The Two Little Kids is on Youtube

The animation is now available to watch online.

A Portfolio of my work and latest showreel can be viewed by clicking here.

Project Evaluation

Overall I am very happy with what I have accomplished but feel I should have spent a greater percentage of my time on the final animation. I am pleased with the animation I have produced, but would like there to be more of it.

The majority of my group work has been successful and some very nice work has been produced for me, if not all quite to the agreed time schedule. When producing designs for someone else to model from I have found that I feel everything has to be perfectly clear and spend far too long on the images, making sure they perfectly represent what I want to be modeled.

My biggest letdown for this project was allowing myself to get behind schedule to the point that my animation suffered because I no longer had the time required to do it all in. This was mainly due to my slow working style and spending far too long redoing my blockout based on various lecturers recommended improvements. I have however greatly increased the speed in which I work and learned the invaluable lesson of when to call it a day so as not to get behind schedule.

I am pleased with the film I have created and have built up a much wider knowledge of the animation process.

Rendering

I have spent the last few days solidly attempting to solve various problems, the majority of which it was later resolved were due to the mac I had been working on. The textures had a tendency to disappear and needed regular reloading, despite all my files, references and project being correctly sourced, named and tidied. The image transparencies would only work on the machine the files were created on, which after a lot of experimenting I got round by converting everything to .tga. The biggest problem I had was that Metal Ray was only producing blank images. Despite my best efforts I could not solve the problem and therefore had to find an alternative way to light my scene. I used two directional lights, one much stronger to use as the sun and the other opposite and weaker to use as a fill. I also used an ambient light to decrease the darkness of the shadows and two spot lights that followed the characters to make them stand out against the background. My lighting setup stop working and despite my best efforts to work out the problem, I had to recreate it many times. I found setting up the camera quite challenging as the mac crashed regularly despite only displaying on wire frame and me already having a pretty good idea of how it was to be filmed.

I then set up my batch renders and took my project to various other machines ready to render. However Mental Ray worked fine on every other computer, but it was too late to take advantage of it and I was happy enough with the results of my lighting setup not to mind. I managed to render out everything I was hoping, but on review of the frames, the lighting has not worked and it has switched back to default lighting. At this stage I do not have time to resolve the problem.

Goat Rig

Jay has kindly run my goat through Setup and Face Machine for me. There were a couple of problems with the eyes, but with a bit of tweaking he managed to fix these.

Animation

I have finally started animating for my project but I do not feel I can achieve what I want in the remaining time. I will therefore just concentrate on the beginning of the film where the boy is galloping around on top of the rock, notices the goat and gets the idea that he wants to ride it. I will try to give my animation a slight stop motion influence, as I have never been a fan of the very smooth cg style. This is a playblast for the boy galloping around on the rock. It still needs tweaking but I am happy with it so far.

Group Work: Animation

I was asked by Matt to do some animation for him. This consisted of three shots of his female character performing various actions.

Woman takes a couple of steps, glances to right then kneels down.

Kneeling woman gets egg from hip pocket and places it carefully on the ground.

Kneeling woman picks up egg, removes cloth from under it and places egg carefully back down.

It took me a long time to do these shots and I am not sure whether this is because I have had a break from animating or that this is more realistic than how I like to animate. I am quite happy with the animation and I have found it very useful to do just before I start my own animation, but it took me days longer to do than it should have done and I really need to learn to animate faster.