Monday, November 21, 2011

WEEK 14- Production Journal Review 3.

It is now the end of week 14 and the end of making my animation.
I did have a few problems trying to complete my film, mostly errors trying to export.
It was very fustrating and annoying not having things working for me, and i felt like giving up. But giving up isnt going to solve anything. I had a lot of help from Jack, Darren and Kirrily telling me not to stress and not worry about it. I also got heaps of moral support from Bounnong and my other class mates.
On the Tuesday the week after, Jack said that if i couldnt get my renders to work i could come into uni and try and get help with it. Jack is very powerful and said he had a dream about how he could fix my problem! I had rendered my film as a tga sequence and i still had them so he deleted my old sequence and replaced it with the tga sequence, after that we tried rendering and there was no errors!! it kept going and worked!!!
It was good to finally get somewhere! after that i needed to add my music, make a new tga sequence and then make the final mpeg2.
I did my music and i never liked what i did, i also completed all the renders i had to do. I was going to put them on disc but for some reason an error came up saying that it couldnt and Jack needed all the files before he left. I spoke to Jack and he said that i could try and put it on disc at home and hand it into the office the next morning or i could go pass his house and give him my hard drive with the files to copy over.
I did try at home to put the files on disc but it took such a long time! in around 3 hours only 140 frames were copied over. i had 4224 frames in total! So i ened up going to Jacks house and it was a lot easier to transfer the files across.
When he watched my film he said my sound/music wasnt every good and that if i had time i should fix it. To be honest i really didnt want to, i was so over doing everything. But then i thought i never liked it anyway and its something i should fix. So after Jacks house i went to uni and fixed up my sound. Im really glad Jack told me to fix it, i like it now.
After i finished it i emailed it to Jack and then the feel of completion came over me. it was the best feeling.
i always thought that i had bad karma, all the problems and stress i got from making my film, but a friend told me that problems are a blessing in disguise, now that i know if i get these problems again i know what to do.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

computer says noooooooooooooooooooo.

These are pictures of some of the errors that were coming up. I didnt think at the time to take pictures of the earlier ones that were coming up.














errors & tears.

Friday.

I got to uni at 9am, worked on the last of my effects with the help from Darren and felt good about everything being done and handing in my animation at the end of the day.
I made a final comp and put all my footage in it. Everything was in order.
i also finished off my titles and used the 3D options in after effects to make the camera zoom into the door I also made the rose change to colour with the help of Jack.

It came to the time of rendering.
For some reason I rendered my animation as a tga sequence first, which was a bad idea. even as i was rendering it came up with an error and stopped at frame 1311. so then i tried again and it did the same thing. i dont remeber what the error was i didnt take a picture of it.
Kirrily helpped me out by showing me in the settings there was a custom settings to render certain frames and i did that, but i had to put them in different folders each time it stopped! so i had to make sure that i was working.
the first time it stopped at frame 1311 then frame 1726,1962 and 2117. From 2177 it continued to the end which was frame 3500.
I wanted to put the sequence into Final cut pro and put some fades were i need it to be and add my music and sound. but then i realised that if i add the extra fades, then the tga sequence wont have it...... pretty much it was a waste of time!! I was having so many problems with importing the tga sequence into final cut, it came up as tiny individual frames and it was really hard to edit together. and i had many folders that needed to be imported in.
From there i started to have a bit of a break down, nothing was working for me, Jarrod said that i should save each tga sequence as a mov file and import them into final cut because the mov files read better and its one whole section and its not cut up into tiny frames.

I ended up getting an error for that too. It was the time of when Jack had come in and he tried helping me out. I was pretty much crying my eyes out because it was 5pm and it seemed like nothing had been done. Jack saved me by showing me how to do the editing(fades) in after effects and orgainse mt credits and titles. I started to think that everything would be okay and i could get it done. Jack helped me by organising the renders i needed to do.
The first one was to make a low quality mov export so i could put it into final cut and edit my music and sound effects to it. then in final cut i can export my sound as a wav file and have it separate. then i get that wav file and put it into after effects again were i can render my mpeg2 and my tga sequence. and thats all i need to do!! THATS ALL!! but i can go pass rendering the low quality mov.

Jack had to leave and i was very thankful for his help, he gave me his number to tell him if there was any problems then he could tell me what to do. once he left i clicked the render button for the mov file and off it went. i thought this is going to finally work for me. But it didnt, a lot of errors came up and Darren had also come in to try and help.

I was crying my eyes out. I was getting way to emotional.
Everyone told me not to stress out about it, but of course i did because i didnt know what to do, it was due on friday! Darren stayed till 7pm and he had to go, which i understand and im very thankful for him to stay.

it wasnt only me that was having problems, everyone was! but everyone else got thre film on disc. mne is still in a program that i cant export. Bounnong and Alex were still finishing up and giving me supporting words of not stressing out and being worried.
i left at 8pm to go home, i couldnt handle it anymore.

I sent a text to Jack telling him and he said that i can come in on tuesday so he can see whats going on.
i just want it to work.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Raven&Tree.

On tuesday i was talking to Darren about putting a tree in the window when Alice looks up at the window. Darren has been such a help! he helped me by organising a tree, raven and rain! its amazing! i love it so much! i just wish i was with him to learn how he did it!!
the tree was done in photoshop and i love the texture of it. Blacks, grays and whites all together. Its simple yet effective and looking at the style made me think of something similar to do for next year.

i cant wait for thursday to put it in to see how it looks.
I will also be adding a glow to the chalk and making a dark shadow for the background. Darren will be helping me out, once i learn how to do it i can get it done and thats another load off done!!

I also got my thursday night shift off so i can complete my animation.

Titles&Credits.

Week 14 has been crazy! ive been staying up late to get work done and waking up early to go to uni. Im glad ive gotten heaps of work done however I should have finished ages ago.

Ive been doing what i can at home and trying to get things complete. When i get stuck and have no idea what im doing i make a list and wait till i get to uni and ask for help from the teachers.
I cant believe its wednesday in week 14. my animation is due on Frday. im scared that i wont get it done but i know i will at the same time.
i dont know :S i guess what im trying to say is that i wish i did things differently and if i did then things would look the way i would like it to look.

anyway! i did my credits and tried to do my title but im having a little bit of a problem so im hoping that Darren can help me tomorrow.



cant wait to put my animation all together. i just hope ill have enough time to put it together and export it all out and put it on disc.

working with nodes.

With toonboom they have a compositing section were you can add effects to your drawings!

If i didnt have visual effects class with Darren where we used Shake with node based editing i wouldnt have a clue on what to do!!



I had a shot where the door frame fades in and appears, so i had a play around with the node stuff in toonboom and i got it to work!!! yay for me!

export problem, i almost cried.

I spent the whole of Tuesday animating one of my long shots. once it was complete i went to export and it kept coming up with a problem!

It was making me so angry! i had no idea what it was talking about! So i had a look on the interwebs and did some searching. Found out that it was too much memory or something for it to export so i had to cut it down into frames of 100. blahhh it was annoying!

but its good now that i dont have to do the shot again or something.

its been a while.

i havent blogged in a bit... so sorry for that, ive been trying to work on my animation and its coming along!

i got all my animating complete which is a massive load off! I like a few of my shots, some are a bit ewww like i missed a few frames.... oops.


This is a picture of animating and editing Alice when she walks over to her bed.



The check list came in handy as well, i found it a lot easier to organise myself. Its so good seeing ticks where it use to be empty for a long time.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Spiral Door.

