Sketching tool research, 29 June, 2016

I'm investigating a high tech way of getting comic drawings onto the computer more quickly and cleanly than scanning or photographing.  I need to streamline the process


http://www.moleskine.com/en/news/evernote-smart-notebo-1

http://www.fastcodesign.com/3034901/wanted/this-new-moleskine-is-like-an-ipad-made-of-paper

http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/

Semester 2 schedule, 28 June, 2016

Monday
comic class 10-12
Gaming 1-4

Tuesday
Film History 9-11
gaming 1-4

Wednesday
Research/flix 9-10
Visual effects 1-5

Thursday
no class

Friday
Research 10-12

BSA225, BSA226, 3D, rendering work, 25 June to 2 July 2016

S3P10

                                                                            S4P1-3

                                                                       S5P1

                                                                      S6P1

                                                               S8P5

S7P1

S7P2

S10P6

scenes done rendering:  S2P1, S2P6, S2P7, S2P8, S3P1, S3P2, S3P5, S3P6, S3P7, S3P8, S3P10, S4P1-3, S4P6, S5P1, S6P1, S6P3, S7P1, S7P2, S7P3,S8P1, S8P5, S8P3,  S9P4, S10P1, S10P6, S9P1,  S9P5, S10P2, S10P3,




Scenes to be done: S11P1, S11P2,

                                               S10P3 pre-lighting and movement work

                                                                S10P2

                                                    S9P5

                                                     S9P1

3rd Year Project thoughts, 24 June

Make one episode of "Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know"
use Marvelous Designer program to create pattern for Jellybean and puppets, make puppets
film on green screen
animate backgrounds
can I take compositing class for experience with mo-cap, editing, etc?
short animation interstitial? "Squirrel v. Chicken"

BSA225, BSA226, 3D animating Peddler, 23 June, 2016

S3P5  First scene with a fully articulated and blended Peddler.  And Pet, too!  But there's always something.  Have I been rendering these shots with the wrong aspect ratio?  This is the first one that has made me worry that I have.  If the film gate goes over it, I lose her face and Pet's lower half when he lands on the lower stair. For some reason, Peddler's skeleton locked and I couldn't do anymore animating.  So her right hand is wonky and "inside" her skirt.  Got to move on.  Many, many more scenes to work on.

There is this massive glow on Peddler and Pet's eyes.  I would like to figure out what's causing it before they sit down at the table.  I might just have to live with it, though.  I mean, come on: time to move on and get it done.  It can't be perfect, after all.

BSA203, how did the story change from graphic novel to animation, 15 June, 2016

The graphic novel contained each of the illustrated journal entries and left the wording intact.  While it didn't have a traditional story flow, if you read each of the entries, the reader could follow that each entry had a subject and those subjects went from happy to sad to mad, etc.  A story of sorts could be seen and followed.  In the animation, no wording was retained; the images spoke for themselves.  The movement and camera framing brought particular emphasis to each visual but there wasn't a progression from one emotion or visual to the next.

Once Deb finishes her song, I'll look at including her lyrics on the screen, or syncing visuals up to her vocals.  The song could add a story back to the animation.

To Do, 24-27 June, 2016

3D-  Speed Dates
render shots as I go
fix Peddler control rig
work out animation order, easiest to hardest
animate!!!!

Stop Motion- Ashes to Gold animation
set up room with lights, doll and book
storyboard/dope sheet what I want to happen
30 seconds stop motion total?

Drawing- next semester comic class
work on story ideas for comic for next semester

Audio
finish Matrix project with Glenn
bounce it out and put all parts in folder by 5pm

Personal projects

Do Taxes

Shih Tzu puppet for Mary Poppins
source hair, order it
source foam and fabric for inside, buy it
get silky fabric to separate body from hair
pattern head and body

BSA225, BSA226, animating Pet, 21 20 June, 2016

I've got a nifty Rendering note.  Not threatening AT ALL, and I will hand sign it and say thanks, too.

I've put the Pet blend up against a backdrop added lighting and animated 3 close-up reaction shots.  Huzzah!  The quickie renders take 14 seconds and should render up quick smart.  I hope that the Peddler close ups go as quickly.  I just need to get her control rig fixed.  Every time I loaded it, it changed the position of the bones and warped the deformations.  Vexing.  

BSA225, BSA226, Peddler is ready? Maybe? 18 June, 2016

I finished the blend shapes today.  I didn't need blends on the cape or top comb, but they're nice to have ready.  I imported the body into the walkready file with the finished skeleton.  I unskinned the body, put in the blend shaped body and clothes, made sure everything was correctly labeled and reattached the skeleton.  Much excitement!  I now have a Peddler that I can start animating!

After I fix the weighting issues.  I had forgotten about that part.  I found the Maya tutorial for delta mush.  I'm going to experiment with that. I've been rendering all day and I have not been able to concentrate on animating.  I may need to rethink my rendering strategy.

Big problems with that version, so I knuckled down and watched the tutorial.  Putting in a new skeleton was much easier.  Can't figure out the control rig, though...

BSA225, BSA226, Render farming results, 18 June, 2016

Thanks to Morgan's facebook post and some coaching from Reuben, I was able to set up renders on four computers last night.  I put my simplified folder into the Y drive "Render Farm" folder as an experiment.  Doing that means I can fix up one folder instead of loading up a new folder on D drive of every computer I use.  I started the process of setting up the renders at 9.30 but there were some problems.  First problem, every machine needed to be restarted.  This turned out to be a smart move because I didn't restart mine and it decided it was going to do it for me at 10.30 whether I liked it or not.  I only lost 7 frames but that was over an hour of rendering.  I restarted it early and should have started again from frame 8 but decided to render straight from D drive instead.  Second problem, any computer NOT attached to a Cintiq wouldn't let me open a scene on Maya.  It was slow beyond belief!  I will call tech support today and ask them to suss this out.  It will make things worse for all of us if only the most popular stations can be used for rendering.  I'm glad that I've started now.  I remembered this morning that I will be keeping normal working hours during break because the girls don't leave for their holiday until AFTER we come back from ours.  So, I can't be here at 9pm to start the rendering process during the week.  If I get going sooner, I will be out of people's way when they start rushing in, panicked, at the end of the holiday.  

