Arm rig

Rigging the arm using orient constraints. I also locked and hid some of the channels and just kept the rotate channels visible.

3D poster

Even though I have some understanding of composoting I don't think it's my strongest point. I was able to transfer some of my photoshop knowledge and follow most of the instructions from the campus but in the end I had to do a bit of improvising to get the result I needed. Mainly instead of using silhouette luma I had to use mulitply for the blend mode and some layers weren't pre-composed.

Shadow pass issue

There is a lighting issue happening in the shadow pass for the female. To solve this I rendered 2 shadow passes and a mask pass. I want sharp edges of shadows for the table and chair seeing as some of the other shadows in the live action are sharp. I solved this by rendering the ray cast shadows and depth field shadows separately.

qRig refined walk sequence

Did some refining for the walk sequence of the qRig. I pretty much just fixed up what I noted down in this blog. post http://ktani210.blogspot.com.au/2014/11/walk-cycle.html
There can still be quite a couple of things done with I think it'll do for now. Also in the future I should be using the graph editor more frequently. Some poses I wanted to hold for 2 frames or more and instead setting key frames I should have adjusted the curve in the graph editor for ease of workflow.

Recording day

On the day of recording we didn't use one of the cameras from uni. I had my own small dslr camera but we didn't have a tripod. We kinda just made up our own kind of tripod.

It was very easy for us to record the measurements of the scene. it was just a simple rectangular backyard. We measured the scene to set it to scale implimented the scale in Maya. This saved us allot of time not having to try and guess the scale in Maya. The only variable we had to guess was the rotation of the camera. Everything else was pretty much set.

Rendering and Lighting

So for the animated sequence I'm rendering 240 frames. I learnt how to do batch rendering from previous turntable animations I did for old modelling projects.

For the lighting I used a simple area light with no shadows.

I am also batch rendering 2 passes. A diffuse and shadow pass.

Bath rendering with no floor.

Batch rendering shadows. (Light doesn't have any shadow options turned on.)

 There where allot of issues with the shadow pass mainly concerning the strange shadows on the female character. Here I've circled the issues with the ray traced shadows option turned on(shadow rays = 40 and Ray Depth Limit = 1. Same issue happens with depth map shadows so in the end I just rendered without any of the shadow options turned on to mitigate the issue.

Photogrammetry

Learning Photogrammetry from uni. We learned that it is very important to do measurements so we can virtually apply the measurements from the real world. The objects in the scene are a guide to lining up the perspective of the scene.

Instead of working with centimeters we worked in meters but instead of changing the units in preferences we simply changed the grids display properties.

Using the objects in the scene as a guide to line up the scene with the camera.

Lighting

Doing some lighting in class today. We used a 3 spot lights for our setup. We could've used area lights instead but it would've come at the cost of a longer render time. I can see the benefit of using this lighting system instead of having to rely on physical sun and sky. Like having to create a night scene and such.
- Key light
- Fill light
- Rim light

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Learnt something very useful in maya from my lecturer today. I can crease the edges in smooth preview. This allows me to save poly count instead of wasting polys by adding in another edge loop. So Now I can be sure to use a combination of both techniques in the future.

Instead of creating a turntable under animate we just manually rotated the objects 360 degrees.

A render of the lighting.

I almost forgot to include saying that we got to do some image based lighting with a HDRI image.

Walk Cycle

So my lecturer checked out my attempt at a walk cycle. He only saw the first pass. He mentioned a few things that needs changing for my walk cycle.

-legs are too bent and too far forward
-need to check the first contact
-Wrists need to be floppier
-Shoulder line should mirror(reflect) the hip line
-Tilt torso forward
-Reference myself walking.

My lecturer also told me to reference Muybridge. I searched a couple of images and they look useful.

2nd Pass

Going through the 2nd pass on my female character though there are some things I need to change for the waiting on my character. I need to give her a more real animation But I'm not sure were the errors are.

Rigging issue

I personally wish I saw these little mistakes before animating. I either continue animating with this rigging issue or go back quite a couple of steps to fix it.

Container.

We were given a couple of days to work on this task given to us. Personally I wish I had a stronger work ethic cause I feel I could have done this task allot faster. Course I did hand in everything on Monday but it was at 8 pm when the dead line was at 5 pm. I learnt that even though you do have allot of potential whats most important is having a strong work ethic and there are always ways to improve your workflow and work ethic.

For this task we were using a new program called Crazy Bump for the first time. http://www.crazybump.com/ It's a really handy program. We simply used our AO bake to Generate an NRM map. Though working with low res I had to make some changes in photoshop to give a sharper contrast in lighting.

Refined walk sequence

There wasn't really anything new to learn at home from uni. At uni we only did one footstep which couldn't really go into a cycle. So at home I redid 1st, 2nd and 3rd passes. for the 3rd pass I just had the head bouncing, fingers relaxing(not so obvious), animted the shoulders and animated the toe movements.

When I was working on the 1st pass I was working in left view using this image as a guide for my walk sequence. I might use the same workflow for my character.

1st Pass

We were learning how to do animation in uni and I learned that there are 3 passes. The first pass is a very rigid blocking pass using stepped tangents. (Gif animations below.) Here for the first pass I keyed some of the controls at 3 frames apart and others I keyed 7 frames apart from each other to save time. cool thing is that I applied similar principles in my 2D animation class drawing at 2 frames apart but later when working on the second pass I can convert the stepped tangents to auto tangents.

Looking at the graph editor and seeing the stepped tangents for the foot controls. I can see how important it is to work in this workflow of going through 1st, 2nd and 3rd pass. Kinda like the modelling process from the basic blocking to the detailing.

Low Poly Wheel

For the NRM mapping I used Crazy Bump. But The UV unwrapping I found interesting. I Unwrapped a quarter of the mesh and then overlapped the rest over the top. This allowed me to have a higher resolution but texturing it was a bit tricky due to painting in a straight line instead of painting in a circle.

Headphones

Rendered these headphones though I can clearly see I need to learn more about Mental Ray. There is allot of noise in the shadow. I'm going to have to diagnose and research how to solve the issue.

Reference

Character rigging

Used a couple of references for rigging this character. I used the skeleton reference from the student assets to build the rig. I also have a reverse foot lock for her.

Some of the controls were inspired by the qRig Such as the clavicle controls and the head aiming at the locater. I really like having the head aim at the locater for the sake of convenience. For the hands I gave fingers IK controls. If I was thinking properly then I would've gave the fingers driven keys instead of relying on IK handles. I actually might try that. Thing is I've already bind skin and did a bit of weight painting. I regret not thinking about that sooner.

Heaphones WIP

Gave The Headphones some Basic Maya materials and now it's ready for some Texturing.

Headphones WIP

Ready for a bit of textureing. Most of it I'll just apply Shaders too.