Well i just thought I'd post my last DDP post to say how much I've enjoyed working with you guys. Right from the beginning we all had the same vision for the type of style we wanted to achieve from our environment, and we often referred to "squint" as our aim to quality. Well I can safely say I think we bettered squint, I love our film and I think we've set new boundaries for other 1st years to look up to as we did.
I didn't know either of you 2 well at the start of this term, I don't even think I'd said more than 2 words to you in the whole of the 1st year, and yet went on to not only become friends good friends at the end of this, but produce a film that was better than any of the high hopes I had! It has honestly been a pleasure working with you 2, theres been lows - stairs, water, importing character, painting weights, image planes, rendering!! to name but a few, but nothing beats the high of seeing this thing done now. I think I must have watched it like 50 times now!
Phil was the rationalist within the group, making us set realistic targets and scrap ambitious ideas, not to mention his great animation and modelling talents (shame he couldn't use his talents to bargin down the price of cheese in the canteen this term!) He was always in early (well except for the final week, huh~?! lol) and stayed late with me in college the whole way through, so no need to question his dedication to the project.
Dave has been so enjoyable to work with simply because of his continous upbeat mood, and making me laugh just by describing the maya problems at times, or even looking at me lol. There were times when I had to push him to put that extra bit of effort in to make the mansion scene just that bit better, and I think he'll agree it was constructive and worth it. I am blown away by how good the exterior of our mansion looks, its so simple yet vibrant and proffesional, love it. His rigging skills were vital to Lil G even existing, without them we would of had no animation what so ever, so thanks mate.
And I hope I have been ok to work with, I have found out alot more about myself over the 9 weeks, including that I am a serious perfectionist, I am not as laid back with ideas as I thought, I can be stubborn at times which I'm not sure is good or bad. I also somehow take on a directorial role without meaning to, I just love to be organised and know who's doing what and set targets.
I also believe my strengths lie in animating and character design and modeling. I did not enjoy texturing and lighting at all. I also found modeling an environment alot different to that of a character, I was constantly modeling with neat edge flow and thinking about keeping everything uniformed and one object. I've come to realise it can all be done alot easier with overlapping objects, boolean tools, bump maps etc etc.
I hope we have the chance to work again, re unite DDP's winning formula, and keep knocking them show reel pieces out there! The final film can be seen on the DDP main blog. Thanks again boys.
Friday 12 December 2008
Tuesday 9 December 2008
Render Week - A Progress Update
I saw the light
Ok Monday began and I fell into the usual trap of tweaking for hours. I made extra statues for the foyer, changed textures, tweaked lights, changed bump depths until it reached about 2.00pm and I decided I preferred it how it was at the start of the day. I then came to the conclusion that there comes a point in a scene where less is better.
The simplistic style we have our hearts set on can so easily get overpowered by cluttered ornaments and realsitic textures, and I am trying too hard to improve what I now realise is already the finished article. I could spend probably another month tweaking the textures, models and lighting in my foyer to get it exactly how I want it, but at the end of the day there simply isn't time. It's wierd because I am totally happy with animation, which is what leads me to believe I am better at that, plus the fact I enjoy it way more! Anyway I have been told by Dave many times that I am a serious perfectionist, and so I decided to listen to him and "just leave it!"
Render Farm
So after realising it was just a case of rendering this week and not devoting more time on the to touching up I just cracked on with the render farm. I was a bit confused on how to use it at first and where my project should go, how to re assign textures, what settings to put in the submit box etc. However I seeked the help of others who had already experieced these problems with the farm and everything started to become clear. Team authentic had already battled it out with the farm a few days earlier and so Dan and Simon had alot of advice to give. I had to copy the project to vanguard, and set my batch rander settings up within the maya file. Textures did not have to be reassigned just simply placed in the texture folder of the project. Then all that was needed in the submit options is a name, frame number bracket, a scene and project directory, as well as a complete folder to send it to. Check which renderer your using, and the frame padding and submit!
