BSA306
finish modelling Girl
3D print girl
3D model Prickles
3D print Prickles
Put all characters into episode pose
BSA303
3.5 hours of internship TaleEnders
freeflow write about IW and episode ideas
look through notes and write up what Ruth suggested for Monday
BSA324
decorate shelves of IW
BSA326
look over proposal and write counter proposal
Personal
laundry
pack for Auckland
call people/work out visit schedule
Thursday, August 31, 2017
BSA324, puppet and 3D combo, 31 August, 2017
This show from ABC (Australia) uses 3D animation and puppetry together in each episode. In this clip the puppet owls change to 3D when they fly around outside their spaceship.
BSA324, IW clean up and shot ideas, 31 August, 2017
The clock has been giving me trouble- it has animation on it from Nightmare Nursery, and when it gets imported into new scenes it won't freeze transform and gums up other stuff. I was looking at it in the IW and saw this:
The nameplace editor for the IW is done and I've grouped everything I could group. I'm able to move quite quickly through the scene. Now to get the 3 areas I'll be "filming" in decorated: center, Jellybean's aisle, and the Sock Museum aisle. I also need to build a bedroom for Girl to start things in.
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
BSA306, VFX doc "Life After Pi", 29 August, 2017
Life After Pi documentary by HollwyoodEndingMovie details how Rhythm & Hues, an academy award nominated and winning VFX studio was forced to declare bankruptcy 11 days before winning the Oscar for Life of Pi. The VFX industry works for only 6 clients who are able to set prices by forcing them into fixed bid contracts. Those clients are then able to change their minds about what they want done and the VFX artists have to do it on the original budget, no matter what. 3 months of delays on Life of Pi forced R&H to take money out of their own pockets to finish the movie instead of downsizing the workforce. A brutal and sobering documentary for anyone who wants to go into VFX. The interviewees suggested that having the director on site while they work would make a difference to creativity because the decisions would be being made in real time. I'm sure that animation has it's own problems, but working in VFX definitely doesn't appeal to me after seeing this doc and others like it.
Saturday, August 26, 2017
BSA324, Mad Bad songs, 26 August, 2017
I reached out to the SIT audio engineer Danielle by email this weekend and finally recorded myself singing the 3 songs I've "written" for the show and emailed them to Anna. It's hard to keep all of the plates spinning. I sent out the pdf of the pitch bible to Pitch THIS! yesterday. Spin, spin, spin!
Thursday, August 24, 2017
BSA303, website needs help! 24 August, 2017
WHATTT???? Check out the URL: it says copy-of-mascot-services for the Animation tab. Same thing for a number of the tabs. How can I fix that? Looks bad and I can't send people links to the section I want them to go to if the URL and pages don't match.
BSA326, oceans in Houdini, 24 August, 2017
right click on any item you've adjusted to access menu and choose revert to default to undo any changes you've made.
putting it on loop means the wave action will be seamless. Good if you have limited amount of rendering power and just want a small amount of frames to be going over and over again.
That looks much better than I would have thought!
textures are kept in shop. right click on obj to find the shop. then you'll see ocean surface and oceanvolume in the nodes but don't open them! just stay above in the material shader builder section. streak equals foam.
This is what happened after changing water colour, foam colour, whitecap intensity and height.
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| grid adjusted low to let me decide size of UV map |
wind direction works around x to y in 360 degrees.
speed refers to how wind works through simulation
directional bias can force waves to move in a more uniform direction. keeping it low leaves the waves going up and down in place.
chop up or down controls choppiness or how high waves peak.
The more I deal with these kinds of aspects of the program, the more I think VFX is not for me. But that's also because I don't see anything FOR me in it, like I did with the cloth simulator. I may want to tell a story with water someday and I'll learn what I need to make it happen.
To properly render, you have to go into the ocean render node and choose export to texture tab and save to disk option. This bakes the displacement map to the grid. After baking is complete, you can then hit render anywhere along the ocean timeline.
To properly render, you have to go into the ocean render node and choose export to texture tab and save to disk option. This bakes the displacement map to the grid. After baking is complete, you can then hit render anywhere along the ocean timeline.
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
Nightmare Nursery Pitch THIS! 23-31 August, 2017
23rd
I've got an extra week to submit to Pitch THIS! and each company is allowed to pitch two ideas, so I'm going to send in Mad Bad tomorrow, boom done, and then quickly, like two days max, whip my NN games doc into an animated pitch bible. The story is almost there, the art is close but could use a boost, and the characters need fleshing out. It's going to be a small pitch bible, but why not? It would also make a good submission to the interactive story development fund of NZFC. I need to follow up with Nick about those dates... he did call Saturday to let me know he hasn't forgotten. Very nice touch, very impressed.
I think it would be good to keep with my collage technique over 3D backgrounds. That might mean rendering out some scenes of the house and foyer and pasting in some collaged figures. Or probably, better, putting together the 2D art I have and making it moody looking like the 3D.
26th
I looked over my screen grabs from the video game that I took last year. They all have the UX? or is it UI? border in them plus any number of lighting, music or direction icons in them. Never mind Lulu's big old head at the right side of the screen. This is a good time to get proper renders of the environment into my portfolio so I'm importing everything into one file and decorating the place up. The sky is a bit piecemeal but I can leave that as is until I see Reuben or Rachel to get another lesson on putting images onto the inside of dome lights or spheres to make it look like a proper sky. Because I'm not racing the clock to get the set basically dressed I can REALLY get it dressed. The roof peaks have been fit to brick and the tree chandelier has been repurposed to create a forest of empty branched trees out front. The brick front has been covered with ivy and maybe I can finally achieve the firefly look around the foyer chandelier. Very exciting! Once I get the shots I want, I will add in Lulu and Todd as photo collage puppets. The elements are all there, I just need to massage and place them. And truthfully, create some new art, too. It needs to be exciting!
