Running out of Time

Ok so now we had the block through, we were able to move on to animating the characters for each shot. I shared the shots out between Adam, Sean, and myself and created a file system where we would all reference in the finished characters into the block through shots and work from there. The animation was definitely the part of the production which I most enjoyed, but again time was an issue. At this point we only had two weeks left and allot of shots to get through. The first shot I went onto was the trumpet shot where I needed to create an ncloth for the flags. Something strange did happen in this shot where the ncloths stop working and wouldn’t let me reapply it. So I had to copy the animation I had done on the trumpets onto some locators and then move these locators into a new scene along with the cameras and then re-reference in the trumpets and then start the ncloth from scratch. This did work out for the best as I wasn’t really too neat in my previous attempt at creating the ncloth. Anyway got the ncloth attached played around with the attributes and finally got it just the way I wanted it. And then my shot become corrupt and I lost all the work I had done. I had also recently changed computers and didn’t have incremental save on so didn’t have a previous shot to work from ... great.

Well that was a huge waste of time I didn’t have so I decided to move onto my next shot and come back to this a bit later. So for the next shot I referenced in my characters and animated them, and all seemed to go smooth which was nice. So I animated a few more shots and no problems yet. Now we were really running out of time so needed to start lighting and rendering out any shots we had animated. Now one thing we needed to do to the referenced characters was to turn on the smooth when rendered setting in the approximated editors, which was fine for most characters but we did have a few problems. The little squire’s topology was a bit illegal so I and Adam had to go through these models and figure out where it was going wrong and fix it. Another thing taken up time we didn’t have, but managed to get them fixed, except now Adams quires would render out smooth but when we tried to reference them into the shots they would crash Maya. So we couldn’t really render all the shots with the red squire in. Anyway I moved on to lighting the shots that would work and render them out. We really had no time at this point so it was just a quick throw a few lights in check it looks ok and render. We decided it was best rendering out the characters and shadows on different passes so we could then play around with these in the comp to get them looking right. Then moved on to rendering, and putting the shots together as best we could in after effects. The shots that we did finish were starting to look quite nice and it was a real shame we couldn’t get more done for the deadline, but I just put what we had into our block through and gave this in, but I am planning to get the project done anyway.