Telling Tales Production Diary Week 8

Again i couldn't quite remember everything i did this week or in which order i did it besides the fact that i did animating at the end of the week. from Monday to Thursday i worked towards figuring out the rig of our character.s

The problem was our characters didn't have the same conventional build of a maya model so the rigging process would of been detrimental to us at this point. the characters didn't have enough polygons and faces to allow for any flexible movement. so we had to think of a different method. I tried to make presets for the legs as they, we thought would only have to be walking (we later realised that they have more movements than intended). These presets worked and created a nice walk cycle for our character which was jumpy and sprightly really showing their character. with their arms we made them seperate to the body and parented them to controllers which were then parented to a main controller for the body, the controllers made it a lot easier to move our characters about.

Thinking id done a good job i gave the model to my partner. Oops. While i had to go home again for family reasons on the friday my partner tried to UV the characters and a new problem arose with the UVs. The controllers on the feet were part of its history that needed to be deleted for the UVs to work which meant they freaked out and caused the UVs to go strange and the file to be too big and to cause it to crash. So while I was away our tutour fixed the problem some how. The room at least was finished with the UVs having finally worked.

For the lighting we used mutiple ambient lights, one main white light in the bulb in the center of the room a few clusters around the flames of the cancdles and a blue one in the computer. These gave it a really nice atmosphere and complimented the muted colours of the water colours. With all this in place i was able to start animating.

We split the animation into scenes to be animated and for the montage we would do the scenes as one long scene and then split them up in post production where needed.

I started with the cauldron and the goblet scenes which both had the same issue of things being detached from objects. But i didnt know how i was supposed to make the hand let go of the objects. through parenting, locators and the visibility settings i was able to make my character throw multiple objects into the cauldron. For the goblet i made a duplicate of the goblet and just switched the visibility between the two so it looked like the bottom fell of in one frame, it works with the aesthetic of our jumpy animation.