The fight scene before imported
less glitchy version
Friday 7 March 2008
The Final Stages(of dooooooom)
There was one day where Maya decided to behave randomly and let us work on the animation. In the morning we opened the file and the animation was screwed like before. A few hours later i tried opening the file having not changed anything and it was working perfectly??!?? so I worked on it for the rest of the day which was all good. I then went home and reanimated the the parent constraints for the weapons. Came to college the next day and opened it and it was a mess again. This time it didn't fix itself so i had to find a way to get it sorted before we rendered.
I had to go back to the tala rig, delete the character sets, create new ones in the same order as the last ones and then re apply a merged version of the clips within the rigged file. This worked when referenced back into the main scene but it meant that I had to import the reference content if I wanted to edit anything. On top of that because the clips were merged i had the problem of there being keys on every frame again. It also meant I had to redo the parent constraints again and while doing this i noticed that her shoulders were all a total mess so went back through the animation re keying them. Finally everything was done and in the scene and ready to render. In test renders we found that the bump maps for some textures were not having any effect for some unknown reason. Other than that everything was fine. I set up lights and a shadow pass because the hardware renderer has crappy shadows and we needed to do them in software. So i did that and one of the main camera renders over night. In the morning we looked at the renders to find that Tala's eye texture had been replaced with her teeth texture!??!?! In the test renders they showed up find, just not in the batch render. I had to re save the eye texture as a tiff for it to work in the batch. Next, because somehow there was motion blur on the shadow pass that i don't remember setting, the shadows looked like crap. Really blurry crap. they rendered quick enough so Jake and i got to work on putting effects into the main render in after effects while it rendered. this all went smoothly because after effects isn't Maya. We then had problems with certain particles not showing up in the particle passes so i redid them and they look fine apart from the one in the last shot which can hardly be seen at all. After rendering out of after effects and watching it back i noticed that where i had redone the shoulders i either missed a bit or it just messed up again because her elbow flips out for a couple of frames and it really sucks.
I'm Happy with most of the animation but due to the process of using animation clips and putting everything together things got a bit messy and there are a couple of bits that i wish i was able to spend longer on. If there was time i would like to be able to go over everything and just make it look polished, something i have been unable to do in both the project this year.
I had to go back to the tala rig, delete the character sets, create new ones in the same order as the last ones and then re apply a merged version of the clips within the rigged file. This worked when referenced back into the main scene but it meant that I had to import the reference content if I wanted to edit anything. On top of that because the clips were merged i had the problem of there being keys on every frame again. It also meant I had to redo the parent constraints again and while doing this i noticed that her shoulders were all a total mess so went back through the animation re keying them. Finally everything was done and in the scene and ready to render. In test renders we found that the bump maps for some textures were not having any effect for some unknown reason. Other than that everything was fine. I set up lights and a shadow pass because the hardware renderer has crappy shadows and we needed to do them in software. So i did that and one of the main camera renders over night. In the morning we looked at the renders to find that Tala's eye texture had been replaced with her teeth texture!??!?! In the test renders they showed up find, just not in the batch render. I had to re save the eye texture as a tiff for it to work in the batch. Next, because somehow there was motion blur on the shadow pass that i don't remember setting, the shadows looked like crap. Really blurry crap. they rendered quick enough so Jake and i got to work on putting effects into the main render in after effects while it rendered. this all went smoothly because after effects isn't Maya. We then had problems with certain particles not showing up in the particle passes so i redid them and they look fine apart from the one in the last shot which can hardly be seen at all. After rendering out of after effects and watching it back i noticed that where i had redone the shoulders i either missed a bit or it just messed up again because her elbow flips out for a couple of frames and it really sucks.
I'm Happy with most of the animation but due to the process of using animation clips and putting everything together things got a bit messy and there are a couple of bits that i wish i was able to spend longer on. If there was time i would like to be able to go over everything and just make it look polished, something i have been unable to do in both the project this year.
Sunday 2 March 2008
Stupid stuff that doesn't make sense (maya is posessed)
Anna and Dan finished (kinda) their models so that I could skin them to the animated rigs and add the blend shapes. This took a long time because Maya's history system sucks and caused a new problem every ten minutes. After I had the characters in a state where they could be imported into the blocked out scene and have their animation clips timed out.... that's what I did. This was all fine for a while, at least until things like this started happening:
So apparently the zombies skin weights are stupid?! This happened every time I reopened a saved file. It was fixed easily enough by just using the paint skin weights tool and clicking on the mesh and they reset to where they should be which makes complete sense : However, the last time I tried to use that little trick to sort the problem out I got a big red cross through the paint weights tool (as you can see in the image above) which apparently means "NOO!! yous not paintin no skin weights here bruv innit". To add to Maya's insults it decided to throw this at me:
Its obvious why this has happened.... isn't it?
