Sheep stage mid shot

Week 5 looming mile stone

Looming Week Five Milestone:

Animate sheep Close Up scene.

The background being quite simple (see pic) has already been crafted.

The sheep character has been fully rigged, bar one problem with the eyes rotating strangely..

Description: "The sheep does three takes. Left, right, then centre. His ears with his head movements"

The monster, which sneaks up from behind... will have to wait, as Chris has %80 textured Lee's "old man" hands. Given a blinn, or a nice soggy wet look, these old man hands can be turned monstrous.

Sheep's deformation test

The deformation test reveals flaws in the character's skinning process, where in incorrect weighting results in bad deformation.

Not a lot of effort was required in weighting, as I used Jack Parry's influence technique to rig the character, wherein extra joints are placed inside the character's mesh to help keep the shape. Those new to Rigging may find the influence technique quite intimidating, as the number of joints are almost tripled. Seemingly it's a confusing eye sore, but if placed correctly the animator saves alot of time and stress when it comes down to applying weights.

Painting weights in Maya is buggy, and the technology is haphazard at best. By removing weights from the arm, the programs default reflex is to place that excess weight randomly over the character, giving you almost no control. This piece of knowledge is something that is learned the hard way, as no pop up informs you of this.

You can systematically weight each joint, then return to check on the very first and marvel at the randomization of all your hard work. Frustrating, but we found loop holes and ways around this.

The problem with this character, is that his mesh tends to look quite jagged and harsh around the nack, and the body. Smoothing edges has softened him a bit, but there are still some weighting issues that need to be smoothed out.

early pencil test

Pencil testing, though a time consuming aspect of the pre-production process, is invaluble.

Early Layout

Discovered an early layout, wherein almost everything has been scratched or changed to make room for more efficent enviromental modelling. Though it looks nice, most of the objects were unworkable. Tis the trouble of balancing 2d design skills with 3d skills.

Lighter, and darker. Contrasts

eyes on the prize

Trouble with pouring countless hours into a single piece of art, is that it's easy to become so absorbed by it, that imagining the eye of the audience or the viewer becomes hazy.
It's handy to pass things around and get feedback, as long as those you show are credible and trusted, and not some one who desperately enjoys the rare opportunity to jump on their high horse and pretend they know what they're talking about.

The footprint scene needs to be exactly that, a scene which reveals the monsters presence through the gaping massive footprint he has left behind. But does this look like a footprint? I feel it's not clear enough.

Some more sculpting work is in order.

I think I need an aerial shot to help show off the footprint, though it was not planned in the storyboards, and will require more work, but this is all apart of the process.

Facial expression and lighting

Pose

Is this a convincing enough pose?

It's often tempting, when in scenes you have limited animation to help the audience anticipate the coming action, to go ahead and squeeze more in then necessary.
But what concerns me is the pose, the singular held pose must be strong.
Does it look like the character is barricading himself indoors? using his body weight to hold the door shut?

Another Problem

Seem to be having a great deal of trouble attatching my characters eyes, to his face.
I created both the Shepherd, and his eye balls as sepperate objects. I made a simple eye rig which works for the time being, though rigs seem to have sneaky ways of breaking down the track...

After skinning the character, i then moved onto binding the eyes of the character by;
1. Combing the eye ball mesh with the character mesh, then skinning both. But this didnt seem to work, as when the character moves his head, the eyes ball stay in their default pose.

2. creating joints for the eyes. This works somewhat, but the eyes tend to rock on some sort of hidden axis, failing to follow the head, and the eye rig which from memory was an aim constraint, stops working.

Making grass.

After watching Pixar's 'Up' and dealing with the usual diminishing thoughts that such a massive studio instils upon a student, I marveled at the grass.
I have sphereical planes with some texture and bumpmap work to create the illusion of grass and follage, but sadly It still looks flat, and unconvincing.

Usually I tend not to get bogged down on enviromental props, as I feel an audience without the critical mind of an animator only soaks up background imagery subconsciously, however this inability to create realistic grass is bugging me.

Fur physics in Maya could achieve this, though the scene I wish to add is already quite compilated to the point of slowing down a computer with decent ram and graphics card, the fur could be it's death.

Obviously I could render different sections of the scene, but having a camera move complicates this, and keeping it all together is a more time consuming render, but more controlled and less work in compositing.

Pixar creates beautiful intertwining grass, but I'm sure whatever script or technology they have up their sleeve, will stay hidden for a good long time.

Help! Whats a render effective way to create grass?