Done.

It’s done. Exit Strategy, is now a complete film. No more, playblasts or storyboard frames. No more scratch music, or over used screams. If feels good to be done, and somehow it ended up cohesive. We had a lot of problems working on this film, but somehow we overcame them. At this point I am pretty exhausted, and I don’t really want to look at it. I am sure by the screening I will be able to look at it with fresh eyes. I am happy with the way it came out. It works as a story and the people who have watched it so far laugh at the right places and get quiet at the ending. A few people wanted to know what was behind the door, while others just got it. Just the fact that people want to talk about it afterwards means that it has done its job. It takes a lot of time, and a lot of missed sleep. It’s very stressful making a film, but when it’s playing at the screening it will all be worth it.

shot 48....

It’s almost over.  Had the critique today and everything went smoothly. Seeing it almost finished, is great. When you are rendering for so many days, and you are looking at it one frame at a time it stops to feel like a film. It is such a slow process; you forget what it is all for, and so far I am happy with the final product. When you are looking at it for some many hours a day, you start to see flaws that are not even there. It’s crazy. It’s almost over and it’s going to be nice to step away from it and see it as a film. I have 4 more shots to go, just got done with one of the most troublesome shots to render. I had so many problems with it. Maya didn’t like shot 48, and wouldn’t even start to render it. It was just error after error. This went on until I deleted everything but Hugh and rebuilt the set. The lighting was a mess, just overall not a lot of fun. I got through it and now only have a few more to go; hopefully none of the remaining shots are like shot 48.

Rendering issues....

This week was supposed to be an easy one. Just hit batch render and go watch a movie. This is how it is supposed to work when it comes to rendering your film. This is not how it is turning out for team EFOF. We are all running into unforeseen rendering issues. Scott is having trouble rendering the shot of Hugh walking outside. Adam told me that St. Peter isn’t showing up in any of his renders because something is wrong with the wrap deformer. And I am having all sorts of weird render problems with the hallway shots. I am having everything from no door knobs, to not seeing the walls or floor textures. The best part about these issues is when I go a quick render everything looks the way that it is supposed to. I don’t know what is wrong with it. I solved these issues by painstakingly re making the set for each shot and testing it as I go. It is a lot more work than I should have to be doing at this point but, it has to be done. I think this film is trying to kill me….

Almost there....

It feels like we as a group have turned the corner and are heading in the right direction. Seeing all of the rough animation start to get cleaned up is a good feeling. The rough reel is starting to look like a movie. From watching the reel, it looks like everything is working and I don’t see any glaring errors that we made in staging. It seems to flow pretty nice, and it tells the story that we as a group set out to tell.

With the animation almost done it is time to get ready to start rendering. This is a little concerning because we still have some issues to iron out. Scott needs to animate the faces. Adam and I have to finalize the lighting rigs and get the shadows to stop looking so pixelated. We also have to find out the best way to attach the name tags to the characters. One last thing that is a problem for is in the ticker on the wheel in the Buddha room. It still is flopping around and I am not sure how to stop that for happening. Aside from these issues it seems like we are on pace to finish the film on time.

Working on the ending...

This week was another week of stepping sideways. I am still working on the ending of the film. I was having problems setting up the shots for the ending. From the start, I have not really like the fact that there is black inside the last room and that you can see it. My idea from the start was to not show any of what is in the room, but I just couldn’t figure out a way to do it and still tell the story. After class on Thursday, I now know how I am going to tell the end of the story. It feels good to have finally solved this issue that has been bothering me since the storyboarding stage.

more work to be done....

This has been a rough week for our film. Doubt about being able to finish the film as started to creep in. hopefully we can all get on the same page, change the things that need to be changed and get back on schedule. This week it was my job to work on the end of the film and get all of the rough animation done for the last hallways shots. I ran into some problems, with this task. First is the fact that Hugh’s feet are just too large for him to get up off the ground in any realistic way. I wasted a lot of time on that shot and tried 3 or 4 different ways, and none of those looked any good. I am just going to have to rework the shots to make it work. I think I am going to just have him stand up into frame and that should solve the problem. After I post this I am going to go work on those ending scenes, there is a lot of work that still is needed to be done.

more shots....

This week we did the first half of the animation. It feels good to be finally working on the character stuff. I was expecting some sort of issue with the rigs, but it went pretty smoothly. Hugh’s rig held up and I only ran into one problem. Some weird thing happened with the upper part of the rig were I couldn’t rotate or translate the controllers. I tried everything and couldn’t get it to work. So, after a good hour or so I just re referenced the Hugh rig back into the scene and it worked fine. It was weird animating a small thing like a close up on the Buddha wheel for 42 frames, but seeing it work in the rough cut was pretty rewarding. As of right now I am working on the end hallway shots. I am running into some issues with how the shots are framed, but I’ll figure something out. I am happy with the way that the film is turning out.  

