the model. I spent the first day cleaning up the model and preparing it for the UV Mapping. I also built out extraneous grass pieces for the foreground and began building the HDR map for the background.
Now I’ve had two texture classes and I LOVED them, but they were all procedural, no UV mapping whatsoever. In fact, outside of 1 class at the end of my first attempt at Polygon Modeling it has never been brought up. My understanding is it’s taught in Poly 2. So I began my day trying to figure it out all on my own. This gradually led me to nowhere and I went online and downloaded tutorials which were all missing steps and left you hanging. I finally bought a DVD and ran through the basic tutorial and got the gest of how to do it. And I believe I can. Unfortunately I also learned that to make it work I needed to rework my model even further. Yes, everything is all tied together. So when all was said and done I had reached the end of my internal deadline for texturing and had squat.
In order to make progress I’ve decided to attempt something else new. I have to animate this weekend which is where I’m at now and will be posting my progress tomorrow. I’m attempting to build the animation using the reference file so that I can continue to work on the texture of the original file and have it update in all the scenes. Since this is a 6 camera shot this is critical. More exciting is this is how they do it in a pipeline with different departments. This one little bit of information is helping me learn how to restructure my future projects to be more time-effective and more flexible creatively.
Isn’t it funny how much you can learn and grow and yet having nothing to show for it.
