Degree Complete... Level Up!

So I've handed in the grad film and have completed my degree, it's been a long testing year but it's also been awesome. There's a few bits and pieces I want to tweak and the edit needs a tiny bit of work now the final audio is sorted but other than that i'm real happy with how it's all turned out. I'm dying to post it but in even better news I've made the shortlist of the top 12 Ba/Ma films and festival submissions appear to be liking exclusivity for a while... However if you want to see the final thing e-mail me/comment and i'll sort something out :)

Moving onto re cutting my showreel and generally job hunting in an attempt to distract me from thinking about getting the final assessment feedback...

Blockout to Final Render

This clip shows some of the processes involved from animation to final film, the first section shows the blocked out animation of the proxy models, the second shows the animation converted to spline curves and a first pass on clean up, the model has also had a smooth preview applied to ensure that there are no strange intersections and base textures have also been applied. The third and final section consists of the final render from the film, the scene has been lit and as a result the SubSurfaceScatter texture on the skin appears along with a light inside the helmet, the background has also been added in post. 

Light at the end of a ridiculously long tunnel

So I've nearly finished the film for monday's hand in, the last few scenes are rendering and the edit is pretty much there. The only decision left to make is whether the bed jumping animation stays

 
I can see the argument for cutting and leaving.... at the moment i want to drop it but that knocks the music out and im still waiting for the final draft of that to arrive so i guess i'll probably make that call late on sunday... that or remove it for the grad show (click link for trailers/previews and profiles etc)

Eitherways while this has been rendering I've been working on Megan's film and doing various things, the biggest job was working on one of the puddle worlds and making a CG city so she could animate a tricky camera shot which iI then inked....

All that's left to do now is a huge write up and publicity pack, hand in on monday then work back into the film a little more for the grad show, I want to get string behaving like string but still don't fully understand how to make this work on time for monday which is a shame but I wanted time to make sure the edit was right and refine a few other animations that I felt were more important. Will have a trailer/link to finished film soon.

Rendering

I'm almost finished with maya, nearly every scene has been rendered with one or two animations left to complete and refine. I've spent the weekend shifting settings and generally solving technical issues which took a little longer than expected but for the most part it's all falling into place.
The biggest relief is sorting out the tomato face in the cave, it turns out I'd changed the settings of the SSS shader without realising and made the layers of skin super thin, so once they were corrected the render started behaving and looking less red. Here is a picture;

Once the animations are out of maya im putting everything through after effects to add in the skies and do any colour correction as required. There have been a couple of cases where I've had strange artifacting on the walls or props, in these situations I've gone back to the source file and rendered the character and environment out on separate layers and composited the two in after effects, these are then exported as uncompressed .mov files for the final edit which is happening in Premiere Pro.

Renders

Been lighting, rendering and stressing pretty much all week but finally have a configuration im pretty happy with, also the renderfarm is alive again so once the last few bits and pieces are textured i'm gonna work up the animation a little and the finally hit render.

 

Argh

What happens when I open a 2011file in an older version of maya.... Not cool