Let the Animation Begin...

Finally finished with the blocking for our film. Some of the shots still need to be tweaked, but over all I am happy with the shot composition. This week I have to animate the Buddha room. It is going pretty smooth. No major problems with the rig, other than the wrist “candy wrapping” a little bit. I haven’t made a rig in a while, and forgot about the forearm roll joint. It’s not the end of the world we will just have to work around it. Not being able to turn Hugh’s hand is going to be a bigger problem, but GH should be fine. He doesn’t have to turn any door knobs. In the end I have faith we will work it out.

More blocking...

This week the blocking phase continues. This week I have to block the ending hallway sequence and the Viking party room. This shouldn’t be too difficult it is just time consuming. Bocking is boring, but it’s interesting to try and recreate the shots from the storyboards. This is the first time I have ever really used the board to decide what my shot is going to look like. I am not sure that all of the shots transfer well form 2d drawings to 3d compositions. This is something that we are going to have to talk about as a group and try to get the most interesting compositions that we can. Some of the shots seem flat to me, but there is always time to change them before we start animating. One more week of blocking, and then we get to animate. I can’t wait to get to the animation phase.

Layout

This week we finished up all of the texturing for our characters. With their simple lambert textures they are starting to look a lot more like the character designs. It’s nice to see everything starting to come together. The next task is to set up all of the shots. It’s a boring job but it has to be done. From the shots that I have already completed, I see that the sets are not completely matching up with the animatic, so something are going to have to be changed a slight bit to make them work in the 3d sets. The scenes that I am setting up don’t have any crazy camera movement so it should be easy to get the compositions we are going for. Doing layout isn’t as exciting as modeling or animating but it needs to be done.

Buddha....

This week we had to have all of the textures created. Aside from this task, I had to rework Buddha to make him fit in with the rest of the character design. I got a little carried away with Mudbox and added way too many details for the look we were going for. I liked the way that the Buddha model was coming out. When I get some free time I want to finish it so I can use it on my demo reel. I initially was going to start the model over from scratch, but I found a way to save the base mesh. The problem was that it was subdivided too many times. I solved these issues by manually delete some of the edge loops. After I had finished with that tedious task I smoothed out most of the details that were left on the mesh. The next step was to model back in some of the details. I added a collar, his nose, and hair. I am about to start in on the textures, which shouldn’t be too bad considering that we are going with simple matte colors.

Skinning & Rigging

This has been a stressful week. This week our mile stone is to have everything textured , rigged and skinned. My job was to rig and skin, generic human and st. peter. I encountered many problems rigging Generic Human. The proxy skeleton was a nightmare from the very beginning. I modeled GH in the pose from the turnaround drawing. His arms were down at his side and his feet were in a weird position. This made the rigging very difficult and took much longer than it should have. The skinning of GH wasn’t that hard and went pretty smoothly. When it comes to St. Peter, he had his own problems. Because of his shape it wasn’t like rigging a regular biped. I ended up making it only the upper part of his rig. This seemed like a good idea at first and saved some work but led to interesting problems later on. When skinning St. Peter the fact that he had no lower rig made every joint have some sort of control over something that it shouldn’t. So instead of starting with rough weights and making them better I had to basically start form scratch, which was fun. I also encountered a problem when weighting his arms, since they are in two pieces weighting the sleeve to the hand was tricky and different. I had to try out a lot of different things to get them to look presentable. Over all this week was a boot camp in rigging and skinning something that I haven’t done in a few semesters.

This week led to a lot of moving sideways and backwards. I spent most of this week, re working Hugh’s design. My original thought was to make generic human, well, generic. I wanted to try and make Hugh a little more defined. This seemed like a good idea at first, but once I saw what the rest of the guys were doing I realized that I needed to change Hugh. We as a group decided that he still needed to me changed. I thought when I started to make changes it would have been simple, but one change leads to more changes and that takes more time. He needed to be more cartoon like and less realistic. I had to reshape his body, make new arms and hands and make his feet larger. I also had to get rid of the face I had made and simplify it. I am happy with the design now, and it should fit in much better with visual aesthetic we are going for. This has put me behind on the Buddha sculpt, I will have to make that time up some where else.

Week 1

This week I am working on finishing up the models for Hugh, Generic Human, and Buddha. Generic Human is finished, and I am happy with the way that it came out. It is a simple model and works with the character design of the film. Hugh is just about finished. As a group we decided to change the characters design. I am working on changing his legs and making him stand up straight. When I finish with I will have to re sculpt his face and ears. It is coming along, it is just time consuming.

The Buddha model is coming along. I have the base mesh finished and have started the sculpt in mudbox. The rough details are in place and I have started on the hair. So far I am happy with how it is turning out. Since Buddha doesn’t have to be rigged or skinned, so, I don’t have to worry about poly count and can subdivide the mesh as much as I want.