Scheduling

With the end of the MSc Animation & Vfx Conference. It was like we took a time out from going live project from a couple of days and we had to regroup and see where we are standing and how to proceed further. So i made a new schedule to go alone from here till the end of the project (going live). We nearly finished the lip sync for all the shots. Next we had to proceed to the animation stage and lighting setup. So we agreed to start the animation with each member assigning a character to them, so the continuity does not get lost. And Stathis agreed to do the lighting test parallely, so that once finished we can get to render the shots and speed up the process

MSc Animation & Vfx Conference

The second semester has come to an end with the completion of the MSc Animation & Vfx Conference 2016. It has to be a presentation of what we have researched so far and what we will be doing in the future about my final project. My final project is about Realism. How to get realistic movements of 3D characters in Live Environment. We had a mock presentation before the final conference in which I wasnt up to the mark, lacking some content and not utilizing the whole time (15 mins) giving to me. After the mock presentation I had an individual tutorial with Jeanette with helped me a lot and gave me more confidence and it reflected pretty much noticeable for me in the final conference. I did my presentation with lot of confidence and had more content in my presentation and it went on much better than my mock presentation

Experimenting And Optimization

As the work for the going live project is getting intense, we were introduced to a new problem. How to put hair for the TROLL DOLL. Several techniques were used for the hair  like fibre mesh in Zbrush and maya fur & hair. The only problem that was constant is the time taken for the rendering the hair in maya(37 seconds for a single frame). So I experimented and tried to minimise the time taken for the render. Like rendering the hair in 3ds max, using scanline render and rendering the rest of the object in maya. But initial experimentation in the morning didnt workout really well. After the lunch it was a success. Yes.! the hair was rendered in 3ds max ( 19 seconds for a single frame, half the time in maya) and it could be easily composited in After effects with the other render of the model in maya.!

 Maya Render

3ds Max Render

AE Composition

Stan Winsent School Of Set Modelling

While browsing through many CG Forums and websites, I was always amused by the set modelling and character arts done in many movies and Tv shows. I made a good research about it and found that  Stan Winston School Of Set Modelling was the top in the buisness.

And in the past week many articles about the online tutorial in the Stan Winston School made me to subscribe for the online course and i have started doing the course in the part time.

Going Live

And so the modelling for the going live is almost 99% done and it had some short comings. I took the sylvanian rabbit to model. The model sheet was done by Katherine and while modelling it there were some issues which had to be encountered. Katherine helped me in sculpting the head of the rabbit in mudbox on which I later did retopology and cleaned up the model and did the UV for it. There were problems(sculpting) faced by me while doing it. But with help of my team it came on quite well.

And along side the modelling we are parallely finishing the texture work and also doing the pre vis for the project, which we had no idea of how to go ahead, when Brendon gave us a helping hand in starting the pre vis. Due to which we are doing it in a good speed to finish it.

Animation And Going Live

And the lesson for the week was the basics of learning the curve editor and the fundamental of animation using the bounce ball. The curve editor is the major and important essence for the animation and the class covered it fully and it went on well.

Along with the learning curve is the working of going live for the axis studio. Along with some team meeting and scheduling stuffs the production for the project has been started from this weekend.

Animating More

After the tutorial for the walk cycle. The making of a run cycle and a lip sync for a 3D character ended up quite well. There was pretty much no big challenges faced while trying it

Lip Sync Trail

Run Cycle Trail

The end result were good but still have to refine the facial animation for the lip sync to make it realistic.

Run Cycle

Lip Sync