Wednesday 28 October 2009

Tiiired

Apologies for no update last week... my brain has been truly fried. 6 or 7 day weeks tend to make you forget things, namely to update on time! This could either be seen as an early update, or a very late one from last week (Hopefully the latter, I do have other things to say but it's too late to say them now)

My final week of RJDM is upon us now. I'm going to miss it, as I've really enjoyed working there. Not much conventional animation has gone on; no building and animating full characters, but then again the kind of stuff we've been working on of late just shows how much potential work there is for animators if you're willing. It's a huge market, and random 'basic' shorts (arrows, AGH!) are just as frequent in the industry (if not more so) than character based stuff.

I've learnt some pretty neat tricks, and I hope to show them in blog form. Seriously, arrows following a simple motion path is NOT as straightforward as you'd think!

Anyway, I've been doing homework for the last two nights til midnight so I think it's time I got some sleep.

Be good.

Sunday 18 October 2009

Very late, been hard at work

Woah, this update is somewhat late. But in my defense, I've been insanely busy at RJDM. In order to get our project done for the client for Monday (well, technically last Friday...) we have all been on a mad one to get scenes to match up, and for renders to be consistent. Apparently ambient occlusion nodes are somewhat unpredictable when you attach them to objects that have been scaled up, even if you keep the attributes to the same level. Some clever camera trickery had to be performed there, along with many other places to bodge out the bugs.

I've also had a good old play in my old friend Combustion yesterday, where I learnt the benefit of Mattes and contribution passes in Maya. It seems that a render layer will render out, say just the floor and shadows that are cast on it, but contribution passes literally cut out patches of the floor where anything would normally be rendered over it. Although this would generally be handy as you can recolourise sections of a render without adding time to render areas you'd never see, you are then prone to getting some ugly black outlines round each pass where the Matte does a poor job of masking everything. Luckily you can shrink this in Combustion to minimise it, but personally I find render layers are much better to control the compositing of your shot. Still, either are very easy to set up in Maya 2009 and 2010 compared with older versions, with the help of material overrides and surface shaders.

I've been invited back to RJDM for another week or 2, so expect late updates again, as I don't tend to get home til 8pm and I'm usually too frazzled to type, but I'll keep everyone posted.
Also, keep an eye out for our video online soon. I'll post a link when it's released!

Friday 9 October 2009

2nd week of RJDM

Oops... a little late this week (Updates seem to have been happening every Thursday so I'll try and stick to that) but I just clean forgot. Let's put it down to being drained from work.

Again, no work of my personal stuff as I've had my second week at RJDM studios. It's been hectic trying to ensure this project meets the standards of our client (they are pretty indecisive which is very frustrating) so we could be spending a morning on one thing, only to find the feedback received at noon says they don't like that aspect. So we're back to the drawing board. And that has happened, and I'm sure it will again.

I've got to play in Maya a lot more this week, animating short sequences and staring at the graph editor. We have also got an additional project to do by the end of next week, which consists of making an advert for a website. The storyboards are down and the feedback has been pretty good, which is a bonus. That should all be done and dusted in the short time we have.

Next week may be the final week in the studio, until November anyway when I may well be going back to help out.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Employed and everything!

Well, it's been a fun few days at RJDM, as we have all been working there since Saturday (that was a doozy). I can't really say that much in terms of the projects, but we're going to be fairly busy with juggling about 3 projects. A lot of time so far has been spent storyboarding, trying to make the first piece as clear and polished as possible to the client. God, I hate storyboarding, especially when you add in a single frame, and eeeeeverything has to be pushed back one space on Photoshop files with 6 frames. Such a hassle! And I'm getting a bit sick of the cheesy smiles that istock has to offer, even on kids with black eyes.
In terms of programs, Photoshop has been on my agenda a lot for many reasons. Maya has been used a smidge by myself, but a lot more by others. I've also got to grips with Final Cut Pro even more which is handy for my own experience... I'd try to stay away from Macs if I can help it, but being forced to use them does give me opportunity to widen my knowledge of them.
Not much else to say really as I haven't progressed further with my own work. Closing statement will be 'I must learn AfterEffects!'

Until next time