Telling Tales Production Diary Week 9

Monday - Over the weekend my partner went through the timings for the animation and each scene which meant a few of the scenes that i had done were actually slightly out of time as they were following a slightly different animatic as i got the variations of our animatics mixed up. This meant that i would have to go back and rework the animations. But before i did this i was going to have to rerig a couple of our models as there were certain models that were different because my partner had altered them on their folder. However because those scenes were much shorter scenes (only a couple of seconds) I started work on the largest scene of mine so that my partner could work on the final scene after that as we needed continuity. The scene was taking some time and trying to stick to the exact timings wasn't working because the actions of the chicken body just bouncing was very unnatural so we decided that it would be okay to go beyond the time limit of 1 minute for our animation and we could keep the pauses the length they needed to be to keep the comedic timing. Im glad we decided upon this as it means were putting the flow of the animation ahead of everything else so that our animation will be smooth and entertaining.

Tuesday - Mental. Breakdown.
No matter what i did maya did not work for me. I had gotten a large chunk of a scene animated yesterday and then had to move a part of the model, which was parented to what i just animated. so that meant the head that i had animated bouncing was jumping up and down with the movement of its parent. So i tried unparenting it, didn't work. Then i tried to go back, i couldn't get back the work id done and i hadn't saved. I was being pushed to my limits at this point so i started again, what does it do? Crashes.
So after the eventful day of spending the whole day on Maya and accomplishing nothing as well as causing my stress levels to go through the roof i had to drop my plans to work on something for responsive because it was going to become detrimental to me if i didn't stop something. I should take this on and think about why it happened as im still only learning how to use maya.

Oh and we had a crit where we showed what we had gotten animated up to this point. While the animations that i had gotten done were well received in the fact that i got people actually laughing at what i had animated it was partially for the wrong reasons, my character was making some very suggestive movements unintentionally. During this small crit i felt a little disappointed as i felt that all the problems up to this point were my fault and it was stopping us from getting more of our animation done as well as producing something that was of decent quality, wether these problems were within my control or not

Wednesday - Okay. So after an evening of purposely not doing anything after the events of yesterday i calmly approached the same scene from yesterday and begun to get the animating done. I found out about the squash input tool which came in very handy when trying to give the chickens initial bounce a humorous and more natural touch although it didn't quite parent correctly but i was able to make it work and at the end of the day i was able to get the scene to my partner so that she could import the animated expressions.

Thursday - I worked on my other longer scene today which i was nervous and apprehensive to begin due to the past experiences. Also i could only work on it for around 4-5 hours due to other timetabled sessions. during the hours i was able to work on it i worked to make an entertaining walk cycle for our characters one where the body would bounce up and down rapidly according to their stature. The Short stubby scientist was to have a rapid walk where the legs would switch back and forth and up and down, initially i did the same for the occultist but my partner thought it didn't fit, he was moving too quickly. So I slowed him down and made it so that he came to the centre at a different time to the scientist to give them a less mechanical action.

Friday - I took the scene i was working on yesterday and completed it in record time. My initial plan was to seperate each camera cuts into a seperate scene but found that i could set key frames on the camera as well. And so i continued to animate the scene. It all went rather smoothly and for once i didn't have any problems, i feel like i finally cracked maya, it was just a case of getting a balance on both sides with the chaos being caused by the chicken and i had to make he chicken bounce on the heads of the brothers at the end so that it could land in the middle as they were too close for it to land inbetween them. I have been continuously saving. There was one instant where the light source was not parented to the bulb model and i wasn't even able to set key frames regularly so i found out that you can set key frames by key selecting the lights attributes so i just moved the light source with the bulb. While because of the way we are rendering, maya software 2.0, we don't get such solid shadows on objects so the light movement doesn't affect much but there is a slight glow shift. With the beam that appears from the magic circle my partner said that she would figure it out as neither of us knew how the light would work.

Saturday - Now that the larger scenes were finished i went back to my shorter scenes that i had to do. With the goblet pouring scene i made his body move backwards instead (much to my dissapointment) so it now looks like hes jumping back in shock as the 'blood' falls into the goblet and through the bottom. Using the same key select method i used for the light i made the blood fall through the funnel. it was really easy to do as they were just cuboids and we weren't using any particle effects.