Maya 4.3 - Rocket animation First Test

Today I have finally started on the animation. I did change my storyboard, but dont have digital copy of it yet, gonna upload it soon. The idea is there is shot on two rockets, mean and big looking that take off quickly. The camera always moves from left to right so their eyes are in the shot first. Then the camera moves again but nothing is there, so it looks down and there is a little rocket with a sign in front of it. For now my idea is it says "Out of Service". The rocket sighs, looking really sad, then it kicks the sign and jumps off from the shot.

I have the scene ready and already animated the first two rockets. Getting teh scene clean and ready was kinda a bitch, its still not perfect but my teacher is to blame, it was suppose to be ready to animate. For now I did render of the two rockets but it looks like the same one repeating itself, I think I need to make them look different a bit, like adding numbers. The camera kinda jumps the way I dont like between them but there will be a shot of lights, red and green one. Maybe it will even be shot on red after the eyes, then camera zooms out, then green and rocket takes off. But I can do all that at the end.

Match Moving 0.2 - Matchmover

Matchmoving is quite interesting and so far I am enjoying it, only if my program would actually work correctly. I was doing some tutorial for the book I am reading the other day but my Matchmover 2011 wouldn't render preview video, what was rather annoying and put me off. I will have to try it on campus and will see, might end up in labs for few hours just doing matchmoving. It is certainly something I would like to get into as a job.

Even found screen on my desktop today:

Windows Phone App - Elementals

I wont be posting often about this but wanted to mention it now, next post will probably happen when its finished.I am helping one of the final year programming students to design game for Windows Phone. He is doing all the coding and I am making the graphics. It all has to be done from scratch beause he wants to publish it when its finished I believe. Fortunately WP design is kind of simple and we want to stick to the Metro style, so all the graphic looks fairly simple. The game will be made out of four games, each themed as one of the four element, hence the name. So far I have finished Noughts and Crosses graphic (fire) and pretty much done with Hangman (wind) images. Its all drawn by me in PhotoShop CS4. Here are some images of the interface. When I have them I will upload photos of how it looks on the phone itself.

Maya 4.3 - Rocket animation

So firstly I have decided to change titles a bit, still keeping the numbers to keep easy track of it but also adding short title to make it easier to see what the post is about, it kinda a pain trying to find something specific in just numbers.

Now to the post itself. We got first feedback from the Advanced Animation, I did good on the storyboard, got 75% but I think it could have go more if I'd put some text on it to explain the shot and maybe some timing too. Google Calendar got only average because I didn't use up the whole timeline. I found the whole think kind of confusing, didn't like we had to use it, it would have been much more easier to just write it down normally. I would have got better mark that way.

But anyway, we got a tast to create rocket animation over next three weeks, I hope to finish it mostly this week and then just spend time polishing it and begin working on my final animation. This is my first storyboard but it will change mostlikely. I want my rocket to look really sad or depressed that it is not good enough to fly.

MEL script 0.1

Over last 4 weeks I have been learning MEL script for Technical Scripting class. Its not very hard, reminds me of VB (Visual Basic) a lot. Just like with C++ and VB I don't enjoy spending more time on debugging it than actually writting it, though MEL is not so bad so far I didn't spend much time debugging my own code, only forgot semi-colon here and there. I think I spend more time helping people to debug the code we are given from out tutor in tutorials. Which is kinda annoying, you'd expect the code that we are suppose to copy and paste to be correct. But anyway, over the weeks we had to do different lab works while we were learning different stuff. The week 4 labworks includes them all pretty much.

I have taken mine bit further than we were suppose to in the UI design and layout, I like my things to look pretty. It wasn't always easy because making procedure for dynamic file path work BEFORE I knew about procedures was a pain, just like was looking for how to include image. Which is really simple but nowhere on the net I could find it, my file paths never worked hence why I ended up using procedure for dynamic file path. Since Blogger wont let m upload text files or even just use kind of spoiler tool (like on forums) I wont be posting the scripts, sore are just too long. Here are just some images of what they do. The first is from my very first script, it makes cubes to be arranged in LILITH formation. Then the other two are my Week 2 and Week 4 UIs.

Overall I think MEL can be useful, its not that hard to understand and I will probably use it my future projects. Don't know about developing my own tools, but you never know.

Maya 4.2

Today we talked a lot about subtle movements and body language for characters, how important they are to show emotions and non-verbal communications. I have decided to research sad/depressed/submissive emotions for my homework. I am also thinking making different animation, I want my character to be really really sad.

I did this animatic for my current storyboard, its not perfect because of lack of good software, I need to find something good and reliable for making videos out of images. PhotoLapse failed me and Windows Movie Maker sucks, so the animatic is about three times longer than it should.