The first test render I sent started to take a ridiculous amount of time to render - longer than if I had used my desktop and so I knew there was a problem. I went into the maya file and realised I had left all of my render layers on R - therefore it was basically rendering 5 times my 600 frames, all of which contained the character, dome etc. !!! I switched everything but master off the render and all was well.
My last problem was when I matched all the individual sequence layers up in after effects, they were not compositing properly, and overlapping etc. Plus I noticed missing objects and tiles etc. This was nothing to do with the render farm just me being dumb - I had not added all the objects in my scene to the layers, and had not divided the scene in 2 properly for the DOF. I quickly altered my mistakes in the maya file and rendered only what needed to be composited the rest I decided to just use master layer - why layer at times when its not needed? I dont know why I didn't in the 1st place.
Progress
So its now Tuesday night and I have successfully rendered out at least half of my foyer scene and imported the footage into premiere. I had a few problems today in which the render farm was spitting back batches with random frames missing i.e failing. This meant I had like 40 random frames missing in the middle of my animation and was causing a nasty flicker. I decided to redo the whole render rather than type in each individual frame number that was missing into the farm and then have to place them in the right order in the folder - LONG. It worked fine the 2nd time, and all i did different was just render one layer at a time rather than setting all layers to R. I am still slightly unhappy with the brightness of the foyer looking at the final renders now, and the lack of depth on the walls is a bit of an eye sore, as well as this the domes texture is hard to see with the ..... wait no I have to stop this - its fine, its just the perfectionist coming out again. I will leave it!
Tommorow I hope to finish all rendering and begin editing, importing sound, playing with DOF, and titles. Only 3 more days to go, the earlier rendering is out the way the better, everyones going to be using it now.
Dave's Issues
Sat with Dave today for a long time and helped him with a few problems with his mansion exterior scene. 1st we matched Mr Solly's music with his camera movements, so it moved in beat. Easily solved. 2nd problem was a long morning-lunch session. The front door in daves scene was not rendering with mental ray to look like the front door I rendered in maya software. They needed to be indentical to make the transition from one shot to the next smooth. For some reason even with the same gold texture on mental ray was spitting it out like a crusty poo bagel colour lol. Anyway we spent ages trying to change it to match my render and gave up as it just wasn't working. Then Dave had the ingenious idea of rendering just the door with maya software on a seperate layer, and therefore it should work!? We changed to software and it still looked poo, so we had to play with the blinn texture more, until I cracked it by typing in a specular roll off colour high than the maximum 1 the slider was allowing. 2 did the trick and we had a matching gold texture. Then it was a case of changing lights and adding the mansion to a seperate layer to the door etc. Altering shadows etc. etc. the list goes on. See his blog for more detail!
Anyway the last job was to sort out a background image which has been on our minds from day 1. I helped him import phils cloud designs onto 2D polygon planes which Nathan showed us how to create using the create path tool in photoshop. We then animated them to move slowly, and encased the whole scene in a sky blue dome rather than a flat 2D image which wasn't working. Then we added some simple overlapping green spheres to achieve distant hills, and whola! It looked simple yet effective. We stayed to like half 7 rendering his scene and attempting to composite the door and mansion but it failed miserably with the door gliding over the top of the mansion layer. However.... we know how to solve this.... and we will tommorow!
Ok Monday began and I fell into the usual trap of tweaking for hours. I made extra statues for the foyer, changed textures, tweaked lights, changed bump depths until it reached about 2.00pm and I decided I preferred it how it was at the start of the day. I then came to the conclusion that there comes a point in a scene where less is better.
The simplistic style we have our hearts set on can so easily get overpowered by cluttered ornaments and realsitic textures, and I am trying too hard to improve what I now realise is already the finished article. I could spend probably another month tweaking the textures, models and lighting in my foyer to get it exactly how I want it, but at the end of the day there simply isn't time. It's wierd because I am totally happy with animation, which is what leads me to believe I am better at that, plus the fact I enjoy it way more! Anyway I have been told by Dave many times that I am a serious perfectionist, and so I decided to listen to him and "just leave it!"
