Happy_Endings_28/11/13

Today is the last day of our week and I have finally caught up on EVERYTHING!

Now i am trying to give our group an extra hand by completing anything that is left to do.

We have started rednering and are in the process of tidying up our shots and animating the last few shots we have left.

I animated shot 20 today which was one of the few shots left. It was a simple scene that involved katie lying on the ground with the tyre swing swinging very lightly.

The hardest part of this shot was trying to position katie into a believable pose where she looks like she has fallen over unconscious.

Every time we tried to position her, the mesh would glitch and would muck up to the point where I had to edit the mesh a little so that it didn't look out of place.

 This is the exact same shot from the animatic that we had. I couldn't quite get Katie to pose like this as her rig wouldn't allow her body to twist as much and her arms are much shorter which won't allow for the reach she has in the animatic. We compromised by slightly changing her pose to one where she is lying face down instead of on her side and we fully hid the bottom leg because the mesh screwed up when it was visible.

I am really happy with the way the shot turned out.

Happy_Endings_27/11/13

We are nearing the end of our animation and have started rendering certain scenes.

We have tested the lighting and we are trying to match the contrast in each shot so that nothing looks out of place.

I have also managed to finish the last two shots that I needed to do.

I had shot 4 and 5 left to complete and they take place right after each other so that made it a little easier to figure out how I was going to animate these shots.

Here is how those shots turned out.

 

 

The first is of Katie drawing a tree which will be textured in the final shot. This is a shot from her point of view but is essentially the same scene in the next shot.

 

 

She draws the tree and then lowers her pad to find a tree has appeared in front of her out of nowhere. For this shot I grouped the pad to her thumb which allowed me to move her arm and the pad together to make her move her arm down and out of the way.

This next screen shot is of the next shot, shot 5. In this shot, it basically replays what just happened in the last one but from a different viewpoint. This shot is of katie, capturing her expression as she lowers her pad and sees the tree.

She sees the tree and is surprised that it appeared and is feeling very pleasant about it. She smiles her unique little smile as she realises her drawing came to life.

Theses screenshots don't really portray exactly what the scene is trying to convey but when you see the whole shot as an animation, it makes a lot of sense and gels together really well.

Happy_Endings_26/11/13

The next shot I had to animate was shot 14.

This was my favourite shot as it was a shot of katie when she starts getting sick and is coughing, and she drops her pen and her book which I had to animate falling to the floor.

I had to animate the book not only falling, but reacting as it hit the ground. I made it so that the book kind of bounced up a little and the pad opens up as it naturally hits the ground. I also done the crayon hitting the ground and rolling away. The camera stays static the whole time the animation happens.

I also animated katies legs so she takes a small step as the book and crayon drops.

I think this scene was the one that turned out best for me in terms of the animation for the book dropping.

Happy_Endings_25/11/13

I managed to finish my first shot last thursday and have started working on my next one, shot 18.

Shot 18 is similar to the first shot i animated, shot 16.

You only see her hand and the tyre swing again but in this shot, she is struggling a lot more to stay upright and is losing all her strength very fast, becoming very weak. you can see this in the shot because her hand shakes and trembles as she reaches out for the tyre swing, still not quite close enough to grab it.

It took me a while to figure out how exactly I was going to get the hand to shake/tremble.

What I ended up having to do was set a key on every single frame I wanted the hand to shake in, then slightly move the hand just a fraction, left and right in every frame and set it. It worked fairly well and looked believable as a slight tremor in her hand.

As well as completing this scene I have also managed to complete nearly all of my remaining work that I personally had to complete. I have also realised all of the shots I have animated have had static camera shots which is just the way we have shot our animation and found that for the scenes I shot, this was most effective in contrast to the whole animation. I did however set up the camera for shot 6 which was set up to zoom during that scene and the shot turned out really well. Jitesh managed to do an amazing job timing the zoom which I helped him achieve to capture a great shot.

Happy_Endings_21/11/13

Today I have finally started animating! I have been given a total of 5 scenes to animate myself. All of my scenes take place in the dream world which will be a lot of fun to animate since I had nothing to do with the construction of this scene itself.

The first scene I decided to animate was shot 16. This shot consisted of Katie reaching out for her tyre swing, not quite able to reach it. it is a very short scene with only the movement of her hand to animate.

In this shot, katie is reaching for the tyre swing as she almost reaches her destination.

As you can see she attempts to grab at it but is still too far away and by this point is getting quite sick.

I found tricky to get the right shot and the right length because her shoulder kept wanting to pop into the scene but I managed to figure out a way where that didn't continue to happen.

Happy_Endings_20/11/13

I have been discussing with Zac and Marc about how we will approach lighting the real world scene.

We had to play around a bit but we had much help from the fact that there are already lights built into our scene. The hospital lights mounted on the walls give off a bit of light and one of them happens to be situated directly above katies head.

We had to adjust the brightness and put a tint on it to give katie a bit of colour. We added spotlights into where the hospital lights are modelled to which produced a great overhead light and changed the colour to a yellow tint that just adds to the shine. We adjusted the cone angle and enlarged it to capture her whole face.

This is before we added the lighting

The light that is mounted on the wall sits just above the drawings in the picture, shining down on katies face. We also had to make sure that the light wasn't going to be too bright.

 

It looks like the light is too bright in this scene but it actually lights up perfectly when you see the proper scene.

Happy_Endings_18/11/13

For our real world scene we finally came together and agreed on a suitable floor and walls for the scene.

The checkered floor i originally created was too dark for a hospital setting so we have kept it nice and simple with a white tiled floor which has been bump mapped to give it that extra effect.

Marc Is in charge of animating this scene so he has added cameras and has started creating the pan shots that are going to be in the scene. We have also been trying to get the lighting right so that it looks authentic and will come up nice and clear when we render.

Here is a screenshot of what the walls and floor look like now.

As you can see, the floor and the walls better contrast the rest of the scene now to give it an authentic hospital feel.

All that is left is to complete all the picture frames and adjust the lighting.