Animated Yorkshire

This was an event I have attended on Sunday 9th with my classmate Sarah. It was a workshop about Stop Motion, run by Ashley Dean from Broken Pixel studio. There was lots of people so it wasn't very technical but we got to design and make a character and then animate it a bit. We used small blue-screen set-up to animate them, which was interesting to see how easy and quick it was with a camera and peace of blue paper. Apparently the animations we did will be combined with bigger animation and it will played on Bradford Animation Festival this year. I think it will be great to see my character on big screen.

This is picture of my character, party Zombie Bob and then me and Sarah when we were leaving. And as you can see there are happy Goths =D

Video Production 0.2

Today was actually fun too, instead of operating cameras and recording we were learning how to use EditCut Pro on Macs, which was kinda annoying because Apple Macs are just weird. I managed to see the recordings we did but unfortunately I was able to only get a copy of the recordings we did before, with the girl mentioned in previous post about Video Production. The editing was fun, it was just lots to take on at once so it was fast, but once I understood the functions it wasn't hard.

I was trying to get screenshot of the video and PS was doing something really bizarre. I PrintScreened my screen with the video on, pasted into PS but when I tried to shrink it or move it the image of the video wouldn't move, everything else did but the still of the girl didn't change, no matter how many new files I made or layers, just stayed the same and appeared only in frames of the video player too, regardless of its size. If it doesn't make sense... it didn't to me either.

Anyway, here is the image after I finally found my way around it.

P.S. Fuck QuickTime player and DivX, all fancy and shit and can't play damn MOV video. I had to download VLC player to be able to see it.

Maya 4.1

No animation or modelling today but I have done my first story board for the clown. Tommorow I gotta finish all the other stuff for animation class, like callendar and self-assesment. Might even do more storyboards and will do an animatic, dont have Flash though, so might just use Maya or Photoshop, it will be only a simple thing. I think thats all about that. Took on some more projects but those are about 2D graphic, so will post about it later.

Here is the storyboard and some sketches. The character is going to be simple, but should give enough for Squash and Strech, different timings and overlapping animation. The clown basically will sadly walk into the shot, then bring his unicycle forward so he can sit on it and then get up. He will ride forward, the camera will zoom out and he will turn around and go the other way. Then she slows down and almost falls back, though instead he falls down forward. Sitting on his knees he starts to cry.

Might actually make it a girl clown, will see when I start modelling it.

Maya 4.0

Somehow Maya 2012 refuses to install on my PC, which was a bitch because I uninstalled 2011 first and then had to install it again after successfully failing in getting 2012 installed and of course they are switching to 2012 in uni so half the files I wont be able to open at home. Anyway, we have to do some practice animations for anticipation so I made one with combined stuff we practiced over the two weeks. I have to get down story board for Friday, I either want to do something with a pixie or a sad clown. We have list of emotions and activities, so for now I am thinking Sad Circus Perfomance, I was thinking a clown with unicycle looking really depressed and sad or maybe a Pixie opening a small present while angry. Both might be fun to do.

For the week 2 practice I did character animation about a space rocket, models were given to us. Oh yeah and I got Youtube channel now too, Flickr is annoying with video limit and blogger was bitchy to upload vidoes the other day. http://www.youtube.com/user/LilithPeterAnimation

Maya 3.9

Okay, I didn't finish that plane yet... but I started doing animations again. In this semester we are doing Advanced Character Animation which seems more fun, just not sure what I want to do yet, I think I will do something with fairies/pixies, kind of like a tribute to the work I did in college for my last year assigment when I was learning Flash.

So far we were playing a bit with Graph Editor for animation and then had to make a combined animation with stuff moving in it. We had few practice scenes with target and arrows and ball and such.Here is what I did, here is just a link to Flickr, Blogger was taking a piss uploading it.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterlilith/6212489508/

Match Moving 0.1

Not much to say for now, beside that it seems really good so far. I am reading this recommended book about Match Moving and I think I will try to get a job as matchmover. It seems like the type of job I'd like to do for a while, can't wait to get started on it.

Video Production 0.1

New (Academic) Year is upon us and so more work, which is quiete exciting. Might have start updating this earlier, but didn't have much to show yet. It week 2 only and I already think the classes are better than before, though also more work at home, especially if I wanna get placement next year.

Anyway, this class is real fun, the teachers are great and the subject is great too. I know some of it from High School so wont be such a problem for me, hopefuly and I am sure with my hand-picked team we can come up with some cool stuff. Our main idea so far is 2 minutes parody of Snow White, not sure what expectaly yet as we all seem to have different ideas, but there will be lots of "easter eggs".

So far we are not focusing on it in the class yet, we only do group meetings to get our  script/storyboard down soon. In the class we had introduction and today we did short filming after training with cameras, which was fun! I got to be the director-ish and camera man for our group. There was also pretty helper girl that we got to record acting, so it was a fun day. Only it was really windy, like a lot so sometime it was hard to keep still.

Some pictures from today of me and my group, my fourth minion was taking the pics so not in the shot =P