And here's what I harvested this morning!

111 files/frames from rendering S2P7 over two computers and S2P6 on one computer.  I will go through now looking for redundancies from false starts.  V. Exciting.  I don't know what to do with them now that I have them, though.  I will copy them off Y drive so they don't get accidentally lost. I got here at 9.45 and nobody was here yet.  It's now 10.27 and still, nobody here.  I'm going to experiment with rendering in  10 frame or one hour chunks.  That way, if somebody comes in, it won't be a massive inconvenience to either of us for me to move to another machine.  And the rendering doesn't have to start from the beginning, just from the frame that is partially rendered.
An hour later, I've got four computers working on another 80 frames of S2P1.  It's a very complex scene.  If the people who use those machines don't come in until 5, ha ha, I may get the whole 80 frames rendered.  This will be an exercise in organisation.

BSA225, BSA226, setting up to render, 17 June, 2016

So frustrating, again, the lighting thing.  I looks like I need a spotlight on every featured alien across the front?  really???  What a pain.  Still tinkering to get them higlighted from the waist up.
Reuben is the only animator I've seen tonight.  We'll divide up the computers in the lab tonight for render farming unless other people show up.

S2P1, S2P6, S2P7, S2P8, S3P2 and S3P6 are cleaned up (all extraneous objects have been cleaned out of the scene) and properly lit, I hope, and are ready to render.  I will set up a mini render farm tonight and come back in the morning to see how it went.

BSA215, drawing statement and end of semester portfolio, 17 June, 2016

Working in the media of black conte’ crayon, white colour pencil, and grey water-soluble pencil, my portfolio is comprised of eighteen pieces selected from my first semester of Drawing 215. 

Tutored work:  As an animation student and as a professionally practicing costume technician, I work to create and refine characters.  The drawings completed during class seek to further my understanding of composition and the dynamics of the figure on the page.  While we did not have many opportunities to work with a dedicated model this semester, the classmates that did pose were interesting subjects.  The focus of in-class work is on quickly capturing form, gesture and contrast so I work with grey newsprint and black conte’. 

 Independent and sequence work:  Inspired by the illustrator Edward Gorey’s book The Gashlycrumb Tinies, I took a series of photographs of 11-year-old schoolgirls lined up on the ornate wooden staircase of an old Victorian boarding house.  In the four studies based on those photos, the children fade in and out of the light thrown out by the stained glass window that dominates the scene.  In the largest drawing, grey water-soluble pencil on heavy white paper, the strokes of the pencil recreate the typically heavy woodwork of the period and lead the eye to the window in the upper right hand corner.  The children are rendered in slight lines with little shading; they appear as both paper-thin apparitions and dark spectres when exposed to the light.  In two of the smaller drawings, white colour pencil on black paper, the children’s ghastly white faces float out of the darkness and detail is scantly rendered.   I treated them like a series of panels in a graphic novel: the scene begins to spin and the apex of the composition, the window, ceases to form a central column and becomes a diagonal anchored to the far right of the page.  In the final image, grey water-soluble pencil on grey paper, the children cluster en masse on the staircase as one ominous figure lurks on the upper staircase, her features “blown out” by the harsh light from the window.  At no point is the viewer left with a feeling of ease or charmed by childhood; their position in life, like on the staircase, is one of being in the middle and on the cusp of going somewhere, or nowhere.

    

BSA225, BSA226, STUFF!!!, 16 June, 2016

 Lighting Peddler for her big entry into the cantina.  I finished her blends yesterday (though now I realize that a cape blend would be helpful, too.  Or is it time to give it up?

And oh, boy!  Here is a really terrible ring that will unfortunately be featured in two scenes.  Gotta get on with it, though.

critique:
some jerky movements.  slow down chattering spiky haired woman and bug alien
start rendering Friday:
short shot with people talking
get rid of all characters in background, extra bar stuff in background to cut down on scene size, render on 50 %.  we just want to check ambience and what we can see going on in the shadows.
checking to see if animation needs to slow down
get it for Rachel to see on Monday, put it into a folder  on y drive and email her where it can be found

BSA225, BSA226, rendering options, 14 June, 2016

Rendering in EXR is recommended.
under render options,
Render during the break, but start ASAP to work the bugs out.
No Render Farm!!!!!
Log into up to ten computers.   Get copy of master folder and put it onto D drive of new computer (tell the computer in Maya where to find this folder!) and then render that shot.
Leave a note on the computer telling people what you're doing.

I need to create a clean folder system for rendering.  I've made a folder called SDmaster and the cantina, aliens, Peddler and Pet will all be inside.  When I start up the folder on new computers, it SHOULD link everything back together.  I'll have to play with it on Friday.

S3P7  The bartender is looking ahead at the doorway.  No lighting in there yet.  Peddler and Pet will be in there.  I will try to take the lessons I've learned about lighting and efficiently and cleanly light that area.  My Peddler character isn't ready yet.  I've found an early copy without a skeleton and I will finish making blend shapes for it.  Then putting in a new skeleton.  Then weighting it all.  Lots to do.