This week i am glad that me and John have made our way thought rendering scene4 now that i have finished the animation for that scene. John has already rendered scene 2 and five so all we have to do now is the big scenes one and three at college where we can use the computers. we have already made qute a way rendering scene 3 out at home.
i was very proud of myself at the begginging of this week as i managed to animated 2 thirds of scene 4 animations including three characters in just two days! i realised how much more effort i would need to get the film finished, john was doing a very good job as producer reminding me just how little time we have left. obviously i knew that the quality of my work would suffer just as i did not have alot of time to spend on anything. As i had gotten all my parts of scene 4 animated it was just down to James to finish the window cleaner animation for both scene 2 and four. me and john found it frustrating recieving unfinished files such as James's window cleaner that requre work to them further to be useable in a scene. doing a animation which will be seen almost constantly in the backround should be given as a complete file with the animation working on all frames in which the chraracter will be seen or else it will be down to someone elso to have to finished the animation instead to no credit (mainly John).
on thursday i started to amimate the old lady in the film who slips over on a doille and fixes her back. John had already made a start on the animation working out her pace and walk and slip. he found it very hard to aniamte due to quite a difficult rig and character to animate.
the old lady took me 4 days to animate in total which was really long compaired to many other sequences i had animated in the film. and john disccused that if i cant finish her aniamtion in a certian time frame we should cut the character from the film as we just dont have any rime left to wait to render those sections. I agreed with this as i know that time can dissapear when animating and it would be in the interests of the film being finished.
Other things i managed to do this week include contacting josie lots and making sure that her animations are useable in the film and making sure that they are cycled of animated for all the shots in the film they will be scene in, i got josies set on making sure that the old woman playing chess continues to do so for the whole scene every time she came into shot.
i continued to keep in contact with Wan about how the effects were comming allong for the two scenes and i reveiwed his tests he showed me and comunicated what we wanted in more depth.
i also spend lots of time sending textures and scene files he needs to complete the smoke effects.
as Raphael came in on thursday i took the opertunity to really give him exact instructions for what we needed from his animation. i gave him a breakdown of each shot he needed to animate as well as timings and i also gave him a copy of the aniamtic to work from as wall as scene files with appropriate cameras to work to. i felt i needed to be this particular as we were relying on a crucial peice of animation so close to the deadline and any mistacks could not be afforded.
I spent some tinme this week such as on Friday making sure scene 4 was working smoothly ready for animation i realised earlier this week that the Jahovas Wttness had no textured teeth or moth backing dispite james modeling the character and knowing exactialy waht is intended to happen to him during animation. that several times he opens his mouth wide and the camera will end zooming into his mouth. so this is an area of modeling which could have been planed better at an earlier stage. To make this part of the scene look even half decent i had to create a mouth back piece for the Jahova so that the camera does not just zoom the the inside of his head. Adding any thing to a model after it is rigged is difficult so i was annoyed this wasent adresed at the modeling stage, where a much better job should have been made.
at this stage when it came to compiling aniamtions and scene files ror rendering there are always probles occuring, one big issue was with the Jahovas Wittness textures not loading onto the character as the texture nodes were missing in Maya. after some investigation into the problemand asking james if he had any idea why this was happening we fond the problem was that james had made an updated texture version of the caracter after it was rigged. me assuming that all the texturing work should be done before the characters are rigged took the final rigged file from Wan and animated using that file. James didn't mention to me that he had changed the character file, so i continued to use the same file i received from Wan. i dont have the time during the end of a project to check every single file i get, so all that was needed from James was better communication and perhaps to not go back and play with aspects of the film which should have been completed weeks ago.
Another Problem created by James textuing so late in the project was with Grims Scyth as James only made the Texured scythe on the 5th of june. By this time i have animated all of grim and to make grim hold the corretly textured scythe meant to import the new scyth into every Grim animation and replace all the keys and re-parent the sythe to grims hand which normaly doen't work. i had managed to successfull recreate the same animation in all the scenes i had animated Grim in except for scene one as i had not yet been able to help set up that scene for rendering.
i was quite anoyed at the uneccacery trouble that not texturing something has caused as it take away a good few hours from me animating to fix stuff like this, it is anoying esspecialy as i had already anmated it with care the first time round and when you start to cut and paste aimation it doesnt always work and ruins the animation.
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