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I got the other two shots from Andrew, and just put them end to end, and added the titles are at both ends. Then I added sound to the animation.

The more I made the sound a bit silly, the better it seems to work.

The sound really helps tie it all together. I recorded some of my own breathing and grunting to add in. Sounds a bit silly but adds to the "drama" and helps build up to the pop.
Then I rendered the whole animation as a PAL MPG file as it seems to look best that way. There seems to be an issue with the shadows on the floor. I like how dim the animation is, but the shadows seem to flicker because of it. When the scene is lit brightly (when Phil is about to pop) the flickering goes away. I suppose we can fix that by upping the shadow quality, but it will push the render times even more. We had an average of 3:09 render time per frame (Targa files at 720x576) which totalled 19.2 hours of render time. This makes it crystal clear why render farms exist!!

I watched some excerpts of the DVD on the website. The chapter on Pushes is really fascinating. It is amazing to see how powerful the camera work is in a scene.
It also shows how useful previz is.
http://www.hollywoodcamerawork.us/mc_sampleclips.html


[screenshot from the website]

I must dig into these over the break. It's really amazing to me how many skills are involved in creating even a simple animation (15 seconds even!) I can see why so many people are employed in large animation jobs. There are so many specialties. On the Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest ILM website (http://www.ilm.com/theshow/) it says there were 96 Technical Directors. Tells you how big a job it was.

Installment 5:

This is a small version of the render of Shot 2 with all the bells and whistles so far. It's a short one only 58 frames (a little under 2.5 seconds).



It's starting to come together. The look is not bad and the animation is getting there (The original looks much nicer-the compression on this blog is not the best). It's a bit hard to do much with Phil in this shot as it's so quick, but I think he could follow the fly a bit more, rather than ignore it so much. It's a fine line though, as he's supposed to be trying to ignore it.

Installment 4:

Here is a large one for kicks:

Installment 3:

So I had to work with the driven keys a lot to animate the glow effects on Phil. There are three glow effects. One for the mouth shader (the filament), one for his body, and one is an actual point light parented to his head that resides in the center of the filament, that way I could get the glow effect and actually light up the room. I was trying to control it all by driving them with the Translate Z of the ROOT, but that was not working because I wanted the glow to change when he was working himself up, not just when he was floating. So I created a funky unidirectional nurbs curve and set the Translate Y to control the mouth glow, Translate X to control the light intensity, and the Rotate Y to control the bulb glow. That way I could control 3 things with the one curve. It actually works quite well.

Here are some shots that show the different levels of glow:





I think it works quite well. Although I do think I need more time to tweak the effects and I would like to try a flare effect, but the render times are already pretty substantial, but I guess that's just part of it.

Installment 2:

So the lighting turned out to be quite a bit trickier than I had expected. Will's advice has been invaluable as has the Mastering Maya 8.5 book. Philip gave us a nice insight last Tuesday telling us we should move the poster from the center of the wall. It does help a lot to keep your attention focused on the bulb. You don't get distracted by the poster that shows through his transparent body. I got the lighting down to a point light in the lamp (with Will's advice) and another point light in the ceiling that I used to lighten up the scene. I turned off the shadows on that light to make things simpler. Getting the lamp to look right was a lot of work. I'm still not sure about it, but it will have to do. I feel like I'm doing triage sometimes, "fix that guy up and send him back to the front!"

Will helped us with the smoothing of the bulb, which now looks quite good I think. Here is a render:


This is the first frame of shot 2

So you may be wondering what that is peaking up from the bottom of the frame. Well we were having a hard time making the fly POV camera work. So Will to the rescue...he suggested we just put a fly in the shot, parent it to the camera and animate it's wings and voila. I added a bit of texturing to the body and made the wings translucent and shimmery looking (very quickly, "back to the front with him!"). Here is a shot with the fly fully in frame:



The little guy looks pretty neat flying around Phil's bulb. The translucent wings make a nice difference (another Will suggestion).

I've been too busy to post the last two weeks, as all the assessments are coming up. I've probably bitten off more than I can chew, but we'll see. Anyway I'll catch up on the work I've done now.

Installment 1:
So this whole animation thing is quite difficult. It's really easy to get confused about what you're trying to do and where the character is going. Makes a whole lot of sense now why you make the 2d animatic. I must have watched that thing a hundred times by now. Every time I lose track of the timing I just fire it up and it reminds me visually of what I'm trying to accomplish. Not that it does it for you. I'm trying hard to avoid Graph Editor Spaghetti, but it's hard. I can't imagine what it would be like with a multitude of characters.

Here are some playblasts I did as I was going along to check on my own progress.

