Project Finished

The rendering was very fast, almost instant compare the my last project. This is the most success of this project I think, which is the management of the files and ...pretty much everything within this project. Simple the best. So...yeah that's about the rendering.

I was most happy with the lighting. As this is my first try out after Sultan's fantastic tutorial, I will continue my practice on lighting during the summer. There are some awsome lighting chanllege which Sultan adviced us to join. http://www.3drender.com/challenges/index.htm

For modeling and rigging, well, maybe I should had chose a thiner charactor since I encontered some problem when rigging. I'd say, I learned the importance between a good model and the rig. A good rigging also affect on the animation for sure. This is the dependency of the production chain.

Speaking of dependency, I find it sometime rather inconvenient for us students. As this is an indivisual project for most of us, we all have to do a whole production. Say for example if a person is very good at compositing or animation, if he can't model or rig he won't be able to show his skills. Luckly I was quite aware of this problem so I was very open on learning new stuff. So in the end, I learned a lot through out this project. hmm... maybe a little pressure is a good thing after all?

Anyway, here is the final schedule. Rendering time has been reduced to 1 day.

Animatic/Playblast

Animation

Animation was fun. But there was an accident which took me hours and hours. I mindlessly deleted the history. :/
I can't really understand how Maya works, but it is cetainly not user-friendly. Delete the history = deleted the link between rig and skin which means I had to redo all the weight map. And I also made a stupid mistake that I couldn't just go back to the stage where everything was fine because I saved it over the old one. Although I've got 15 saves so far on every key stage of the project, I failed to save this one.
Well, sh*t do happens and I was ranning out of time for ROA.


and, after all the crying, complaining and drinking...
I did all the weight map agian. Here is a little test for animation

I was inspired by Sultan's lighting tutorial. I like the idea how he said that in pixal the lighting people would create 3-4 spot light around the charactor and group them with the model. So instead of creating environment lightings that effects on the charactor, they create lights that only for the charactor.

By using the light linking editor, I created charactor lighting that would only light up the charactor; and evironment lighting that would effect on the charactor.


First spot light on the charactor.


This is the final result. 7 lights on the charactor.


Link back to the 'In The Jungle' song. I really liked its background because it was simple and clean. I tried to create an simillar effect by using 2 spot lights to expose the background.


Here's the result. Without using any texture maps I did this. The very best advantage is that it renders fast. I surely had took the lesson from my last project. For the Ravensbourne project, a single frame took a maximam 20 min to render. That created huge problems not only in the rendering stage, animation stage espicailly. So this time I was very careful on the RAM, technical side of this project.

Texturing result

nothing to comment. I'm happy

Scheduel update

The main thing is... rigging has been separated into two mini taskes. Skeleton and Weight Painting. As I just started to learn how to use the weight painting tool, it takes extra time.

Texturing test.

I didn't want to use my old method of texturing which is to.... do an UV snapshot and edit it in PS. I followed Sultan's tutorial and decided not to use UV. Since my charactor is a penguin, the texuturing should be simple enough to be done using 3D paint tool.