On wednesday i got help from Jack with the spirals coming out from the door after Alice draws it. I didnt want to draw over and over the same line and extend each time it will take forever. So Jack showed me in After Effects with the brush tool how to make it work.

when you use the brush tool and draw over the guide lines of the spiral, it records it and when you add some keyframes the spirals move! Its really cool. So thats one thing out of a million to go.

I did get the last of my backgrounds back and i organised the shadow with it. So now all the backgrounds are complete and a few of my shots are complete. I stil have lots to do. I mostly have my hard longer shots to do, but i want some time to edit it together and add my music and sound. I actually still have to find some more sounds AND i need to do my title and credits.
Its my own fault for leaving this so late, i was just having so many problems with my backgrounds and it felt like nothing was going right.


Today is exactly one week till my animation is due. I hope i can get this done.

Week 14, come at me bro.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

I want a C - U - P, C - U - ohh my god!!

Okay so horse racing blah blah extra day to work on animation.
i went through my check list and ticked things off that i have done. it doesnt look like much tho :(
Anyway i decided that i need to go through all my shots, organise the backgrounds and do super rough pencil tests and then start the next shot and do the same thing.
Im having problems with a few of my shots only because i dont know how to animate them. I never got to show Jack on friday so i hope i can get his help on wednesday.

As i was going through my shots i decided to cut out a section. Even tho its my fave bit :(
after Alice draws the door spirals come out from the door frame, the spirals organise into a tree and goes up the wall and stops before hitting the roof. I think its going to take me forever to do this because ToonBoom doesnt have Keyframes like Flash where you can draw something then insert a keyframe and continue from that drawing. In ToonBoom i would have to draw over and over and over and over and over and over the same drawing. BLAHHHHHH If someone can give me an idea on how to fix this it would be great and yes i did try it in Flash but the paint stroke is weird and you can tell were ive started again.

So I feel like i havent done much work, I still don't feel confident.
Its week 13!! ONE MORE WEEK!! I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO!!!!!!!

Music in my Hands.

I had only gotten back to Kenny on Saturday morning and told him about Dropbox.
The reson why he asked if i could come down his way was so i could hear the recording that he tried to send and do the final recording when im there to listen to it.
So i got to his place at 2:30pm and listened to it.
Its soo beautiful. I really like the violin.
I have a slow tune and a more upbeat tune. Its great :D

So now i have my music that i need and my plan B music as well just in case.
One thing that i forgot to take with me was the contract that i wrote up, i will need him to sign it.
And i also asked what he would like in the credits.

So glad that is another thing taken care of.

Sound Recording.

In Kirrily's class Jarrod, Bounnong, Tai and myself went into the sound booth recording room and worked on our sounds that we needed for our animations. It was so fun! Also it took us a while to figure out how to use everything but we got it to work. Just pressed every button we saw hahaha no not really.

We did a few tests to make sure we were doing everything right and did a few takes each time to make sure we got what we wanted. We wrote down everything that we needed and one by one we recoreded our voices.

FRIDAY = FUN, FUN, FUN, FUN. THANKS REBECCA BLACK!

When we were done we went back into our normal room, i contiued to animate........ its slow.
I spoke to Kirrily about getting an e-mail back from Kenny and how he couldn't send me the file of the music and that i would need to pick it up. She told me about this program you download called "Dropbox" were you can send kind of like an e-mail but can send a much larger file then what a normal e-mail can hold. So i will tell Kenny and see what happenes.

Background Fin.

On friday i got the last of the renders from Jack and he also did a soft shadow render as well!! which looks really cool! It shows more detail with the black... if that makes sence.


Anyway with the shadow render it had to be done separate from the background, Jack told me that i needed to organise eacj frame into folders (which I have been doing) and import the background with the same shadow backgrounf into After Effects. Then from there i had to make sure that the shadow layer was on top then change it to multiply and done!


I will do some picture maths for you to look at, i learnt it in accounting.


Original Background


PLUS



Shadow Background


EQUALS


Complete Background.

"It's the finnnnnnnnnnnaaaaaaaaaallllllllllllllll Backkkkggggggoooooooooooouuuunnddddddd, I mean coooouuunnnttt dddooowwwnnnn"

The only problem is that one shot didnt get rendered which was when the mother grabs the door handle and closes the door. So ON MY OWN I fixed up the render command and rendered the frames i needed :D there was also some history on the roof with the window so it looked like it was from the 60's, so i deleted history and rendered the frames i needed with that roof.

yeah so i don't have the shadow background for when the mother slams the door, so Jack said he can quickly do it at his house and give it to me on Wednesday. YAY!!

Thursday, October 27, 2011

WEEK 12 - Production Journal Review 2.

AIM: To report the progress of the animation production.

Already the end of week 12, I am sorry to say that I am very behind.
I've been having many problems with my 3D background. I'm up to my 3rd render and its starting to look a lot better then the last two renders that were done.

I will see the final renders today because Jack took the file with him to finish off the renders. It was mostly because his computer is better and students aren't aloud in class room on their own. Jack finished at 12pm so he couldn't stay behind.

I have been working on my animating with my old rendered backgrounds. I was originally putting to much detail in my pencil test drawings and Jack said i should use a circle for the head and a vertical line for the body. Jack said that animating is fast and that I shouldn't spend too much time on the one movement/shot. After that i do my final pencil lines and colour a few of the frames in to see what it looks like. Its coming along okay, Its easy to do my colour because my character is just black and white, so she doesn't get lost in the background because there mostly grays. I like the way it looks because she doesn't belong there.

I had sent an e-mail to Kenny about the music and he wrote back with a bit of a problem. For some reason he can't sent the music file over e-mail and I will need to meet him to get the file. He has asked for this Saturday to pick it up, however i don't know if i will be able to because there is so much work to do. I will make a plan and I most likly will pick it up tomorrow.

Time has gone so fast and I'm actually worried that i won't get this done in time, or I might just not as well as i hoped it would come out. It time for long nights and work hard.
I think because of all the stuff ups I'm having I've lost some confidence and I feel like i won't get it done.

I just have to believe because "impossible is nothing".

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

renders are betters.

Today I showed Jack the problems I was having with the renders.
I told him i tried rendering at home and didnt work, so I wrote the render command wrong.

The main problem with my renders were the textures being really pixelated. This was happening because the UVs for the texture were covering only a little section from the whole of 2048pixels. I painted my textures and scanned them in, i never cropped just the texture to its fullest and i ended up having massive patches of white around the textures which includes the width and height of the pixels. so i was losing detail because of this.

The way it was fixed, Jack did some crazy Maya Magic and he fixed it.. okay he actually told me that close ups are really crap in 3D! (I DIDNT KNOW THAT!! NO ONE TOLD ME!!) and i have many close ups :) next thing was to look through the master camera and see how much of the area is seen. Then select the faces of the area seen and cut it from the original and make it separate. Then make the UVs bigger and assign a new texture to the new cut out.
The only thing was that i only had one copy of the textures i used and they were small.
So he said that we need to use a bigger texture and the only big textures i have are the walls. so now the close up sections are fixed with bigger textures.
I just hope that no body notices the jumping of different textures on the same item. hahaha

Jack helped me make another render batch and off it went.
while checking the pictures, one of them came out looking like 60's wall paper. this happened by not deleting history on the item.
Then on my own i made a new render batch and got rid of the frames that were already rendered and then it continued rendering.