Playblast of the first shot:


Plablast of the second shot:


Playblast of the third shot:

Here are some links to useful sites:

This one is nice in that you can see what one person can accomplish...2 Blind Mice
http://www.poorhousefx.com/2_Blind_Mice/Home.htm
Not the greatest animation (pretty bad sound, but modeling is decent)




This one is a good tutorial by Larry Neuberger maker of the above film on creating blend shapes:
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/animating/Animating-Facial-Expressions-using-Blend-Shape-249.html

Not a tutorial I needed really, but I thought it might come in handy to make Phil look like he was actually on the cushion. Turned out it wasn't what I thought, but there is a lot of good information here on driven keys.
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/animating/82.html

Came across the website for Embassy Visual FX (http://www.theembassyvfx.com/). They have made many stunning visuals for a lot of commercials I have seen. Impressive and inspiring work. I particularly like the Citroen ads.
This website has a great article on how this car/man was created and lit, as well as nice pics.
http://www.cgwhat.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3&Itemid=1



[Pic from http://www.videogiochi3d.it/img-esterne/citroen-c4/01-modello.jpg]

Came across the ILM site for Pirates: Dead Man's Chest. There is a great section detailing the flow of how the shots were created from shooting live action and acquiring MoCap Data to compositing, Lighting, etc. This is a wonderful overview of the process and an insight into the many roles in a project like this, not to mention the magnitude of it.
http://www.ilm.com/theshow/


[snapshot from the site]

Andrew sent me the Environment files so I was able to put those into the master scene and get some renders happening.


Front view of the environment


3/4 view of the environment


Phil in the environment

It's interesting that the render window does not display the images at full quality somehow. In the render window you can see color banding that is not in the outputted (?) image. Must keep this in mind as we go further and not get too worried about that without checking the renders outside the render window.


Frame from Fly POV Camera

Had a really productive morning today:

I finally worked out how to stencil his "eye" on. I selected some faces on the front of him and gave them a different material. Then I Planar Mapped the stencil file onto the front of him. I had a dream last night that that would work. I don't know where that came from, but I'm glad it did.

Then I realized that lattice deformers had controls so I was able to undo his deformation and redo the above on his smooth surface with a spherical mapping. Then redo the deformation with the attribute and voila, his eye was on his deformed body.

Then I realized I could use the lattice deformer version and create geometry of different shapes - by duplicating and deforming and then duplicating again and so on - and use those to create blend shapes. So I got the blend shapes to work and just to give it a go created a 1 second animation of moving his eyebrow up and down.

Tried to get the file organization going. Created the master project...but I'm not sure if each shot should have one or should I create 3 cameras for the 3 shots within the one master. Need to ask Will tonight.

Created the assets folder and started putting the files in and updating the log.

File referencing seems to work fairly simply, there shouldn't be any real issues there.

Worked on Phil:
Created an eye with a sphere, but when it's transparent you can't really tell it's there. Maybe with the text UV'ed on it it would work. Need to try that.
Then I created a lattice deformer for Phil and that seems to be a viable option to create an eye with a brow. That will give us more control on the expressiveness. However, I tried duplicating him and creating blend shapes and I got an error saying no objects found. Tried it again with just the bulb part and still no luck. More questions for Will. I hope he's ready ;-)

Worked on the axe swing some more. Man I am starting to get really frustrated. I can't seem to figure out a way to consistently get the keys to record the movements. I'll spend all this time tweaking a position and key it. Then I'll play it back and some element (the axe, or the wrists) won't move. I tried using the S command to key all the attributes. I tried using the Shift-W and Shift-E commands to key only moves and rotations and it just doesn't seem to work. I must be parenting the axe to the controllers incorrectly. I'll try again later...I have spent hours on this and I have like 15 versions and none of them work properly!

Met up with Andrew and we discussed some things that we should have settled already (oh, well better late than never, and not his fault certainly).
We have divided the modeling as follows:
Phil - me
Environmental stuff - Andrew: this includes the room (and window), a lamp, a buddha (low res as it is far in the background and small), a candle, a small table, a cushion and a poster with frame.

There should only be one light rig as there is only one environment.

I'll keep track of the Master project and the Assets folder: I need to get this organized...:-(

Rigging the character. So far the rig appears to be very straight forward as Phil won't have much range of motion. I think FK and just a couple of joints should do. The blend shapes will be more important I think. Actually I'm really not sure how to go about this...more questions for Will.

The soundtrack I can take care of. The 2D animatic sound track is close, just need to tighten it up a bit (especially the fly sound stuff).

There are 3 shots: the intro, the fly POV shot, and the shot where Phil gets it. We haven't decided how to divide these up yet. We need rigged models and camera moves first. Should these be separate master files? More questions...

So I tried my hand at the axe swing using Will's character (by the way, I'd like more info on how to create those cool controls...). This is by no means an easy feat. I did it 4 times, and it still seems to suck. Well, I guess I just need more practice. Here is a Quicktime of the render:






It has a bit of snap, but the weight doesn't feel right...

Stopped slacking this week and got around to working on Phil some more. Got the transparency and refraction issues pretty well sorted out. Added in a mouth and got it work like a filament by playing with the incandescence values. I had been using ramps with the transparency but it seems to block the incandescence of the filament, so I inverted the ramp and it seems to work okay. I'll have to ask Will about this. Here are some renders:






















First I rendered without the bulb to see if the incandescence was working. Not bad (a bit bright, but...). Then I added the bulb with the fixed transparency ramp (learned that trick from a tutorial on the spafi.org site). These were done using the mentalray shader. I hope that's okay. I'll have to ask Will about that too.
So then I started thinking about the eye. I tried to add "Philips 60Watt" as a UV on the bulb, but it doesn't show up when I render (maybe because it's transparent). One of the forums mentions layered textures, I'll have to look into that and ask Will if that's the way to go. I hope we're not shooting ourselves in the foot with the transparency!?