Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Final Shot



For the final shot, I wanted a Paper Man-esque credit sequence with photos of their "date" except that it cuts out to reveal that it's not a date at all as much as hanging out with a group of friends, and just as the audience processes the joke, the boyfriend enters.




 After one of our crew drop out last minute, however, I had to turn to a random Sweet Eugene's customer to  operate the boom mike. This put me in a bit of a rush, and I ended up not taking the excess of negative space into account. To remedy this, I've begun resizing the composition, and animating masks to move the friends closer. It's still got a few lighting issues around Kate's cup and couch arm, but I'll keep working with it.

Before
After

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Fall Show


What I submitted to the VIZA Fall Show. Still need textures and tighter editing, but We've got most everything filmed and synced up.

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

localRender 1.5


I've been placing rough lights in the animation scenes so that Krista's local render script can see anything. I decided to test it halfway through and noticed the lights from bcam catching something VERY interesting in the last few shots...

The Keyboard

This is pretty much all my team has accomplished this semester, courtesy of texture artist, Austin Goddard. We're really going to have to pick up the pace.

Monday, November 3, 2014

Lefty's Room with Dark Light Textures

Kelly let me use some Beary Scary shaders from the 2012 Summer Course. While the texture team is applying those to Boomer's props, I decided to use some of Rachel's textures from or own Summer Course Project, Dark Light, in Lefty's room.


Before

























After 






















It looks... really freaking good.

localRender by Krista Murphy

Alrighty! This video MAY not look like much, but it's actually the first step towards doubling the momentum of Lefty & Boomer's production. Krista Murphy made this localRender script that renders all the scenes with a single command, using a lot of the same script she wrote for Kelly's Wake. This takes HOURS out of rendering each frame individually and editing them together so that the team is pretty much guaranteed an updated video each week.

Obviously, it's got a few issues; the most obvious being that the renders are almost entirely black. This is because the script renders from the animation files using the hardware, which renders any lights in the scene, and resorts to the default if there are none. This is what it does for Wake, as there aren't any lights in the animation files. However, my animation shots feature assets with linked lights that project other scenes onto the surface, making them and the incandescent textures the only surfaces that the script will render.

I briefly considered removing these lights from the assets, and letting the lighters set them up on a scene-by-scene basis. However, since they've already got so much on their plate, and the layout and animation doesn't make sense without the story present in the projections, I've instead decided to place rough lights into the animation and group them together so that the lighters can easily hide them before placing the proper lights.

So yeah, I've got my work cut out for me, but at least it's cut very nicely. I'm also redoing the light rigs for the texture artists, so I can just reference them and knock two birds out with one stone.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Screen Lighting

It's looking like playing the footage on the screens via lights with an animated color map is going to be our best option, as it saves us the tedium of compositing and the hard drive eating tex files of animated textures. However, there are a few issues to work out.

Mental ray renders them just fine.


Renderman, on the other hand, leaves rather distracting pixelations on surrounding surfaces.
 Same thing in Lefty's room for Mental Ray
Some of the slim shaders in Renderman, however, seem to be looking for objects which don't exist in the renderq.

// Warning: (10/22 13:44) rfm Warning: T16001 Texture "/u/renderq/cjj9640/textures/0263/pov.263.tif.tex" accessed in shader "renderq/cjj9640/leye/shaders/back_LIGHTShape_rfm" with out-of-range t width (5182827545689323933462724203249664.000000). [<Shading> Object: leye:eyeScreen_GEOShape Shader: renderq/cjj9640/leye/shaders/back_LIGHTShape_rfm] //

EDIT: Ope! Nevermind, it was just a warning and the render just took while.

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Cleaning Up the Project Space

So my project manager has extracted from my team that the reason they haven't gotten a desirable amount of work done is that the files are FULL of extra cameras, lights, and other objects that made the file look too messy for anyone to deal with. So I set out to strip my maya files down to their bare essentials. 
This is the first and sixteenth scene file after the clean up. It's looking far more structured and manageable. However, I realized that I didn't have any screen shots of the before, so I tried backing it up.
THIS is what happened to 010_lighting after the aforementioned backup. My last backup wasn't since 2013, so yesterday's state of the project wasn't QUITE this bad, but you get the general idea. It's all good now, so don't worry.

Unfortunately, some extra nodes are still refusing to delete, like scene 4's fx:side and bcam:hide (neither of which appear in the referenced file). Sure, two undeletable cameras may seem harmless, but the last time I ignored a 'side' duplicate, it ended up duplicating itself 200 times and took hours to clean up.

But I am making progress, and soon, working on this project will no longer feel like looking for needles in haystacks.


Tuesday, August 19, 2014

All the shots

Now, I've finally an animatic that I'm not ashamed to include in my demo reel. Big improvement over the last one, wouldn't you say?

Old Animatic

New Animatic


Credits and Closing Gag

I wanted to parody Disney's Paperman credits, being my favorite credit sequence, except that I'd immediately succeed them with a downer gag. I originally wanted to end this on a "maybe, maybe not" note, but the more animations I see, the more popular ambiguous endings seem to be. Since I'm all different and original (probably just pretentious), I decided that I'd end this on a loud, resounding "Nope!"

(Skip to 6:30)






Shot 18 - Lefty's Perspective

I long debated whether or not to show Ava in this shot, as it ultimately determined who's perspective we were taking in the following exchange between our hemispherical heroes. When I brought up the dilemma to Gil Zimmerman, not only he thought that taking Lefty's perspective was better, but everyone in the room unanimously agreed before he could say anything.


Shot 17 - Low-angle upward tilt

We tilt slightly upwards from a low angle to fully capture Boomer's despair.


Shot 16 - The monster shot to end all monster shots... AGAIN!

WHEW! So... emphasizing all his expressions this time, we heighten the level of intensity to the panic.