It should be allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll good!!! need to animate, need to animate.

Monday, October 24, 2011

itisnowweek12.

yes it is... soooo fun! ahh NOT.

I've tried rendering my 3D room and im having no luck. I've organised each image sequnce into there shot folder and wrote next to them the problem i'm having.

i shall show you a picture.

so yeah. im missing frames, textures look pixelated and crap. a section like the floor looks bad which means other frames that show the floor look bad. Its just really fustrating and i want it to work.


Ive been animating, but its taking a long time, im trying to animate my long shots first with the most movements. So i've been doing pencil tests and then going over them for the final pencil and also editing at the same time. Im using my old render backgrounds and ive made a few frames longer and also gotten rid of some. So when i FINALLY get the right render of my 3D room, i can import them in and edit it to my old renders.


and it should be all good.

i got lots of animating to do.

Friday, October 21, 2011

can't render at home.

After uni i continued working on my animation at home. I decided that i kinda know what i have to do with the 3D stuff so ill try and get it fixed.
so i fixed up the window texture.
i got 3 pictures of the wall for when Alice draws but the texture still looks really blurry.
i fixed the door texture
and tried fixing the floor texture but it still doesnt look so great, I cant go higher then 2048pixels. It might have to stay like that. (IT LOOKS HORRIBLE)

So i fixed up what i could and wrote down what frames i need to re-render.
I went into the batch render and made a new copy of it and then changed the location of where the scene is saved so it could render the frames from there. Once that was done and i had a look at the old render comands to make sure i wrote it out right. Then i saved and souble clicked on it. The only thing that happened was a black box came up and then straigh away disappeared.

I checked everything and it was all the same. I noticed in the second round of rendering the comand had '-proj' in it so i added that in and saved then tried again and it did the same thing. Im not to sure why that happened and i really wanted to do it on my own and not have to annoy Jack about it. On tuesday i might try on the uni computers, there might be something wrong with my Maya.

*sigh*

you shall not pass.

Jack came a little early and i told him how i couldnt open the Maya file that im working in.
At the start it seemed like i wouldnt be able to open the file and im admiting my eyes may have leaked a bit. I just felt that there was no hope at all for this to be complete.

I did save a file before the one that couldnt open but it was saved from last friday and there was so much work that had been done since then.
Jack said that the file wouldnt open because the textures were changed over to 3000x2000pixels (original 1024x724pixels) and because I saved the file with the textures showing the computer couldnt handle the open. So maybe uni should get better computers or maybe better everything. Anyway Jack said to me to remember to press "5" before saving which makes the textures go to a default black and doesnt make it go all spaz. OHHH i didnt say how Jack got the file to open, he went into the project and changed the name on the 'sourceimages' folder to 'sourceimages_x', thats were the textures are saved, then the file opened up!! by changing the name of the folder, the file couldnt find the textures.
So problem 1 solved!

Next problem. It seems that Maya can only handle a texture size of a max 2048pixels, not all the textures were bad it was mostly the floor and walls, and the door that were really blurry. So with the great script that Jack wrote last week, he changed them all back to '_sm' textures. Then had to go into Photoshop and make '_med' (medium) sizes of the textures for the wall and floor that were 2048pixels. (i forgot about the door texture)

After that was all done it was time to render. OHh hold on, wait im skewing up the order of what happened. BEFORE changing the texture sizes to 2048pixels, and AFTER changing the file name of the sourceimages folder. We did a render, and it would do a few images and then crash. then we would start it again and before Jack even got back to his desk to sit down it crashed again, SO this happened because the textures were too powerful, THEN the textures were changed.

Okay so after changing the pixels the render began. Strated at 10:10am and finished at 12:43pm. While rendering i was checking the images and some of them came out okay and the others still looked a bit eww.
-I forgot about the door texture and thats the first thing you see, it looks crap.
-from frame 200-250 didnt even render :S
-The texture on the roof with the window had the textures changed and so the textures were in the wrong place because the UVs were'nt fixed up. need to re-render frame1300-1322.
-The panning shot of the wall when Alice draws looks so shit that im just getting rid of it and getting 3 pictures of the bottom left, top then bottom right of the wall.
- and the floor still looks blurry.

During the render i had my laptop with me and so i was animating, Im still behind.
This was the first time Jack has seen my animating and he gave me helpful notes on how the body should move. He also said i should draw a circle with a vertical line under it to say that its the head and body, need to be really basic and rough for tests.

In Kirrily's class i also continued animating and she gave me some more pointers on animating. She said i should try and add some squash and stretch but not to much like a cartoon, just to give it more life and try and think of the movements like a dance or music, so count 1...2...3....4 with the key poses and it will help with timing and spacing.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

friday, friday, going to cry on friday.

umm.. i dont know if this can be fixed.
Im in the animation cupboard now and i wanted to make sure that everything in my 3D world is right so when Jack comes at 10am i can start rendering.

When opening my file an error keeps coming up saying
"runtime error This application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way"
and then in Maya it says "//error:free memory is low. Memory exception thrown"

Im freaking out! I remember from last friday that Jack said that Maya doesnt have to be opened to render so i have a little hope that maybe everything will be fine i just wont be able to open up my file again.
But also i need to make sure that the render is 1920x1080 and that the image sequence gets saved as a .JPEG
I hope this can be fixed.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

fixing textures.

Today i explained and showed Jack the final rendered pictures from my 3D room and how horrible the textures look. It seems that the pictures were resized to small and thats why some of the textures (mostly on the walls) are really blurry. So Jack spent a long time with me making a MEL script in Maya that can select all the small pictures and change them over to the orginal size picture.

There were a few problems with the script not working but Jack got it to work after a good hour. Maya did have a crash as well, but we were saving the file every time, so there wasnt really any problem.
After Jack showed me how to work the script, i went through and changed over the images. There was however one texture that i had to fix up which was the wall with the window. Just moving the UVs around to fit the texture.



(picture of when Maya crashed, Jack working on the script and telling me to get a pen and paper and write it down)

So now on Friday i have to do another render, this time it will be a high quality render and the textures will be detailed. Jack said that he can get to uni early on Friday to help me out with the render which is really helpful and i really appreciate it!! so he will get to uni at 10am, i will be there at 9am and go over everything to make sure its all perfect and then render time! AND remember to tell Jack to make the file a .JPEG and the size 1920x1080.
So while thats rendering i can try and animate. Jack hasnt seen any of my animating and i would like for him to check it out and give me some pointers. I dont like animating much but i want to get better at it.

I cant wait for Friday, things are kinda working out now.

guess who has more problems?

me me me eme mememem em mem mem me me me me me me me emmem em e em em em emememememememem me!!!

The problem i was having yesterday with the image sequence going spaz and changing size has been fixed thanks to Darren! it seems that ToonBoom doesnt like .IFF files so i changed them over to .JPEGs and now its all good! which made me very happy! so in class i organised files with the frames in each folder. When i got home i changed all the files to .JPEGs so now they work in Toonboom.
Now here comes the problems:
Problem 1:
the quality of the render looks so crap! some of the textures look great but other ones look so pixelated and blurry!
THIS FRICKEN MEANS that i have to fix up the textures again and re-render that shot!
but wait theres more! its not only one shot that needs to be fixed its funbsfjcking most of them! the stupid walls and stupid everything!
BY THE WAY THIS INCLUDES PROBLEM 2,3 AND 4!!!

im so sick of this. no sound done no animating done my backgrounds might as well say there not done.

im just going to cry now and join that amazing accounting group.