Render Farm
So after realising it was just a case of rendering this week and not devoting more time on the to touching up I just cracked on with the render farm. I was a bit confused on how to use it at first and where my project should go, how to re assign textures, what settings to put in the submit box etc. However I seeked the help of others who had already experieced these problems with the farm and everything started to become clear. Team authentic had already battled it out with the farm a few days earlier and so Dan and Simon had alot of advice to give. I had to copy the project to vanguard, and set my batch rander settings up within the maya file. Textures did not have to be reassigned just simply placed in the texture folder of the project. Then all that was needed in the submit options is a name, frame number bracket, a scene and project directory, as well as a complete folder to send it to. Check which renderer your using, and the frame padding and submit!
The first test render I sent started to take a ridiculous amount of time to render - longer than if I had used my desktop and so I knew there was a problem. I went into the maya file and realised I had left all of my render layers on R - therefore it was basically rendering 5 times my 600 frames, all of which contained the character, dome etc. !!! I switched everything but master off the render and all was well.
My last problem was when I matched all the individual sequence layers up in after effects, they were not compositing properly, and overlapping etc. Plus I noticed missing objects and tiles etc. This was nothing to do with the render farm just me being dumb - I had not added all the objects in my scene to the layers, and had not divided the scene in 2 properly for the DOF. I quickly altered my mistakes in the maya file and rendered only what needed to be composited the rest I decided to just use master layer - why layer at times when its not needed? I dont know why I didn't in the 1st place.
Progress
So its now Tuesday night and I have successfully rendered out at least half of my foyer scene and imported the footage into premiere. I had a few problems today in which the render farm was spitting back batches with random frames missing i.e failing. This meant I had like 40 random frames missing in the middle of my animation and was causing a nasty flicker. I decided to redo the whole render rather than type in each individual frame number that was missing into the farm and then have to place them in the right order in the folder - LONG. It worked fine the 2nd time, and all i did different was just render one layer at a time rather than setting all layers to R. I am still slightly unhappy with the brightness of the foyer looking at the final renders now, and the lack of depth on the walls is a bit of an eye sore, as well as this the domes texture is hard to see with the ..... wait no I have to stop this - its fine, its just the perfectionist coming out again. I will leave it!
Tommorow I hope to finish all rendering and begin editing, importing sound, playing with DOF, and titles. Only 3 more days to go, the earlier rendering is out the way the better, everyones going to be using it now.
Dave's Issues
Sat with Dave today for a long time and helped him with a few problems with his mansion exterior scene. 1st we matched Mr Solly's music with his camera movements, so it moved in beat. Easily solved. 2nd problem was a long morning-lunch session. The front door in daves scene was not rendering with mental ray to look like the front door I rendered in maya software. They needed to be indentical to make the transition from one shot to the next smooth. For some reason even with the same gold texture on mental ray was spitting it out like a crusty poo bagel colour lol. Anyway we spent ages trying to change it to match my render and gave up as it just wasn't working. Then Dave had the ingenious idea of rendering just the door with maya software on a seperate layer, and therefore it should work!? We changed to software and it still looked poo, so we had to play with the blinn texture more, until I cracked it by typing in a specular roll off colour high than the maximum 1 the slider was allowing. 2 did the trick and we had a matching gold texture. Then it was a case of changing lights and adding the mansion to a seperate layer to the door etc. Altering shadows etc. etc. the list goes on. See his blog for more detail!
Anyway the last job was to sort out a background image which has been on our minds from day 1. I helped him import phils cloud designs onto 2D polygon planes which Nathan showed us how to create using the create path tool in photoshop. We then animated them to move slowly, and encased the whole scene in a sky blue dome rather than a flat 2D image which wasn't working. Then we added some simple overlapping green spheres to achieve distant hills, and whola! It looked simple yet effective. We stayed to like half 7 rendering his scene and attempting to composite the door and mansion but it failed miserably with the door gliding over the top of the mansion layer. However.... we know how to solve this.... and we will tommorow!