Well at least i knew it had something to do with blendsahpes.
OOOk so the only solution i came up with was to re-import the zombie character but this meant I would have to re-time out all of the animation clips which I had spent days doing. To get over this I merged all the clips into one and the exported that as a new one so that I could import it back in to the new zombie. The first problem with this is that when you merge clips it sets keys for every attribute of every object in the character set ON EVERY FRAME!!!! This makes it pretty hard to edit later so its a good job I was happy with most of the animation on the zombie. The other problem with this is that the global control was not included in the character set for good reason!! It wasn't included so that the whole character could be moved and scaled independent of the rest of the characters animation. So the animation I had done on it for when the character needed to move where i had done on the spot walk cycles and where i had repositioned her between shots was gone. I decided to make a new character set for the global control and make an animation clip out of the animation on it to re-import onto the new zombie. This seems to have worked for the time being.
At least Tala didn't have any problems....
Shit.
So this is the other thing that happened whenever I reopened a scene. Her lower body stayed in the same pose that it was in when the scene was saved for the whole animation. again i found a way to get round this by activating and then deactivating the keys for the animation clips. I didn't find a permanent way of fixing this.
So it came to the time when i needed to show the animation to the rest of the group. I open up the scene and we all nearly cried:
If you hadn't noticed, all of Tala's animation is messed up.
I tried the the tricks from before but nothing happened. Thankfully though, it worked fine when I got home and opened it on my PC. Question is will we be able to render at college?!?!
On top of this I had problems creating the blending animations between clips which were so easy to do in my initial tests. Then I had to add the particles which are a pain in themselves. Then there was all the parenting animation I had done for the weapons that couldn't be copied across. And then just the general lining up of animation with both the characters.
*SIGH*
So apparently the zombies skin weights are stupid?! This happened every time I reopened a saved file. It was fixed easily enough by just using the paint skin weights tool and clicking on the mesh and they reset to where they should be which makes complete sense : However, the last time I tried to use that little trick to sort the problem out I got a big red cross through the paint weights tool (as you can see in the image above) which apparently means "NOO!! yous not paintin no skin weights here bruv innit". To add to Maya's insults it decided to throw this at me:
Its obvious why this has happened.... isn't it?
Well at least i knew it had something to do with blendsahpes.
OOOk so the only solution i came up with was to re-import the zombie character but this meant I would have to re-time out all of the animation clips which I had spent days doing. To get over this I merged all the clips into one and the exported that as a new one so that I could import it back in to the new zombie. The first problem with this is that when you merge clips it sets keys for every attribute of every object in the character set ON EVERY FRAME!!!! This makes it pretty hard to edit later so its a good job I was happy with most of the animation on the zombie. The other problem with this is that the global control was not included in the character set for good reason!! It wasn't included so that the whole character could be moved and scaled independent of the rest of the characters animation. So the animation I had done on it for when the character needed to move where i had done on the spot walk cycles and where i had repositioned her between shots was gone. I decided to make a new character set for the global control and make an animation clip out of the animation on it to re-import onto the new zombie. This seems to have worked for the time being.
At least Tala didn't have any problems....
Shit.
So this is the other thing that happened whenever I reopened a scene. Her lower body stayed in the same pose that it was in when the scene was saved for the whole animation. again i found a way to get round this by activating and then deactivating the keys for the animation clips. I didn't find a permanent way of fixing this.
So it came to the time when i needed to show the animation to the rest of the group. I open up the scene and we all nearly cried:
If you hadn't noticed, all of Tala's animation is messed up.
I tried the the tricks from before but nothing happened. Thankfully though, it worked fine when I got home and opened it on my PC. Question is will we be able to render at college?!?!
On top of this I had problems creating the blending animations between clips which were so easy to do in my initial tests. Then I had to add the particles which are a pain in themselves. Then there was all the parenting animation I had done for the weapons that couldn't be copied across. And then just the general lining up of animation with both the characters.
*SIGH*
Friday 8 February 2008
Thursday 7 February 2008
Thursday 31 January 2008
Particle blood test
the blood particles had to be redered with the hardware renderer so would have to be composited after.
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