Monday, October 17, 2011

problem after problem after problem after problem.... it continues with more problems.

hmmm.. lets see when going through my rendered images i thought it would be a good idea to go through the rendering list that Jack did for me which has the start and finish of the frames in order. Already the first problem came up were the first image sequence starts on frame 0 and ends at frame 84. HOWEVER WHEN GETTING THIS SEQUENCE FROM THE FOLDER IT ONLY STOPS AT FRAME 45!! this has also happened to another section of the frames.

The next problem is that some of the textures look crap! really blurry and it seems like i need to fix up these textures in Maya but the reason they are blurry is because the image was originaly too big and Maya would effing crash and had to be scaled down, so now there too scaled down and look crap.

one good thing that came out of today is that ToonBoom can import .IFF files so no need to change them all over. The problem is that when i select the image sequence i want to import each image changes size!! WHAT THE FU.....!! THEY DONT STAY IN THE SAME PLACE! ALL THE IMAGES ARE 1920X1080!! MY TOONBOOM CAMERA SIZE AND ALL THAT CRAP IS 1920X1080!!! WHY THE HELL DOES EACH IMAGE HAVE TO CHANGE!!??

IM SICK OF THIS!! I decided that because toonboom is being gay i would do my sound and music. I did get my plan b music today which is a good thing! (so 2 things good today!)
And so i went and worked on that! A PROBLEM CAME UP WITH ONE OF MY SOUND EFFECTS SAYING THAT AFTER EFFECTS CANT READ THE FILE!! ITS A FRICKEN .WAV!! LIKE ALL THE OTHER FILES I IMPORTED IN! AND THEN IT SPAZZED OUT ON ME AND SAID SOMETHING GAY LIKE "IM A STUPID PROGRAM THATS GOING TO CRASH NOW"
gggggggggggggggggggggrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.............
so it seems like i did nothing today. isnt that great.

i fricken try so hard and everything that ive done ALWAYS has a problem!! and im being serious there isnt one thing i can think of that ive done for this animation that just worked right.

I HAVENT EVEN STARTED ANIMATING!! ITS WEEK 11!!! OMGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
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i hope Darren can help me tomorrow, or im crying my eyes out and giving up. ill become an accountant, my life dream... and i can use this thing to count (abacus)





it even says "fun factory" on it!! accountants get all the fun!!



cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry cry.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

nek minute.

WATCH THIS ONE FIRST!




AND THEN WATCH THIS ONE!



haha.

WEEK 10 - Production Report 2 (went over a paragraph)

AIM: to report the process of the animation production.

During the two week holidays I decided that I would continue working on my animation and complete the 3D world and hopefully begin a good quality render. I began with getting the last of the UVs I need for my room and textured them, then I adjusted most of the textures to make them look darker, I did this because most of the textures look the same and I didn’t want them to get lost in each other. I only got stuck on two items that I couldn’t figure out to fix. They were the book shelve and the door with the handle. Because there are so many textures to one item I couldn’t figure out how to assign them to the book shelve. Also with the door handle I couldn’t seem to just select the door on its own and the UV layout that Jack did for the door handle before the holidays went back to its original state.

I also had another problem where I would render a section of my items and the textures came up really weird and looked like they were from the 60’s, I didn’t know how to fix it and I did e-mail Jack but never heard back.
I also organised my music time for Kenny which is the musician that will be doing my violin piece; I also gave him an example of a song that I really like. I also went through and found most of my sound effects that I need for my film.

Before the holidays Jack helped me make a playblast from my master camera in my 3D world so I could start doing some test animating, because there are 2500 frames and they weren’t named, I decided to make a render shot reference folder where I organised each frame into each shot folder. I also found a problem where the file saved as an .IFF and when I tried importing it into ToonBoom it couldn’t read the file, so I had to change only the few frames that I could work off and save them as a .JPEG file.

More problems I came across was that I wanted to test my pencil tests with a render, so when the render finished and I watched it, the ToonBoom logo flashed everywhere over my pencil test. The reason this happened was because I didn’t have the full version of ToonBoom. There was however an openGL section in the export list which exported as an image sequence however the size of the file only stopped at 1600, and I need 1920x1080. Another problem was that the quality wasn’t that great. My holidays ended up being “I have a problem with everything day” and on Thursday night I decided to buy a new laptop to work off at uni and also became very sick and got stuck in bed from Friday to Monday so I couldn’t do any work and I couldn’t even set up my new laptop till Monday.

Once the holidays were over and uni started on Tuesday, I got as much help as I could get from my teachers. Nothing seemed to work for ToonBoom, the only option is to get the full version or work in the animation cupboard to animate which would be bad because I wouldn’t even be able to work at night. When Wednesday came everything changed thanks to Sean, he got a full version of ToonBoom and now when exporting works perfectly, that problem got solved and so did my other problems in 3D. it seems that I had history still on my items which made the textures look like they were from the 60’s, Jack also helped me with the door handle and how to select just the door as well, so I added the textures to them, I also got help with the book shelve, Jack simply colour assigned each section for me and all I had to do it get the right texture and assign over the colour.

I had wrote down for my milestones that in week 10 my 3D should be rendered and I did get this timing right, on Friday Jack showed me how to render, I started at 2:13pm, 2500 frames later and the render is complete at 5:40pm. However it didn’t run smoothly all the way I did get an error and it stopped rendering at frame 1309, Jack showed me how to fix it if it was to happen again (lucky it didn’t). When looking at my final rendered images I noticed that some of them are a bit blurry, Jack said to me that I can always fix it up and then render that section of my shot.
One more thing is that they saved as a .IFF file and Jack showed me how to change them to a different file that ToonBoom will like.

Where I wish I was?
In my head I was hoping I would be doing post-production now but in reality I haven’t even started animating. It’s already week 11 and uni finishes in week 14, I need to get cracking and start working or not everything in my animation will be complete. Accounting here I come.

Problems I’m still having?
I had sent an e-mail to Kenny giving him some more examples of what I want for the music and asking if I could have a rough recording so I could at least have something to go by. I still haven’t heard from him. I do however have a plan B which is an acoustic guitar version.

And finally wants on my mind right now: I’m freaking out.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

(almost) Final 3D Work.

Wednesday was a good day!
I got the right program that i need for animating and i got help with one of my problems with my 3D room.

Jack helped me out with fixing up the door handle UV, He saw that the UV went back to its original state and he had no idea why it happened. I think that maybe i didnt delete history and i moved it or something.. i dont know.
I also showed him when i do a render, my textures look like there from the 60's. Jack said it could be that i havent deleted history on all my items. So i did that and now they look just right.

When i got home after uni I printed out the FINAL and i mean final!!! UV for my room, because the UV for the door handle stuffed up it had to be changed around which means that the painted texture i did before wont match up. Then i made a Lightbox copy, painted it, scanned it in, edited it in Photoshop and then finally assigned the UV to the door handle. Then i assigned the door texture too! so now its complete.

After that i remembered that i had to add the two photographs that Alice looks at. So I cut and edited them and assigned them like a texture onto the photoframe type thing i have in the room. I also made a section in photoshop under the photos where i could put writing. I kinda made it like Alice wrote it. One says "daddy mum and me." and the other one says "mum holding me." I did this so the audience can understand who they are.

I also did a back up on 3 different usbs and im planning on doing another back up on my laptop.


