CAGD_495

Week 12

This week I finished up the animations that I had, as well as modeling a doorbell to put into the scene for shot 2.  The doorbell was a very simple model that I created just to have for the rig to press so it didn't look like he was just pressing air.  The other thing that I was working on this week to little success was attempting to UV the van to allow the logo to be placed on it.  I spent many hours trying to fix the model to allow the UV process to work, however the tediousness as well as the countless errors that I ran into made me run out of time to completely fix it for UVing.

Week 11

Throughout break I worked on fixing up some animations from Shot 5 with the chicken animations. The main things I worked on was shot 6 and the transfer of the bag to the chicken.  I had to remember how to give items to rigs but then had to do research on how to transfer the object from one rig to another, which involved attaching multiple locators to the same object and then adjusting which locator was active at the right moments.  I think that the shot turned out how I wanted it to look like but I want to adjust where the locator on the chicken is, because of the fact that the bag feels a bit too far away. But other than that I believe that we will be on track for rendering by this week.

Week 10

For this week I continued on polishing the walk cycle for the chicken, to reduce the slide as much as I could, as well as working on the delivery driver's animations to help him not clip through the environment, specifically through his feet and the floor.  I also changed up the animations for the chicken in Shot 5 to make the chicken seem more prideful and less nervous based on recommendations from the rest of the group as well as Frank in Weeklies.  The changes to the chicken definitely make the chicken feel more unhinged and happy that it gets to eat other chickens.  This week I'll try to get the animations for the bag up and running so that the chicken can take the bag of food out of the delivery driver's hand.  I may also do a small bit of facial animation because the delivery driver's face shows up for a second or two.

Week 9

This week I continued to work on the walk cycle for the chicken as well as changing the animations to now match where the delivery driver hands the bag to the chicken. My main focus will be refining the chicken in shot 5 as well as improving the handoff and turn animations in shot 6.  I believe that this week Ill be able to do much of the needed refinement for the shots that I have been assigned.  I do feel that I have been distracted by other classes at the moment but I will reign my focus back to this class in the next week.

Week 8

This week I continued working on the walk cycle for the chicken in Shot 6 (was shot 7) to make it have more character, I wasn't able to work on the grabbing animation or add the other model, so it was mainly a refinement week.  We recorded the mocap data for the remaining shots as well as reshot some of the actions that we waned to use in our shots on Wednesday.  This week I will import the mocap data as well as work on matching the actions in the scene.

Week 7

For this week I finished working on shot 6 for the time being, there still needs to be some animations on the feet of the cat and dog so they do not slide across the floor but I am pretty happy with where the animation is at the moment.  I also have begun work on shot 7 but was only able to block out a quick walk because I need to import the mocap data into the scene to figure out timing an positioning for the chicken.  This week we plan on finally finishing off capturing the mocap for the scenes that we need the data for.  I also plan on continuing my work on shot 7 to get it to the best I can before we add the mocap.  Until then I shall keep working on shot 6 to hopefully add the feet animations.

Week 6

This week I was working on the animations for Scene 2 Shot 3 of the animals reacting to the order of Chicken Nuggets.  This week I continued to clean up the dog's animations as well as adding the some of the cat's.  They are still rough animations and need some work but they are functional for the time being until I am comfortable with other shots to go back and improve those.  The hardest part about this week was finding and referencing how a cat's tail moves when it is excited, it is not as simple and stiff as a dog's so I had to learn how they curl over themselves and the tip's offset compared to the base of the tail.  I did over pose the animation originally so I had to cut out some of the animations that I did to make it feel more natural and smooth instead of jerky and overwhelming.

I do wish that I was able to work on the animations more this week, however other due dates for other classes required my attention.  This next week I plan on finishing up the cat's animations and moving and hopefully finishing the chicken's animations for this shot.  Then I can move onto Scene 2 Shot 4, where the chicken takes the bag.

