Its bin a while but we finished!

So basically I havn't posted for a while because of Rave-on-Air and essay submissions, and after that time was so tight. Basically the group decision was that there was no way I was going to finish animating the dump in a week, so we changed the dump scene to be more of an extension of the intro. (Unfortunately it's also the only scene where the whole dialogue is important and couldn't simply be cut down like the other scenes.) This meant a series of stills framed on a storybook looking page with text instead. While I am very dissapointed I didn't get to finish the animation this was definately for the best under the time constraints.

Here's a quick example of the final still. where I used a volume light and incandecense to make a glow come from the open wardrobe.

Still all finished now and I think we did very good on this project. Editing took no time at all, though After Effects took a bit longer for me as I had to get the storybook looking good with fading text etc. We are getting it onto a DVD today and taking it up to Paul, and I think we can all be pretty proud of this.

quick animation update

Added a few more poses, a little kick of the floor, a bit more sulking. you know how it is.

Fail free day! hurrah!!

Today was pretty much a good day. I had to spend a fair bit of time fixing Dans issues with the rig, as he needed to be able to pivot the whole body from the head so Bare Bear could fall over properly from his upside down pose. I also needed to find a way around the facial expressions, as we discovered today blendshapes weren't working. Probably because we tried doing them now after we started animation, but as a solution (possibly temporary as Yaniv thinks he knows a way to do it) I fixed up the brows to all the characters with cluster deformers so we can animate the mesh directly. This works even if nothing else does.

So as for my own animation I made a fairly decent start today I'd say. I decided to scrap the idea of him starting in a sitting pose as it's going to take far too long to work a way around it. Instead I just started him off standing and scuffing his feet a bit. I have a long way to go, but I at least have some rough opening poses. I have been working mainly in stepped animation as it is more like industry practice, and I find it useful for blocking out poses. You can see above how it translates from stepped to spline, and you can also see what I mean when I say it needs more work. A lot more inbetweens.

While I've been finding this difficult because the actions of the bear in the dump are so vague, (dragging out roughly 700 frames of him "looking embarrassed and shy"), I have managed to get over my fear of animating today. Using a character set has definately helped as all I have to think about is poses for the time being, and keyframing is less complex than I remember.

Just as a laugh, Alec showed me a cool trick with the rig, and that is the "paper Bare Bear" look, made by scaling it on the Z axis. It looks awesome, and the animation still works, but it does go a bit crazy in places, so it's not really worth persuing as a genuine idea. Here it is anyway.

Sitting down fail.

It pains me to report more failure, but now that I've decided to scrap the camera movement and just get on with animating the bear more issues have come up. The shorts are causing some serious grief, as they are just not flexible enough for him to be able to sit down or even bend. The way I had weighted it before they did not deform with the leg movments. I weighted it this way because the deform badly with the leg movments. You can see what happens with both here. the first image is without hip weights, and the second is with. Im sure you'll agree they both look aweful. I don't exactly know what to do about it.

Pan fail

Ok so I got the scaling sorted out, I grouped the environment and scaled that up rather than scaling the rig down. I also turned the ambient colour up on all the bears textures to get him to actually show up. Now I am faced with a new problem having just tried to animate the opening camera pan. Basically because I have modelled only to fit one frame when I move the camera everything falls out of place, and the lighting and textures look terrible. Observe:

How rubbish is that. Keyframing the objects that fall out of place is one option but it doesn't sort out the ugliness of the textures and lighting. After a discussion we came up with two possible solutions.

1. cut the pan out altogether and just have the title fade to the opening shot.

2. do the camera work on After Effects/Premiere.

The latter would involve rendering out the correct timing of still frames before any animation is involved. Its probably worth doing that anyway, because I can always cut out that section later if it looks terrible.

Rigs and skinning done!

Basically today I sorted out every problem with the rigs that was remaining. The zip was grouped into itself and parented to the upper back bone, which sorted that out, and I gave it blink attributes and the squash and stretch handles. I also fixed it up with a master controller enabling everyone to scale and rotate the whole thing problem-free. I then skinned the naked bear and did the same things for that one. It didn't take too much time to be honest, so I decided to sort out the shorts with a quick cylindrical map of a heart pattern I made in Photoshop. It took me a couple of attempts to get this right, because with the way I was doing it origonally the texture wasnt following the uv's they were assigned to. Never mind a bit of fiddling and it seems to work now, so it's all good.

I am now left with an issue though, as I have been working in centimeters whereas everyone else has been working in metres. This hasn't been an issue up until now, in fact I'd probably go as far as to say I've had less issues with my scene as a result. Now, however, it has come back to bite me. Despite the fact that the rig is capable of scaling, on such a large scale the model does end up slightly deformed and just wrong. You can probably make out what I mean in this render where I attempted to import the bear into the environment. You can also see my next issue, which is to do with the lighting of the scene. Bare Bear is totally sillhouted in the area where he's meant to be standing.

Yup, some serious sorting out all round is definately in order here. At least everyone else can animate now though, so I'd still consider this to be a good days work. Im nearly ready to animate, but I'm going to have to deal with this tomorrow as my brains switching off now.

panda, weights, done!

Sultans rigging lecture proved very useful yesterday, as he showed me how to do a spine in a more professional way, encorporating both FK and Ik by using extra joint chains and grouping/parenting/orient constraints. Its all a bit technical to post I think, but I have a good understanding of it now. The method of grouping an object to itself in order to keep it independant from itself has also helped immensely as it seems to solve many problems that I find commonly occur. He also showed a method of parenting the object group to a joint and then uparenting it to keep the rotational axis of the joint. This helps with orient constraints, as normally I would have to change the local rotaional axis manually to make it fit. I used this technique to create some ear controllers. Basically the rig is now fully updated to encorporate all of this, and skinning was no problem at all. I have included a switch to turn the model from low to high rez, and a similar switch to turn the spine controls off if necissary, as Dan said it looked a bit complex. I also put on pole vector attributes for the elbows and knees in case of preference to use that.

Also, the problem with the knees caving in I solved without Sultan, basically because I'm THAT awesome. It was doing that because they were too bent at the point of skinning, so naturally when they straighten out that has an effect on the geometerey. Straightened the legs out a bit, and its fixed!

This is almost ready to animate now, I just need to sort out blink attributes and the zip control (it doesnt follow the skin). We are currently testing to see if we can apply new textures to the skinned model without it messing things up. If it doesn't then that should save a whole load of time.