WHAT IS LEFT TO DO!!
The only thing left to do is:



1. Finish off book shelve-assigning last of textures.



2. Make final wall and add texture

3. The final good quality render.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Pencil Tests.

There not that great, I was mostly rough testing and also some go to fast, so i havent fix up timing or spacing.
























SOOOOOOO happy!!

Today is a great day! Sean got ToonBoom Animate Pro 2 for Jarrod and I!
We both have our laptops with us and tested the new program and it works beautifully!! the only thing is that when Jarrod was testing the export the quality wasnt so great and other things. So hoping tomorrow Darren will know how to do the right exporting settings.

This is great! Im hoping i can get help from Jack next and get my 3D room checked out and fixed! And then when im at home i can start re-animating because my old ones wont open now.
So maybe I can post my old stuff, however the quality is pretty crap! haha

Check List.



Another thing Darren told me to work on when i got home is to make a check list of each scene/shot in my animation. With check list of
-Background Render
-Pencil Test
-Finished 2D
-Rough Composition
-Full Composition
-Edit Complete.
So when i complete something i just tick it off. I also added in an extra section and wrote if a shot is a still image.

This helps me out a lot, a feel a lot more organised now.


I'm hoping that tomorrow in Jack's class i can get help with the two problems I was having and finally render a good quality final 3D background.


one step closer, 500 steps back.

Goodbye holidays.......If thats your real name!!!???

Problems everywhere!

Okay so its first day back, it was very good.
During the holidays when i had talked to Jarrod about the problems with ToonBoom he had actually e-mailed Darren to see if he knew anything about it, or what we should do.
Darren only got back to Jarrods email yesterday because of email issues. However it wasnt a problem because Darren went in detail what Jarrod and I should do and try before thinking of a different plan.

I had my laptop with me to show Darren the issues we were having and trying to click different options as well. BUTTTTTTTTTTTT for some reason when trying to click the "video options" or any button that relates to changing options around wouldnt work! I dont know if i didnt install the program right but that shouldnt happen. Anyway Dareen said to try it at home on my main computer.

Darren told me to try and export my tests as a PNG sequence and with bitmap. If it works to then import the sequence into after effects and then export into image sequence. Then download a program called 'Pencil' and try and import the image sequence into that and if it works then i can do my complete 2D there.

Darren also said that id the export has the logo on it, it shouldnt be a problem as a pencil test and that if i was to import it into a different program i can draw over it. But when I exported it as a .mov the background becomes black and the logo flashes everywhere!! so i actually cant use it as a reference.
The PNG is the same as a IFF, the image opens up in a 'Fcheck' which is a Maya thing. But it did work as an image sequence.
The PNG can be imported into After Effects. And i downloaded 'Pencil' to add the image sequence pencil test in. TWO PROBLEMS, first one is i tried exporting some crappy tests and it wouldnt export, and two, when you select import the only option you have is "PALETTE"

OOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH so many problems. So everything that Darren told me to do either worked a bit or didnt work at all. BLAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Monday, October 10, 2011

The Day Before Uni Starts.

Monday!



I'm still feeling very sick and couldnt concentarte on doing any work.


I'm really worried about working with ToonBoom now. since im having so many problems with it, i just don't know what to do.


I really dont want to use any other program because i'm getting used to working in ToonBoom. I feel so sad and i really dont understand what i should do.


OKAY

So accounting is amazing! We learnt about this guy named Frank Doyle and he invented something about the 5cent piece. I dont know i wasnt listening. I cant wait to use the calculators with the paper that comes out the from the top... you know which one yeah???

I'll find a picture, hold on...

Its so cool!! By the way Bounnong saw how much fun Jarrod and I are having in accounting that he wants to join too!!! i told him i got a few extra application forms so he will soon be with us.

Day 12,13 & 14

okay so since Thursday night after work i wasnt feeling so good.
Once it hit Friday morning i was really sick!! I ended up going to the doctors and finding out i have a bad virus and really need to rest. I know that stress and some other things caused my sickness so i decided that i can only get better if i rest and not try and work while sick.

I pretty much did nothing for the last few days and i feel so crap not getting to do any of the work, but ohhh well I cant really do much about it.

I did buy a laptop on Thursday but couldnt even set it up on friday because i had a really bad headache and couldnt see anything. So by Sunday i was okay and put the programs i needed on there.

Can't believe uni on Tuesday.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Day Eleven.

Hey guess what!? more annoying things happened!! FUNNNNN!!!!!

im so sick of this!! all i want to do is animate! i really enjoy working in Toon Boom BUT ITS BEING SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BALL BREAKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
First of all i figured out why the textures went white, its because i had to select the vectorization off or something and then it worked. But the backgrounds still look horrible! i dont know if its because there not good quality renders or something else.
Its just really annoying.

And what else... ohh yeah when setting up to export there is a section where you can adjust the width x height so 1920x1080 is what i need. THE AMOUNT ONLY STOPS AT 1600!!!!!!!!
WHAT THE HELL!!!
so its rendering on 1600x1080 and some of the scene is cut out........................... This is so fun.

Pretty much the quality is crap, everything is crap, this is crap and that is crap!
I'm fricken going to buy a new laptop just for this bloody program so i can use it at uni!!

I JUST WANT THE FULL VERSION OF TOON BOOM RIGHT NOW!! WITH NO PROBLEMS!!
im so angry!
jghbkjhgbg ghkgjgjkjffrkjjjjkjkjgjjkgj oifujlsoiloedjflflidg l flo ldfjul *punching keyboard and screaming*

The good thing is there are some accounting courses coming up. I grabbed a few application forms for my fellow classmates and i to fill out together.
:(

Day Ten.

Let's see, today I did work but there was some problems.
I'm using Toon Boom for animating and because I don't have the final renders of my background I'm using the image sequence from the playblast.
With the playblast a few of the items were textured, when I imported the image into Toon Boom the textured area would either go white or just disappear.

I have no idea how to fix it, I'm thinking because it's low quality image. I'll only find out on the day back at uni.
Anyway!!! The images that imported are also too big so I had to scale them to the same size, I noticed that one was a little bit off and jumped a bit so I thought I might as well do a render to see what it looks like, if it's super noticeable.
So I did a .mov file and all that and then when I went to watch it there was just toon boom logos all over it!! It was so annoying!
So I tried making it a .swf file and it just said the word digital all over the render! The background went black with a section of white showing (where the texture should be) PRETTY MUCH it was frustrating and I didn't know what to do!

So then I thought ohh crap Jarrod is using the same program as well I better tell him and maybe he might know how to fix it. So I rang him and he didn't know either but he also checked his computer as well.

I also had a look on the web and found out that it does that because it's not the full version of the program -LAME!!
So then Jarrod called Sean who contacted me and Sean was pretty much asking me to try different exporting and it wasn't working, I even sent him a picture. Then finally he said to email the file and he will have a look.
He found out how with a exporting section called 'openGL frames' pretty much it's an image sequence and you put it in after effects and fix it up.

It was such a relief to know that it was still good to use toon boom because I did do a bit of work in it. Ohh yeah and I found a better way to export, in the OpenGL section there is a make movie section and you just choose the right settings and it works.there is no need for image sequence and having to put it all in after effects. So I told Jarrod and told him how to make a movie.

It's all good FOR NOW! Something annoying always happens!!

Ohh yeah! And I texted Bounnong to see how he was, so he wouldn't feel left out :) hahaha
I also looked up some tutorials on ToonBoom and After Effects.

