kayleightraceymi5018-blog

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Conclusion

At the beginning of the semester I felt completely lost on Nuke and had zero confidence that I would be able to learn the program. I had a few goes with still images and with a lot of guidance and still a lot of the skills went straight over my head. I am very proud of my progress this semester and have gained big confidence in using the program for personal use. I felt that a lot of my struggles landed in the tracking of scenes and had attempted it on so many different types of shots such as tracking ones, panning ones some tilting ones aswell. I had messed up so often and had tracked so many films I felt that I had learnt a lot.

My original idea was to have the objects on towering scales. However I realized that was a lot of masking and a lot of difficult tracking that someone of my current skill would struggle a lot with. To make things simple for myself, I had one tracking scene which was the library scene. This scene was perfect for my first time as it was completely flat and wide and everything was a pretty simple shape to work off. Although I have 3 scenes, I feel I had made the mistake of not including Squires Annexe in the short film as I understand it was the main goal of the project; to present representation for the course. However, I feel I had demonstrated the common ideology of university lifestyle simply; learning from your course (Ellison Building), personal study time (the library) and the social experience we all get from it (the student union). 

My strengths of the module I feel are my tracking in the library scene and also my animations. I did really well in terms of making the books falling onto the roof look convincing. This animation was done with active and passive rigid bodies. This was a simple technique and didn’t require me to learn NCloth (even though learning this feature would probably have been helpful). Instead I added the animation through rigid bodies and had to bake the simulation. This way the animation was essentially made for me and had a sense of gravity to it which is what I wanted. I also felt that my colours and lighting fit a lot to the world’s lights in the scenes. Although I struggled a lot with the ellison scene because of the overcast whether and being in a limbo between no shadow and a slight darkness below the objects.

I know that I struggled a lot with inputting shadows, I felt I got lucky cause a lot of my shadows were already in there because of my load out. However, I struggled to understand how to input the shadows in as a separate file for editing. This is noticeable within my ellison scene where the green jug probably needs a darker shadow for depth. I also felt my idea for the overall film could have been a bit more thought through. However through this project I had learnt to model simple objects that could come in handy such as cups and bottles.I also know I could have improved the sounds. Although I had a quick test with audition trying to edit my sounds, I felt that the sounds could have been prolonged and editted to sound more realistic to the world in the film.

Overall I feel that I have massively improved in terms of animating objects and also feel much more confident working independently as I didn’t get too much aid from teachers and technicians. A lot of my time had been spend on problem solving and watching tutorials to help me get out of holes that I was stuck in. Because of my many mistakes, I feel I have improved and am capable of helping others when they are stuck. I have definitely learnt from past mistakes aswell and had time near the end for little bits that needed fixing, such as editing out the shadows from my hold outs and also perfecting the bounce of the ball. I now know to think deeper and more realistic in terms of my animations, this way would have made me more determined to fix shadows than getting more objects in the scene, for example. My video has definitely gotten up there with some of my better work and has given me an idea of what area of animation I would like to focus on more.

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UNI LYF

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Student Union (with sound)

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Library (with sound)

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Ellison building (with sound)

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Rotoing the block area of the building so it looks as though the books are falling behind the pavement rather than through the floor.

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The settings I used for my sounds throughout the film, using adobe audition.

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rotoing some of the shadows from the hold outs that managed to get into the scene.

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Ellison building scene with no sound

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Student Union scene with no sound.

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an overall playblast of my ellison building scene.

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Using the squash and stretch technique for the ping pong ball bouncing across the scenes. Just for a more animated and organic motion in the ball. 

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My overall scene set up for the student union scene. 

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Here are my holdouts for the Ellison building scene. These holdouts are used to make shadows. Unfortunately I am struggling with trying to render the shadows out. But I understand that I have them in my animation, its simply the rendering part that I’m struggling to understand.

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Here is a playblast of the student union scene. This scene represents the freedom after work. It will be my last scene as a symbol of having fun when all deadline are passed.

In terms of rigid bodies. The model i made of the student union building would not become a passive rigid body and my objects were just falling through it. I couldn’t find out the reason why and decided to just go with the messier option. I could only think it wouldn’t become a passive rigid body because of the weird mesh shape. So i decided to take a sphere and stretch it in a similar shape to the building. This was it wasn’t hard for the rigid body to take shape. Then I added a roof shape so the cans would have something to fall onto and also because obviously the cans are falling on top of the building and not exactly on its side.

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Now that i’ve got the jist of everything, I happily put my other models into the next scene which is this of ellison. The building is a primarily science lab and so I chose to incorporate chemical measuring glasses. 

This is my first video and is to be improved. feel this was also a test to see what animation could look better. I feel the sizes can be improved too.

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 NEW addition.

I was inspired a lot by animations I saw at pictoplasma and had a “screw it” moment. I felt that I should just go with what I think would look cool. It took many hours of youtube tutorials and trial and errors but I learnt to used rigid bodies and created this scene of books falling and piling on top of the library.