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.