And tomorrow I'm going to get me a new laptop that can handle all the programs I use and not spaz out on me.

And that's the end of that chapter.

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Day Nine.

I pretty much still didnt do much.

I was working from my laptop because i wasnt at home and I've had this laptop for ages! its a mini one and the screen is too small.
anyway i never finished changing the .IFF files to .JPEG files and when i went into the folder to get the pictures i needed the .IFF files werent there. This is because i don't have Maya on my laptop. So I installed Maya which took forever!! and went to change the pictures.
I got a few done until my laptop started to go crazy! The scroll bar on the side of the screen just kept moving/skipping up and down and when ever i clicked on the scroll bar to move it, it would just keep spazing out.
So i couldnt do anything on my laptop!
THIS means i need a new one! and i need it before i go back to uni!
i can not work on my mini laptop for toonboom.

so many problems.

When i was at home i fixed it all up on my desk top and started doing basic pencil tests for the main key poses. I will continue tomorrow.

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Day Seven.

Sunday - end of week one holidays.

This is bad.

I'm not where i thought i would be right now, im a little behind, simply because i have no idea what im doing.
I went to import the image sequence into Toonboom so i could start doing test animating. I hit a wall when the file that the images are saved under are .IFF and Toomboom doesnt support these type of files. So then i selected one of the images and opened it up as a .IFF and then had to go into file and save the image as a .JPEG, then i tried importing again and it worked.

So i thought cool i can change the files and start working. YEAH until i realised that i would have to do it for 2500 FRAMES!!! i really think its a waste of time and i could do it with the final render images, i would be sitting at the computer for days just saving the images.
i just dont know what to do and time is going so fast, stupid day light savings.

I said i wanted to go to uni on monday and do a final render but now im thinking i can't do it because i have a few things that still need to be fixed and i just want to fix up the images and animate at the same time.

Now i have no idea what to do, i don't even know if im going to get anything done.
When we go back the first day im going to get asked "so how much work did you get done over the holidays?" and im going to say "nothing, im becoming an accountant."
and then start crying.

yep..

Now im thinking if i should just go to uni tomorrow and do a image sequence playblast with the textures that i have and work off them, but it still puts me in the situation of having to go through 2500 frames and changing them to .JPEGs.

I'm spiraling into a pool of madness.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Day Six.

Saturday.

I didn't really do much work today, I kinda wanted a weekend so I relaxed a little.
I did organise a 'Render_shot_reference' folder and in that folder I made individual scene/shot folders that have the frames/image sequence of the shots in my scene.

So an example is:
- Render_shot_reference
*sc1sh2ab
•0001
•0002
•0003
And continues on .............
•0083

And then the next sc/sh folder continues on from •0084, until sc1sh17,18 finishes at Frame •2500.

Now that I've organised the frames into folders I can easily choose the shots I need and start animating. Hopefully I can start tomorrow after a full day at work.

Day Five.

JARROD!!!
i couldnt post a comment for some reason.
but i was going to post back: "haha thanks Jarroxd, i know that5s why i=m not an ingrish teachder"

anyway, back to what i did on friday.
I havent gotten an e-mail back from Jack so now i'm alittle worried because i cant get the last 2 things to work and i havent started animating.
I did however find some more sound effects and an ambiant piece for the beginning of my titles.
I also looked online for tutorials on how to render, and the best way to combind 3D and 2D.

So with the combinding of both mediums i need to render my 3D background as an image sequence and then import it into Toonboom. The problem is that i dont think my computer can handle it, so on Monday i think ill go to uni and use a computer there, even if i dont have the last 2 things fixed i should just do it. I just hope i do it right.

Also i met Kenny at Young&Jacksons and gave his CDs back and gave him time indicators for when i want the music to go from minor to major. His going to record and sent me the file.
So thats pretty much what ive done, i need to find a few more sounds and i think i will do some more test animating with the playblast image sequence that i have.

but right now, i feel really worried that some things wont be complete.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Day Four.

Thursday.

I don't think my computer can handle renders!!!
I wanted to make another playblast with all the textures to see how it looked and it just took forever!!! it hit 10mins and it hit 15frames. AND even when I just want to look through the master camera and scroll through the timeline there is a massive lag! I'm pretty sure it wasnt doing that on the uni computers, so plan B is to go to uni and render what i need.

BUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT i can't do that yet until Jack e-mails me back! because i have no idea what im doing!! i'm going to do a search on how to render and what the best way to animate.
I feel really behind! i should be animating but there is ALWAYS something that needs to be fixed.

I went through (well tried too) go through my shots in Maya so i could make a timeline for my music that i want. It took me so long because there was so much lag, so i hope that i got the timing right. I also listened to some music that Kenny gave me and he had suggested to me 'La Serenissima" by Loreena McKennitt, so i listened to it and noticed that there was great transitions between minor and major keys.




So im going to use this song as an example of how i want the song for my production. IF for some reason i cant get the violin piece that i want, Plan B is to get my boyfriend to do a accoustic guitar piece simular to 'La Serenissima'

I also went through my foley list to get some sound effects, i'm using the Sound Librarian and FlashKit. i only got a few so tomorrow i will continue to finish my foley list.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Day Three.

Wednesday.



I have almose completed the 3D room.

Since yesterday i said i have two problems with the door and book shelve, i am STILL having the same problem.


I did get e-mails from Jack back which was good! he told me how to select the door handle but then i noticed that i couldnt just select the door WITHOUT the handle. I know that they are parented together but i don't know the best way to just select it!


It's going to be something easy like "unparent then re parent" or something, im just tired.

So anyway i e-mailed Jack back with the problem and made another crappy discription for him to look at.
Also Jack had e-mailed me asking if my "cupboard" (i think he ment BOOK SHELVE) rendered okay. So i checked it and some of the textures look right, but then the other ones look like 60's designs!! i have no idea how to fix it! so i rendered 3 pictures and sent them to Jack aswell.


Yesterday i had printed off the LAST of the UVs and made a copy of them with my LightBox. Today i painted them, scanned them in the computer, edited them in Photoshop and then finally assigned them to there object!


The room is complete with textures with only the door and book shelve to fix. (AND if i need to fix the textures because of the renders!!! and i hope i don't have to!!)


OOHHH and also i would have finished this earlier today but because the storm started with thunder and lighting, i didnt want to risk working on my computer. Last time it was really windy and stormy I was almost done safely removing my hard drive till the power went out for just a second, and my computer turned off!


Of course i was in a massive panic, when my computer turned back on it kept coming up with an error and was going in loops turning on, have error, restart. same thing over and over. I CRIED!! my computer is everything and i use it all the time.(and yes i have back up of my work) The way i fixed it was to force shut down then restart in safe mode, when i was in safe mode i shut it down normaly then i started it up again and it worked fine.


I have no idea how i got the idea to do it, but it worked.
AND one more thing, Maya kept crashing on me when i was working. i noticed it started to happen when i deleted a texture from an item and it turns green, when i try and select it again, an error comes up. I fixed the texture by selecting the object in the side bar and using the hypershade to assign the new shader.

Monday, September 26, 2011

Day Two.

Tuesday.

Today i have colour grained all the items in the 3D room, mostly the walls and the beams are darker and i left the items in the room lighter. So now they dont look like they are blending in to much.


I have saved the last of the Uvs that i need to print and paint.

