28/05/16 - Animation progress and flowey hair ♥

We seem to be making some good progress in our group animation. Started rough animations beginning of this week, placed them in our test animatic, got some good feedback. I think our group knows what we need to be doing, all the tasks at hand, it's just a matter of doing them and getting them done.

I have been testing out how to animate the flowey hair on the wifey in shot 12 when she puts her hands on her chest and smiles. I am trying to go for a soft gentle look.. something about the timing though looks off to me but i just can't place it at the moment. 

side note i want to eat another cookie but i should go to bed now got work tomorrow and had long busy day today orz

This is just rough animation, not the final look of the wife, we will be doing another pass on the rough animations for the clothing and to match her to the model sheet.

Oh yeah Phoenix and I were also talking about me doing the hair flowies on all the shots so that they look the same otherwise it'll all look different if everyone does it. I think it was also discussed that I should do the keys for the clean up..and let everyone else inbetween

26/05/16 - Rough animation

Finished the rough animations for my assigned shots ready for the animatic.
Here are some screenshots of it.

23/05/16 - Renders from weekend

Haha I found out my save file was corrupt from Friday's save over the weekend so I had to redo all the lighting I did. :'( So I redid it all, I couldn't work on it too much since I was doing it at night after work.. so i did as much as I could.
I added a little bit of light on the vanity from the street light and added some boxes to the room to make it look more cluttered and messy. I tried to match what was there before as much as I could.

I also tried to work on some rough animation over the weekend in my spare time but I could only do a few frames

19/05/16 - Cleaned up version of wife in mirror world scene

I drew up a couple of drawings of what the wife would look like cleaned up in the mirror world as reference for animation. The first picture is of shot 12 (i think) where she puts her hands on her chest and shows the husband a comforting and happy look. The second picture is of shot 5 (i think) where she is just sitting there playing the piano~
I was also playing around with colour so it's different in both, going to ask what my team mates think of the colours and get some feedback.

19/05/16 - Mirror World Renders

Here are some reference renders of the camera angles of the mirror world for animation.

19/05/16 - Wife proportions for rough animation reference

Sketched up the body proportions for the wife of the side and three quarter view after Phee and I planned out what to do for rough animation. We planned out the shots that 2D animation are required for, the difficulty of the shots and the specific actions of the animation.

These sketches are so that each person that is assigned a shot has the same body proportions when doing their rough animations. The hair and clothing can be focused on afterwards.

EDIT

New images with chair closer to piano so she isnt stretching

17/05/16 - Environment Test Renders, lighting, shadows

Test renders of the environment. 

I was editing the lighting coming through the window to make it look a little more natural, I didn't get to focus too much on the colour of the lights or the shadows just this time but I will get around to that soon.

I changed the street light to a spot light and played around with the attributes, increased the light radius to make softer shadows from the planks of wood covering the window. The shadows created by these shouldn't be too sharp because the street light isn't that close to the window.

I might have made it a little too soft, I'll play around with it next time I work on this.

I also need to make the scene less dark I think, I'm not really sure. It's supposed to be quite a dark scene, I will look into increasing the brightness of the shadows in the room a little.

The street light has a lot of noise/grain but that can be fixed in the shadow rays attribute for when the final render is ready so render time isn't too slow when testing everything else.

I also think the room could do with a little more debris, if there is enough time I will look into adding that. Just in the corners of the room that are a little too empty. 

16/05/16 - Fixing up render for good scene + edits

I forgot about looking at the good scene so I started playing around with the lights and got a bit carried away. I added a few levels of bevel to the geometry in the scene to make it look less geometric, i added a couple more lights also. I added a back light blue light on the other side of the piano to bring a little bit of contrast to the warmer  lighting, and I changed the lighting a bit for the main light and the ambient. I am not sure if this was Patricks most recent file because it doesn't look that way from the stuff I saw him upload, so I was trying to make it look like what he had before.
I also changed the shadows to depth map because it takes less time to render and also no need for raytrace in a simple scene like this. Can get the same effect from depth map.
I also increased the ambient light in the textures to make them lighter.
After I saved a render of the scene I was happy with for the moment I decided to pull it into Photoshop to test out some possible effects for the "mirror world" look.

16/05/16 - Environment Render -update-

Unfortunately Patrick is unable to come to class, I am taking over his work until he is well enough to return. I had a look at the 3D scene and noticed why the lighting wasn't quite working in the renders, and had to do some colour management to fix it up a bit. I also fixed the lighting a bit, it wasn't set up quite right but now I think it is ok for the moment. I changed the lighting to quadratic and had to change the settings for the lighting to suit what was there before. I also had thought about adding a few little changes to the lighting but I just need this render out first.
Today I just worked on fixing this up quickly to render out so that for our group submissions we have the 3D turnaround render of our environment, the objects within it and the lighting. Since we are running low on time I didn't bother to do multiple passes for the render. But later on in the project when it comes to rendering out the shot using multiple passes would look a lot better for the render.

notes:
-change quality of shadows/lighting (there is some pixelation in the orange lighting)
-add another level of smoothing to blanket
-add newspaper and photo to mirror
-add framed picture on wall
-reflect on colours of shadow/ambient lighting
-bookshelf too dark?
-entire scene still too dark, need to play around with lighting more

update:
Got the finished render done, frame rate is a little too low though for the turn around but there isn't enough time left in the night to render a longer one so just compiling this now for the turn around.
Uploaded render and good to go, slight colour correction was done to scene.