Week 5

This week I was working on texturing the bag that I created last week as well as adjusting the shots that I previously worked on.  Uving and texturing the bag was not difficult at all, I also imported the logo that I designed onto the bag, however I may need to adjust it slightly to give it a larger white border so it doesn't blend into the red bag.  For the animations I worked on the dog to try to get it progressed to a point where I am happy, I plan on doing the chicken and cat for that shot next.  The shot that I am saving to do last is the chicken's shot because I want to put lots of effort and exaggeration into it but I would like to have other shots finished before that one.  I feel like I have made pretty good progress this week, with the new prop and textures as well as the animations. 

This week I plan on continuing to work on the animal animations for the most part to have them caught up with the rest of the animation.  I also want to talk to the rest of the group on whether we would want to use mocap for the rest of the animations on the sam rig, or if they would like to hand animate the few remaining shots.

Weekly 4

This week I decided to work on the props and logo to make sure we had those to animate around for some of the scenes where we have the characters holding props.  I designed the logo for Nom Nom Express, the company our commercial is for, as well as creating the food carrying bag that the delivery driver will be carrying.  The logo will be used on the car, bag, as well as being displayed at the end of the commercial.  We needed the bag to be made because originally we had just a larger identical bag to the food bags that he was handing out, but this clears up much of the visual confusion. 

We also used the Xsens suit to mocap much of the actions that one of our actors performed.  It will absolutely speed up the process of our animation as well as help improve the quality of it.  There are a couple scenes that we decided not to mocap at the moment because we didn't know if we would be able to animate the face alongside the mocap animation, we will figure this out this week and either stick to hand animating in some shots, or simply finish off mocapping all of it.  This week I plan on texturing the bag and setting it up to be used in the scene, as well as working on the mocap data that we have to help add animation layers onto it as well as getting it into the maya scene to be transferred into unreal after the proper setup is done.

Weekly 3

This past week we finished doing the 3d animatic block-out, on Monday when we first turned it in our results were very subpar so we buckled down and were able to block out everything in Maya before attempting to bring it over into unreal which was our main issue before.  Our results for doing everything for Maya made us much happier than we were previously and made us feel much more caught up with the class.  I was experiencing many issues with one of the rigs that we were using, causing in many crashes and the loss of some save data.  I have been doing my best to troubleshoot, but with no idea what is causing the issue it is very hard to determine.  I plan on continuing to troubleshoot and ask around for any similar issues or fixes, but if worse comes to worse, we may have to swap out the rig that we are using for one of our actors.  This next week I hope to get the issues that we have fixed as well as begin on splining the animation, resulting in much smoother and cohesive storytelling.

Weekly 2

This week we have been mainly blocking out the story boards in unreal while also learning the unreal pipeline.  We had been trying to import the models and rigs into unreal from Maya, which caused many issues that we were unprepared for.  This resulted in some issues where the the models would not want to import into unreal or export out of Maya.  We also have been constructing the scene that we plan to use in Unreal and have gotten the scale over to Maya for the correct sizes of the rigs we will be using.  Our scene in unreal was then used for out 3D animatic block-out for the assignment.  Unreal was causing many issues with the sharing and importing so for the block-out we just used basic geometry to represent the characters that we were unable to get into unreal at the time being.

 Weekly 1

This week has mainly been getting used to the rigs that we have chosen for our production as well as setting up all of the programs that we need such as Unreal Engine 5.  In the previous weeks we decided to film reference to be used for animation and storyboarding purposes, they were used to develop timing and the camera angles that we would hope to use in the project.  I have been working with the chicken rig mainly to try to get used to it as well as attempting to make chicken mannerisms work through the rig.  It's been slightly difficult, due to the fact that chickens are very quick with their mannerisms and it can be hard to replicate in the animations, but overall the process has been going very smoothly so far.  I have not started doing actual animations for the project yet because we have been trying to set up the Unreal project to get the correct scaling of the models to animate with in Maya.  The process is very difficult that some of my past experiences with working on productions for a large animation like this, at my internship we animated exclusively with motion capture and then had tools to edit the recordings in Maya to get the desired results.  The major difference is that the animations we did were usually much shorter than the shots that we had planned for this project, as they were more individual actions that can be merged together in the game software.