I am having two problems though which are the book shelve and the door and handle to the room.

since last week i was having a problem with the book shelve and i e-mailed Jack asking for help. i didnt know how to explain it so i took a print screen shots and circled things that i needed help with.


So i have done the same with the door that im having a problem with.

After i finish the last few textures, fix these two problems and make sure that everything is complete in the 3D room, I CAN START ANIMATING!!! BEST FEELING RIGHT NOW!!

but i need Jack to e-mail me back so i can finish, and he hasnt yet :(

Day One.

Starting of the holidays, Monday.

Okay i did have a bit of a break in the morning. BUT i got straight into work after that.
IM STILL working on my textures, but i want to finish them because i want to do a good quality render and start animating. Its good now that im on holidays because i can spend a day just getting my textures done and then i can move on to other things.

Today i got the bottom wall beam UVs and the Rabbit toy UVs, i will need to print and paint, scan and edit then add the textures. I had already done the rabbit UVs last week but when i printed it out i realises that the UVs were on an angle and it was hard to paint because everything was overlapping each other. So now i made sure they were completly flat by using the planner mapping.

I also finished assigning the texture to the bed frame.
So now all i need to do is assign the texture to the door (with handke), floor, two paint brushs (problem with the Uvs when i transfered the attributes) and make and texture the last wall.
After that i need to adjust the textures to make some darker because some of them look the same and its hard to no whats, what.

Then textures will be complete and ill be a happy nandos.

Week 9 gone - Hello Holidays.

Okay i have 2 weeks holidays now which is really good to try and work on my animation, i would love to actually relax instead of breaking my balls trying to get my work done.
But i have to work on my animtion! I havent done any animating and i need to start that!

On Friday the last day befor holidays started i asked Jack as much as i could about how i would put my 3D world into a 2D program and he helped me out. I would need to make a playblast of my master camera as a image sequence. this is so i can import the images into ToonBoom and draw over them.

I was thinking that the playblast is just a low quality render of my scene and i do have some shots that i need to extend or slow down because some of my shots jump straight away to the next shot. I would rather edit and animate at the same time so i will need to e-mail Jack to find out how i would do this.

i hope i get lots of work done or im screwed and becoming an accountant.

Transfer Attributes.

In the 3D room i have many items that are the same such as books, pencils, paper and paint brushs, i didn't leave them the same size so i made each of them have a small, medium and large catagory.
instead of organising each same item's UVs indivdualy, Jack showed me how to 'Trasfer there Attributes'.
When selecting an object that has there UVs already organised, you can shift select another object which is the same, go into mesh, then Transfer Attributes and change the settings to have UV set to all and sample space to component. Then when that is done the object will have the same UVs. So that means i can assign the same texture to the object without having to re organise, paint, scan and edit it.

Its takes a load off of doing extra work for the same thing.
However when Jack was showing me what to do, the pencil texture wasn't working and the UVs were'nt transfering over. All the pencils i made were the same, all i did was make a copy of them and scale it smaller. For some reason they were'nt the same and couldn't be transfered, so Jack said it was easier to make a copy of the object with the fixed UVs and replace the other ones.

So now they are all complete with the same UVs.

Problem with Image Size for Textures.

Jack helped me out alot with assigning my textures to an object because i had said in earlier posts that i was trying to work on the textures on my own but couldnt seem to get it working.

When Jack showed me again how to do it, it was everything i was doing, Until Maya decided to crash! Lucky that nothing major was done. The reason the program crashed was because the image size of the texture that i scanned in was too large, so each texture had to be opened up in Photoshop and resizes to be 1024x724.

Now all the textures are resized to be smaller and adding them into the scene.

UVs Fixed.

I havent made a post in a while, sorry about that.


From my last post i was having problems organising my left over UVs in the 3D room.

Jack helped me out with Planner Maping the UVs and looking at them from the front which shows the whole of the object and not having little pieces everywhere to sew and move together.






The bed frame complete.
The door handle complete.The fairy toy complete.




and Rabbit toy complete.

All but the rabbit toy have been painted and added to the object they belong too.

I need to next paint the rabbit toy, scan in and edit in photoshop. Then i assign the texture to the rabbit and its done.

Sunday, September 18, 2011

I can't do these UVs!!

I just went through the 3D room and organised the UVs for the new items in the room.

i came across a few UVs that i can't do and it looks so complicated!!

I NEED HELP!!

The bed frame.


The door handle (it looks simple but its driving me nuts!)



The fairy toy.

and the rabbit toy.

i feel like having a cry when i look at these UVs.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

3D Mothers Arms.


What the Mothers arms look like beind the door.

Mothers arms coming out from the darkness of the door.


The Mother grabbing the handle and closing the door.

WEEK 8 - Production Journal Review 1. (may have gone over a paragraph).

AIM: To report the progress of the animation production.

It’s already the end of week 8 and I’m getting close to starting to animate.
In week 7 I had to get my milestones complete, I got most of my milestones done with only a few small things in my 3D world that I had to complete. During this week I have been trying to complete them, by Friday this week I was hoping to have the 3D Mothers arms animated and add the textures that I’ve done to the scene.
I finished making the two toys that are in the room and a wall with a door that opens and closes, I haven’t done any textures for them so I will need to print out their UVs, paint them, scan them in and adjust the contrast in Photoshop then add the textures to the object.

Everything is slowly coming together; however time is slipping through my fingers.
During the week Jack helped me out with organising a master camera and timing my shots to flow continuously however some of my shots are still too fast and some shots jump from shot to shot, they will need to be fixed. While I was going through my play blast I realised that the final shot camera is in the wrong place, I will need to fix this.
I was thinking that instead of fixing the cameras in Maya 08 I can export each frame twice then use After Effects or Final Cut to extend the shot and use still frames for when the camera doesn’t move.

The Mother's arms are in 3D, during the holidays I made a blocked out and rigged body (the body is from the neck to the hips with the arms). There was a problem where the arms were too small and needed to be scaled to make them bigger. When I was doing it I was selecting the wrong thing and was making the bottom of the Mother look fat, instead of the whole body becoming bigger in size. That is now fixed and the arms look bigger in size.
I had organised the arms to come through the open door and it was set perfectly, then there was another scene where the mother grabs the door handle and closes the door, the arm didn’t reach the handle and I didn’t want anything else but the arms seen. I got told that I might have to make a new rig because the arm wouldn’t reach, then Jack decided to scale the arms a lot bigger then what they were originally, and surprisingly it worked out well and looks a lot scarier. I went through and organised the fingers so it looked like the mother is gripping the handle.

I was hoping to have my textures added to the items in the room but for some reason every time I try and add them it doesn’t seem to work. I try and organise it to the UV Texture Editor but the picture ends up being blurry and when moving the UV points it doesn’t seem to work. I keep trying and searching on the web the steps on how to add textures to a surface shader and I seem to be doing everything the same. I need to talk to Jack about this and see what I’m doing wrong.

Where I wish I was.
I was hoping that I would have completed my milestones in week 7 and I would be beginning to put my 3D room into a 2D program and start animating. However I am still working on some 3D elements because I am still unfamiliar with Maya and I am learning as I work.

What I want to achieve by week 9 is to have all my 3D elements complete and to be able to put my 3D room into the 2D program, so once the two week holidays come I will be animating Alice.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Paerry.

Jack helped me out so much today in class!
I had finished setting up my camera shots and Jack helped with downloading the zootool file and putting my camera shots in a continuous flow. I then made a playblast video and i posted it straight away!