Musical weekend
Over the weekend I provided my good friend John with the latest playblast of our film so he could get started on producing some cribs music to accompany it. I had total faith in him, as he is a well respected music producer, and has produced beats for some big names in his time. I spent the best part of Saturday with him in his studio giving my thoughts and opinions for song choice, as well as explaining to him how I invisinged the music working. I managed to give him a rough brief however I wanted him to have a creative input into the track and let him do his thING. We then watched a few cribs episodes for inspiration. We agreed it had to have the following qualities:
- Upbeat and fast paced
- recognized R n B / Hip hop tunes
- Maintain the MTV cribs style
- Contain no swearing
- Have a big build up upon entering the front door
- Have record scratches and jolts to match the camera
- Include sound fx
- Fun
- Each track had to mix flowingly into the next on beat
- "Benny benessi - satisfaction" had to be included for the thong scene!
I think those were the main issues we addressed. Anyway he was amazing, he did everything I asked and more. We agreed on every song choice and everything seemed to fit into place. We even managed to get lyrics to match things that were happening on screen e.g lethal bizzle pow's on every picture frame, and house of pains jump when pony jumps, as well as the word down for when he falls haha. He managed to custom mix the songs to match our cuts, and have the tracks land on beat and in time. It was difficult at first because john quickly pointed out that MTV cheat their track mixes by using the time when the celebrity talks (the dialogue) to drown out the mix. As our character has no dialogue his mixes had to be spot on. The music really really brings the film to life, I can't stress how much it's improved it visually in a wierd way. I'm so chuffed with the sound I can't wait to hear it with the final rendered film instead of a shitty playblast.
Anyway theres not much more to be said other than I owe him a big thankyou and everyone better watch out coz our films gnna blow u away - aswell as your ear drums!
- Upbeat and fast paced
- recognized R n B / Hip hop tunes
- Maintain the MTV cribs style
- Contain no swearing
- Have a big build up upon entering the front door
- Have record scratches and jolts to match the camera
- Include sound fx
- Fun
- Each track had to mix flowingly into the next on beat
- "Benny benessi - satisfaction" had to be included for the thong scene!
I think those were the main issues we addressed. Anyway he was amazing, he did everything I asked and more. We agreed on every song choice and everything seemed to fit into place. We even managed to get lyrics to match things that were happening on screen e.g lethal bizzle pow's on every picture frame, and house of pains jump when pony jumps, as well as the word down for when he falls haha. He managed to custom mix the songs to match our cuts, and have the tracks land on beat and in time. It was difficult at first because john quickly pointed out that MTV cheat their track mixes by using the time when the celebrity talks (the dialogue) to drown out the mix. As our character has no dialogue his mixes had to be spot on. The music really really brings the film to life, I can't stress how much it's improved it visually in a wierd way. I'm so chuffed with the sound I can't wait to hear it with the final rendered film instead of a shitty playblast.
Anyway theres not much more to be said other than I owe him a big thankyou and everyone better watch out coz our films gnna blow u away - aswell as your ear drums!
Thursday 4 December 2008
All Problems Sorted Thanks to Rob
Rob helped me solve:
My Render Layers, Dust Particles, Depth of Field, Rendering problems
My Depth of Field Layers
Smoke Layers
My Render Layers, Dust Particles, Depth of Field, Rendering problems
My Depth of Field Layers
Smoke Layers
Inspiration
Rob showed us a very similar spoof crib animation which is quite amusing and fits the bill with xmas on the way....
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3nLEek_YE
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=qH3nLEek_YE
Wednesday 3 December 2008
Monday 1 December 2008
Welcome to the house of fun...
Needs quite a bit of tweaking but the key frames are there. I feel better now we have a bit of animation under way. Motion blur will play a big part in our characters quick movements. I created some quick blendshapes for the mouth and eyes but they can easily be changed and rekeyed. Please comment for thoughts guys...
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