connorscott241-blog-blog

[connorscott241-blog-blog]

Post Production

The majority of my post production was adding sound, such as footsteps, a sword draw and war drums when the ninja is onscreen. However it also consisted of masking the ninja to make it appear that he is running behind the bollards and is unseen by Saul.

I also did a little bit of tweaking with colour correction because the scenes were too light. Unfortunately one of my scenes had camera glare and with the added colour correction looked vastly different from the rest of the scenes so I returned them all to normal except Scene 1 (After the intro scene), which had to be corrected because it was then darker than the rest.

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Rendering

My first renders were terrible because I had left the background in the renders and also forgot to add motion blur to the ninja, making him really really obviously a CG character.

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This is the end of my final scene of animation. Where the ninja catches Saul who gets a glimpse of his imminent demise.

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Poblem: Animation -Ninja run speed

I have to redo all previously done animation because the Ninja's step are to slow, making it looks as though he glides across the ground and taking a step that is only one third of the distance he travels. It looks really stupid.

Solution:

To solve this problem I have made an animation cycle of him running. This means I can adapt his run speed to however fast is needed.

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The beginning of my animations. These pictures show me working on Scenes 1 and 3 of my final where the ninja stalks Saul.

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Texturing my ninja was very simple as his outfit is all black, his skin, pinkish and his shoulderpad and swordblade silver with abrown leather-ish coloured hilt.

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For my ninja's eyes I used a simple polysphere and a ramp shader. Hes a ninja, hence no need to blink, hence no eyelids necessary!

I have aim constrained the eyes to individual locator's which are in turn children of a nurbs circle for control.

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IK Handles

With Byron's help, the IK Handles on my ninja's legs are better but still rather broken. This is one of those computer glitches that happen for no reason and doesnt seem able to be fixed. Ill just have to work with what I have.

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Problem: IK Handles

IK Handles have proved to be a huge problem. For some reason the IK Handles turn the feet of my model even though they are not part of the IK chain. Also, when I did the pole vector constraint to locators nothing happened and they still bend in the wrong direction.

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Problem: WeightPainting

For some strange reason my weightpainting keeps disappearing every time I load my model. As a result I have had to weightpaint it four separate times before I finally managed to get a working exported weight map.

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Here is my first attempts at weightpainting which turned out to be more difficult and time consuming that I had previously expected. THe legs were by far the hardest part.

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I had to re-rig my mesh because for some reason the joint orients were out when I bound it. I did this twice because after rigging the mesh for the second time I realised I needed to reroot the skeleton aswell.

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A side shot of my armour, ninja, sword and the beginnings of my rig.

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For a small model the sword took me a surprisingly long time to make. The detail on the guard was the real time sink.

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Here is my ninja's outfit over his body. Took a long, long time for me to get the right vertex's merged.

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The face was extremely hard to do and as you can see, still doesnt look very good. Its a good thing I only really need to eyes because, as a ninja, my character will be wearing a full body(or near to it) typical ninja outfit.

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More of my ninja’s body development. I worked off a template to try and give a good human likeness.