Like i said before some of the shots are still a bit fast and some also jump straight away to the next shot. So i will need to fix them.
Other things i did was complete my fairy toy and added it into the scene, she sits on the bed.

I also added the mothers arms and was having some problems were i was trying to move the body and the skeletone wouldnt move with it. So i e-mailed Jack and it was simply i was selecting the wrong thing to move.
So i moved the mother behind the door, but when i tried to scale the arms to make them bigger, they just looked like fat arms!!!
i tired different things but i couldnt get them the way i like. I'll have to ask Jack on Friday.
(i also stopped working on them because everytime i tried zooming closer to the arms it would jump to another section, so i think my computer was going spaz)

Today and a few days ago i did try adding some textures to the items, i'm having some problems with it where i sometimes can't see the textures on the item, or trying to move the UV points to match the painting and not fitting. I did do a search on how to add textures, everything the search had i was doing. AND yes i did select the outcolour, and all that other stufffffffffffffff!!

So yeahh... i would e-mail Jack but i think i might wait till friday because then i can watch and learn.

SO! what i have left is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (must finish)
- fix mothers arms and animate. (friday)
- add textures. (friday)
- and will have to do some more painted textures because i have new items in the room.

full stop

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

3D Playblast.



Jack helped me today with downloading zootools and making a master camera for my 3D room.


Some of the shots are still really fast but they can be fixed. I need to add the mothers arms in, finish the fairy toy and add the textures . Then 3D is done!

Monday, September 12, 2011

Working on 3D.

Today i wrote down a list of foley that i will be needing in my animation.
I also wrote down what i want my character to say. She only has one word which is "Mum" but she does have a surprised shock sound and sniffing sounds too.

after that i went through my camera shots and decided to make them longer. like i said in my last post i think that timing is really important for my animation and i think that some of the shots are too fast so im slowing them down by adding extra frames in the time line.
I'm still working on it now.

By tomorrow i should have the cameras right and i want to try and fix up the last toy and put it in the scene. Then all i have to do is add the mothers arms in, which are too small so i will need to make them bigger and animate the arms. And add the textures.

Then the 3D world is complete.

3D today.

It's really good having Mondays off! i get to do more work!
Today i worked on the room and the items that are in the 3D room.

i fixed up my camera shots and now they are in place, however i do have some shots that i think are too fast. I think that timing is really important in my animation so i want to get it right.
I e-mailed Jack asking him how i could make a master camera so i could play blast my shots. He actually wrote back :P and said that the master camera is in Maya 11. I'm using Maya 08.
So he sent me a link of a download for M08 so i can play blast my shots.
I have no idea how to do it!! So he said i can wait till Wednesday and he will help me out.

The next thing i did was download a program called 'Sound Librarian' which lets you search for sound effects or music and you can use it for free! So i went through that for a bit.

I decided to work on my fairy toy that i want in the room, it's slowly coming along because i'm making some mistakes. I don't have Jack to guide me through it so it's trial and error all the way. Of course i'm learning as i go!

So the next thing to do is to add the toys and other items into the room.

The Fairy Toy. It's not finished yet.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

7 Week Milestones.

Its the end of week 7 now. Time went by so fast.
I have to say that i got most of my milestones complete! which is pretty good.

I have a lot of little things that i have to finish, mostly in my 3D world.
On friday Jack helped me with making a wall that has a door that opens and closes, i had to move around a lot of the vertex points so it could look old and not perfect. i like it alot!
I have a problem where i use to have a door substitute, which was slightly off to the left, i set all my shot cameras aline with that door. When the actual wall and door were made it got moved around and i forgot about the cameras. Now the shots are wrong and need to be fixed.

What i have to complete in my 3D world:
- Fix up camera shots

- Add mothers arms behind door
Over the holidays i made a set of arms in 3D for the mother, i ended up using the blocking out i did for one of my assignments from last semester. I tried on friday to add the mother character to the scene but it kept coming up with an error, my plan B is to use my blocked out Alice i did.

- toys x2
The toys aren't really a major thing, but i do want them in because it gives the room a kid feel. The toys look like they have been hand made by Alice.

- Add Textures.
I need to add all the textures into the room. Last week i learnt from my new teacher Kirrily that took over Huni how to mask in Photoshop. it helped out alot and i ended up making the textures a bit darker.

What i have to complete in my 2D world:
NOTHING :D
I finished my colour world early last week. Which is a load off!
I have completed it in photoshop and added it into After Effects and made a panning shot with added bubble effects.

My Sound:
The sound section of my production is the only thing thats a bit slow, i do have a musician that will do my music, ive had a meeting with him and he has given me some cds to listen too.
what i need to do is make a timeline that says when i want the music to become minor or major, with added scenes and how long the shot goes for. i can then send it to Kenny the musician and get him to work on a violin piece.

- I do have a list of what foley i want and i have a few sounds also.

I'm hoping i can get most of my 3D stuff done by next week and get started on taking frame shots of my 3D world and putting it into ToonBoom where i can start animating Alice.

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

rough sound design.

These are 2 songs that i really enjoy listening too.
I hope that i can get my music to be amazing like this.
Try and listen to the violin playing.



Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Finished Colour World, couldnt upload video.

Today i completed my colour world and placed it into After effects and did a panning shot with the help of both Darren and Jack and added bubble effects in the foreground, midground and background. I'm really happy with it and really love the bubbles.




The foreground bubbles are a pale blue, midground are a pale yellow and the foreground are a pale purple. the colours are really dull so they don't actually destract the viewer.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Colour world complete?

I worked on my colour world today and I think it's finished.
All I need to do now is put it into after effects and do a panning shot and make each layer move in 3D space.

It feels good getting it done.
I'm actually really worried that I won't get my milestones finished. I'm in week 7 now I think I have till Friday to get them done.



Thursday, September 1, 2011

colour world shadows.





I found some references for light hitting the top of a mushroom.


I'm trying to achieve the same thing.






I'm in the animation cupboard listening to Gypsy Music, trying to find something that i like for my animation.

trying to fix time wasting.

i had work last night, so i don't get to work on my animation on Thursdays.
I did however tell my manager that i'm finding it hard working 20 hours a week and trying to fit in homework at the same time.

I work full day on Mondays and i hate it. I find that when i get home im just to tired to do anything. So my manager took me off Mondays :D
Now i work less hours, which means less money, but i can finally have a full day of getting work done and i won't feel so behind in work.

So things are going well!

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Music Meeting 310811

Today in Jack's class i worked on my colour world, it was the first time Jack had seen it.
he gave me a few pointers on where my light was coming from so i can get my shading right.

i also didnt really like my grass area that i have so jack showed me the grass tool in Maya 11. its really cool you can change the lengh and change angle of the grass as well.
I don't have Maya 11 at home so i will need to work on it at uni and pretty much trial & error until i get the grass that i like. then i can put it into photoshop and make it look 2D. im cheating :)

So after class at 1:30pm i had a meeting with Kenny. it went really well!
I went through my storyboards and explained the minor and major sounds that i wanted in my animation.

He gave me some CDs that i could listen too so i could get an idea of what i want.
I could also take sections and use it as a rough sound design for my animation.

Pretty much everything went smoothly, all i need to do is make a chart that has the scenes, pictures from my storyboards and the timing of how long the scene goes for.
then i need to indicate what sound i want at each scene.

Then i e-mail it to him.

I'm hoping everything goes well!