Discovery

Discovery from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.


My grad film, completed in 7 months. Thanks to everyone who helped along the way

[insert witty title]

So its been a while since I last updated this properly, loads has happened in that time. I'm writing this sat in a hotel bar drinking an ice cold pint celebrating getting a 2.1 for my degree and starting my new job as an animator at Rare.

To say I've been lucky is an understatement, admittedly I've worked hard this year but it's all coming together at last. The month or so before hand in was unbelievably stressful and I still cant watch the film without cringing at glaring mistakes and animations that are a little too rough around the edges.

The grad show came and went and I'll post photo's from that once I've been reunited with my camera, which is in one of many boxes 116 miles away in Cardiff. The show itself was a success, was a good chance to see people from my original year before I disappeared to do the animation internship at Lionhead Studios as well as getting to see my film on the big screen, the biggest surprise came the next day when I got a mention on the ffresh review of the screening and show.

Whilst all of this was going on I'd been applying for various jobs and snuck off for an interview at Rare in Birmingham, within the space of 7 days I'd been offered the job, moved to Cardiff, and then frantically raced upto Birmingham to start work as an animator/motion editor.

I'm still not entirely sure as to the purpose of this blog post gradutation, in some respect it will always be my production journal for the grad film and a place to ramble about the various projects I'm working on. So far there's been talk of working on a game with Chris Caesar, vague discussions of a windows phone game with Megan and Jacko once Tea and Techno have finished competing at Dare to be Digital, as well as wanting to get my reel vastly improved to send out after my time here at Rare. It seems the work really never ends but there's so many cool things going on I really cant complain. While I try figure out the best way to keep working on my reel (separated from pc whilst on the short contract at rare) and juggling the other projects I'm shortly going to be posting various things over at #AltDevBlogADay but it may be a few weeks before that gets off the ground as internet access and time have been in fairly short supply...

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

Testing of things so far....

Another hectic week in which a lot has been learnt, took a day or two but ive got a skin texture im happy with so spending time researching and looking into subsurface scatter has proved worth while, the bedroom is complete except for the posters and medal, the earthboy is also done except for some tweaks to the hair. The next couple of days im going to be focusing on getting the moon up to the same level so by monday I can focus all my attention on lighting and rendering and try and get a decent first cut out for the 10th of may deadline.

Texturing:

Problems:


Turns out the render farm is down and unavailable, which sucks however I had a feeling that if anything were to go wrong it would be this. So I decided to see what the Uni pc's are capable of and rendered a relatively simple sequence full HD with a poor lighting set up (have since found tutorials) these 4 seconds took 3 hours to render so getting 3 mins out on time is going to be tight seeing as theres still a couple of weeks work to go into all of this. Another added problem is that they auto power off after 20mins of inactivity and that cancels the render so leaving work over night also seems impossible.

Quick Render Test from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Deadline:

Now ive got a gauge for how long the rendering will take and the work that needs to be done in post the 6th of may has become my absolute deadline for work to be completed and ready to render/tweak lights etc. Unexpected shift in dates but hopefully something thats realistic providing there's large quantities of caffiene available.

Subsurface Scatter Tests

Today I learnt about Sucsurface Scatter (SSS), the top photo is how the boy looked this morning with a flat horrible lambert, so I tried to figure out how to get some texture and life into the skin, the 2nd image is pretty much the default maya/mental ray SSS shader - all waxy and horrible. 3rd is the latest incarnation, getting there still got to play with the specular highlights etc... but the bump and colour maps add a lot of detail, shall continue with this experiment

Bedroom Textures and Lights

Finishing up the bedroom textures and starting to play around with lights.....

Update on everything and yet nothing in particular...

... been a long and busy week but theres been a huge leap in progress and a massive drop in stress levels which is awesome.

Animation:
The majority of the animation work is completed and Ive been able to get some help from Scott MacDonald on some of the shots I was struggling to get ready on time.
Texturing:
The bedroom is very close to being completed just got a few things to finish up like the posters and stars and tweak a few things here and there. Matt Sutcliffe has helped an insanely huge amount with this and has got things looking awesome, needless to say I would be really upagainst it with out his help the last few weeks.
The Moon is very much WIP but ive finally got a good indication of what i want it to be like which has been a real block the last few weeks.
Lighting:
Is my new nemesis.
Audio:
FINALLY found a composer who sounds genuinely excited and interested in the project and had some amazing tracks that are being used as a start point, played a few over the film and it added so so much, really looking forward to getting the 1st edit which i think is gonna arrive on time for the first cut review.
Edit:
I also managed to playblast and arrange all of the sequences into the first edit of the latest version of the film and its improved hugely, the pacing is loads better and from the feedback i've had its working as a film at last! Another bonus is that in the way ive structured the projects through Maya, After Effects and Premiere providing I stick to correct file naming conventions and folder structure the edit should remain untouched for the most part and just update with higher quality visuals as the project comes to completion. Render times are becoming concerning along with my total lack of lighting knowledge but if i can have another couple of weeks like this one then i should get something out that im happy with.

All in all collaboration is good and I wish i'd asked for help sooner.

Test Edit with 1st pass animation and blockout

Moonboy Test Comp for review from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.

Everything so far in one sequence to check pacing, see how the new shots work and whats left to do, Clean up is taking longer than expected but having a HUGE helping hand with textures means I can afford a day or two longer to get this looking really good. 

Shotlist Update

Midway through animation clean up, the bedroom should be completed by the end of the weekend and the moon will hopefully follow soon after, also getting a few textures going here and there so will get some render tests and better quality WIP shots posted asap

Studio closed for holidays... make front room studio...

The studios are closing for easter so the lounge is now the new studio so Moonboy and Puddles can carry on being made

Tests

montage seq v2

Shuffled things round a bit, feels a lot better to me, gonna block this version in asap and playblast everything so far to check it out... will post updated animatic/work in progress edit soon

montage test, wanna have the camera move around a little and put in some shots further away. showing the development of the rocket slowly coming together etc

Somewhere in here is a montage I just havent found it yet... there in no particular order yet but some of the drawings i like. a lot.

Tests

Been fiddling round with getting a working duvet reacting to the boy breathing/sleeping, nice little anim starting to appear (and im aware the UV unwrapping is not done yet hence the warped look on a lot of things but not everything is going to require it and for the time being im more focussed on the animation and getting the story working)

jump on bed

In an attempt to stop me doing over and over the same anim file ive set a time limit on blocking... then uploading whats ready so far. so here is the last hours work. i can see whats wrong but there simple weight shifts/adjustments/arms theres 2 looping keys on there making him look like a chicken :( (i think) and also have to rig the bed so he can actually bounce rather than go through it.

trying to get a contrast between the two jumps, found a video of astronauts jumping/playing on the moon that i used as reference but needs lots of work and figuring out the cut between the two is tricky - almost, well probably does need pose matching...