27th
I've finished dressing the inside and outside sets and split them into two scenes to speed things up.
Lighting is such a pain in the ass. Even after copying lights from the warehouse scene that Rachel set up, replicating the results is next to impossible. Boo! I will keep trying, but... I understand why lighting in CGI is it's own discipline.
28th
I added Todd and Lulu to the front concept art. I'm on the fence about collage- do I have time for that, or should I just paint into each scene? I'll do a test tonight to decide. The Arnold renders are grainy which could create good separation between backgrounds and characters or just look odd.
Pitch Bible so far:
This is the first time I've combined my photo collage characters with the 3D rendered environment and I like it! A little bit of line work on the background helps bring the whole thing together.
30th
More concept art. Because I had trouble with Arnold (Rachel is showing me how to fix it) I've had to manipulate the 3D renderings to bring up details like the red in the door.
Work in Progress: Todd stumbling against the coat rack and discovering Lady Greigh's glasses as Lulu prepares to clean the mirror. After this is finished, that leaves one more to do: Lulu and Todd reacting to the menacing reflection of The Butler in the mirror. I'm nearly out of time. As of 9.15 tomorrow night, it will be 5.15am in Canada on the 31st, the deadline. So I have all day and tomorrow night to put the final strokes on. I have far less concept art in this one than I do in the Mad Bad pitch, but that's hardly surprising. This should be sufficient to get the idea across and after the deadline I can work on illustrating The Butler, the Red Smoke, and maybe the visitors for the pitch bible I submit to NZFC's interactive development fund.
Rachel showed me how to clean up my maya scene. I thought I only had to delete history, freeze transformations and optimize the scene but there was heaps more to do. Anything, like the clock, with animation on it won't freeze. And there were SO MANY files with bad names that had to be merged with the parent file in the nameplace editor under windows- general editors. And anything with too much geometry, like the vines, needed to be added to a layer that could be turned off to make it possible to move around the scene quickly. I will need to go into the outside of the NN mansion and do this and fix up the IW ASAP. 5 days until we go to Auckland for the game conference! I need to be a to do list...
31st
Done and I'm so DONE.
This is where I gave up even though I had all day to do it and didn't start until 4. When I apply for funding, I will add the second half of this episode and another illustration.
I've got an extra week to submit to Pitch THIS! and each company is allowed to pitch two ideas, so I'm going to send in Mad Bad tomorrow, boom done, and then quickly, like two days max, whip my NN games doc into an animated pitch bible. The story is almost there, the art is close but could use a boost, and the characters need fleshing out. It's going to be a small pitch bible, but why not? It would also make a good submission to the interactive story development fund of NZFC. I need to follow up with Nick about those dates... he did call Saturday to let me know he hasn't forgotten. Very nice touch, very impressed.
I think it would be good to keep with my collage technique over 3D backgrounds. That might mean rendering out some scenes of the house and foyer and pasting in some collaged figures. Or probably, better, putting together the 2D art I have and making it moody looking like the 3D.
 |
| make this pinker and it will do for Lulu's dress |
26th
I looked over my screen grabs from the video game that I took last year. They all have the UX? or is it UI? border in them plus any number of lighting, music or direction icons in them. Never mind Lulu's big old head at the right side of the screen. This is a good time to get proper renders of the environment into my portfolio so I'm importing everything into one file and decorating the place up. The sky is a bit piecemeal but I can leave that as is until I see Reuben or Rachel to get another lesson on putting images onto the inside of dome lights or spheres to make it look like a proper sky. Because I'm not racing the clock to get the set basically dressed I can REALLY get it dressed. The roof peaks have been fit to brick and the tree chandelier has been repurposed to create a forest of empty branched trees out front. The brick front has been covered with ivy and maybe I can finally achieve the firefly look around the foyer chandelier. Very exciting! Once I get the shots I want, I will add in Lulu and Todd as photo collage puppets. The elements are all there, I just need to massage and place them. And truthfully, create some new art, too. It needs to be exciting!
27th
I've finished dressing the inside and outside sets and split them into two scenes to speed things up.
 |
| dressed set, screen grab |
 |
| overexposed lit set, rendered in arnold |
 |
| underexposed lit set, rendered in arnold |
 |
| area light of varying intensities from the tree chandelier. |
 |
| Here's what it looks like when it's inside the clock. |
Pitch Bible so far:
This is the first time I've combined my photo collage characters with the 3D rendered environment and I like it! A little bit of line work on the background helps bring the whole thing together.
30th
Rachel showed me how to clean up my maya scene. I thought I only had to delete history, freeze transformations and optimize the scene but there was heaps more to do. Anything, like the clock, with animation on it won't freeze. And there were SO MANY files with bad names that had to be merged with the parent file in the nameplace editor under windows- general editors. And anything with too much geometry, like the vines, needed to be added to a layer that could be turned off to make it possible to move around the scene quickly. I will need to go into the outside of the NN mansion and do this and fix up the IW ASAP. 5 days until we go to Auckland for the game conference! I need to be a to do list...
31st
Done and I'm so DONE.
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