The Major Project - Finished

It's Finished!

So enjoy!

Now you may have noticed that there are further additions to the pages panel.
Firstly is the Demo Reel page, and I've created a rigging demo reel, which you can view there. It's a trimmed version of the Monk Demonstration video which I posted earlier, with a few extra filmed bits, and, well… go take a look!
Lastly there is the Downloads page. I have put my making of and technical Document there. I have other plans for this page too.

Of course you can also get to all these things in this post too!

The 'Making of' The Place Where Lost Things Go

The Technical Document

The Rigging Demo Reel

And here are my DVD cases and covers.

These are for the film itself.




And these template designs are for anything just related to A Flock of Pixels.



I'll re blog the business card here too.


And here is the ident by itself.

This has been a very enjoyable and most satisfying project to work on. Most importantly though I've felt very much in control of the whole thing and although there were a few moments when I thought I was falling behind schedule, these last few weeks have been the least stressful of any 'last few weeks' of other projects.

And finally, I leave you with an extra 'feature', the animation progression reel; a collection of my animation play-blasts, showing my progression from blocking to final animation.
Just to clarify, it's not a 'demo reel'.

A Flock of Pixels

The Major Project - One week to go

The blog has had a bit of a re-design, including a new page (more to be added in the coming months) and I've given myself a bit more width for posting in.

I shall start by posting the accompanying business card.


Rendering is practically finished and most of it is already composited. While that has been happening I have also been working on the intro sequence for the animation.
Almost all the graphics have been painted and added into the sequence. Here is a selection of them.

And here are a selection of stills from the animation.





A Flock of Pixels

The Major Project - Other Effects

Animation is practically over. While for the last week I have been finishing off all the animation, I have also had to tackle some other interesting challenges too.

There's no doubt that you have seen in my pre-vis some cones, which were supposed to be representing either piles of socks or coins. Piles of something anyway. So one of the challenges this week was to actually make those props, and I can tell you that the pile of socks particularly, was a pain to make. More on that in a bit, but first the pile of coins.

The first and most obvious way to make a pile of coins would be to use dynamics to drop coins into a pile, although I knew straight away that it should be a hollow pile so I would need some sort of mesh shaped like a pile to drop coins onto.




It didn't work very well. It was slow and no matter how much stickiness and friction I added, I couldn't get a decent pile made efficiently. That's when I turned to Maya's Hair System!

The hair system generates (what Maya calls) hair follicles all over a mesh from which hairs are placed. I don't need the hairs, just the follicles as they gave me random positions over the pile mesh that I can parent geometry to.



I created a simple script to automate the duplicating and parenting of the coin mesh so that I had hundreds of coins stuck all over the mesh, creating my basic pile.



I had a small and large coin so it also made sure that both sizes were randomly placed over the pile.

I then had another similar script to randomly assign three variations of a coin shader to all the coins in the pile.



The last step was to check for the intersecting coins where they were too close to each other and manually move them to create the final pile of coins.

A similar technique was used to create the sock pile, but with one slight difference.

It was necessary to have the socks lay over the pile rather than be rigidly stuck to the pile. So the main difference was that I generated the socks (with Maya Hair) onto a flat plane, which I then used a wrap deformer to make the plane control the socks, and the plane was dropped onto the pile with cloth dynamics.



It was a pain because applying the wrap deformer to 900 socks not only took a very long time (half an hour at least), but after that was done, calculating those socks was extremely slow. Once it was done though, I could remove all wrap deformers and cloth sim stuff and all was fine.




In one of the last scenes the Monk crash lands into the pile of socks. This again was tricky, as I had to animate the pile mesh, and again used wrap deformers to control the socks around it. In this case I did end up caching the socks, so that it was just reading a file rather than calculating stuff, which improved performance a bit.

The good news is that it is all done now.

There were a few other effects I have needed to create for the animation. The kitten running through a puddle of ink, and the candle flame.

The ink splashing was achieved with Maya's nParticle System...


…and the candle flame was done with soft-body dynamics.





In the case of the candle flame I was following a tutorial from The Gnomon Workshop.

http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/tutorials/candle.html


So currently I am at the texturing, lighting and rendering stage. Two scenes have been rendered, but there is still a long way to go as there are 28 more shots to left to finish.

Then there's the intro sequence, the making of, technical documents, show reel, and an updated blog design all to be done in the next two weeks. No pressure then!

A Flock of Pixels.

The Major Project - A bit of Everything

Yep, I'm posting a bit of everything today.
I have been animating all week and as it is requiring 100% of my time and dedication, other areas (like texturing) have come to a halt.

I did however find an opportunity to render one frame from my animation (with temporary textures) and with a lighting setup that I experimented with a week or so ago. No passes or anything fancy like that yet, but I did take it into After Effects to mess around with the colours and even adding some focal blur, although it's completely faked as I didn't have a depth pass to work with, but you get a rough idea of what I'm going for.


I will be lighting the character with separate lights to make sure he is shaded clearly in the final render and splitting foreground and background elements to achieve better focal blur in post. Also might make a backdrop other than just pure white.

Here were some of my earlier lighting tests of the same set that I did a few weeks back.






Now for some animation. I'm well over half way through animating the entire animation. I'm now at a stage where I am tackling some of the toughest scenes, but I have given myself extra time to get these right. That's not to say that what I've done so far was easy… it wasn't. For now though, here is a very small snippet of the animation so far.



The last thing I'm posting is the presentation of the interim crit. Not so much for having new content, but instead just so that the blog isn't missing anything.

IterimCritPresentation_01

A Flock of Pixels