14/05/16 - Environment test repaint

I almost forgot about our idea of doing like a sort of matte painting repaint over our environment renders until today when I was looking through textures to overlay onto the background. So I pulled one of the renders into photoshop and tried out a little bit of a repaint on top of a couple of textures I overlaid to try and give it a more of an artistic feel?  I didn't put too much time into it because it was just a quick test and I wanted to see what my team mates thought of it first. 

My intention here was to remove a bit of the stiffness of the 3D scene and make it look a little more organic.

I realize though that a lot of the textures we put into the scene in maya have dissapeared.

13/05/16 - Animation Notes

Animation notes Phoenix and I thought about for our scene

Elizabeth is pre much playing the piano as the husband is talking to her. Her arms are gently moving as she plays the piano
She turns her head slightly towards him and nods and smiles gently while still playing the piano. She turns her head back, concentrating on playing the piano while listening to her husband. Once the rumbling begins, she stops playing and turns towards him with a look of realization. She puts her left hand out to stop the husband while her right arm is resting on her lap. Puts both hands up to her heart and has a loving and reassuring smile. She puts her left hand out again towards her husband.

Her hair would move slowly as if under water. (Not at a consistent timed movement. We can afford to leave some inbetweens out as it would give as an almost random movement to the hair).
Very flowy and gentle. Any loose clothing would also move slightly. Obviously blinking from time to time.

12/05/16 - Yet another post~ Finished mirror texturing and ideas to be continued

Quickly finished up the effects for the mirror today

Just an idea for the animation -Hair and clothing could move slowly like she's underwater, very soft and flowey.

Second screenshot is an angle for Gabby, she was going to work on some possible title tests :)

Third screenshot is the grungy dirt I added to make couch fit into the scene a bit better!

12/05/16 - Another post~ vanity update

Started some texture tests for the distress on the mirror today. I tried to replicate what I saw in the reference images i found earlier onto the UV for the mirror and I have been doing some trial and error painting.. I also might have to add some slight  texturing to the vanity frame too to give it a bit of realism and detail. For that I will just create a layered shader and put those details on top of the material I have already applied to the geo.

09/05/06 - Couch updates

Today I have been doing a bit of work fixing up the textures for the couch and the other objects around the scene to get it finished and ready to dump into our scene.

(12/05/16) - I haven't been able to finish up the texturing for the couch at home for some reason because maya is coming up with error reports and I cannot open the scene, will try again at course today.

12/05/16 - Vanity feedback

Regarding the feedback given on Monday some changes have to be made to the vanity unit to make it more realistic and tie into the scene better.
I found some images of distressed mirrors and found the look that I am going to go for when changing up the vanity, placing the woman behind this image of the mirror with a bit of slight corrosion/distress will help make the scene a bit more believable.

Also some notes of feedback from previous test shot of the scene
-glow was too bright/overpowering
-the hair on the wife was too dark, needs an extra overlay or something to match her with the dream world, need to be lighter and more saturated.

09/05/16 - Catch up blog about previous work

Over the last week of last term and over the break I had been trying to do some work in MudBox for the vanity unit in our group animation. I had been playing around with it to see what kind of details I can make for it since it is the centre piece in our animation.. after spending so much time trying to work out how to use bud box and create some details I thought looked nice I started looking into importing it to maya. I asked for some help from Raj and he told me that I could have done some of the details I did in maya instead, and that I should only use mudbox for the small details I can't do in maya. I didn't really realize this at the time so I kinda went overboard.. and spent a little too much time in it.
I ended up scrapping the stuff I did in mud box and redoing it all in just a couple of hours in maya~ I think I'll stick to maya for now until I have a little more experience with mudbox, how to use it and what to use it for if needed. I also ended up just using materials instead of textures for the new vanity I did in maya and it turned out a lot nicer than the paint stuff I did in maya, and it was a lot easier to do. :)

06/05/16 - Wife (final animation look) + Vanity finished

Been a while since I updated my blog. Tonight I spent a bit of time fixing and finishing up the vanity unit after a few headaches of editing it through mud box. Thanks to Raj, I realized I could just do the details I wanted in Maya, so I scrapped all the Mudbox sculpting and went back to Maya, and I finished up the vanity pretty fast. Since I didn't have much time left for the team meetings tomorrow I just decided to use some simple shaders for the Vanity's materials.

I also drew up a final animation look for the wife and how she would look in the scene. Ah... looking at it now the angle looks a bit wrong for the piano. It's 12:36am I'll just ask the others about it tomorrow and maybe change it a bit before class. I also wrote some notes for the effects to use for the scenes with the wife.
The vanity unit is just from a screenshot, I didn't use a render because the furniture is going to be compiled into the scene tomorrow morning hopefully before the meetings, so if that is ready to go I might be able to replace this with a render of the actual scene maybe.
I was going to draw up a few different pictures of the shots with the wife but it's getting a bit late and I have to get up in like 5 hours. :(