lizstevanovic-knb321-blog

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Here is the latest version of the timeline. We finally have the beginnings of sound yaaay. I’ve been talking with Zhang Han over the last few months trying to organise sound and it is finally showing up. The full sound clip (on TLM Fb page) really adds to the story.

I also managed to cut nearly 20 seconds out. After Brees suggestion in week 12 I sat down with some classmates not involved in our project and we decided to cut out the shots when Haru puts the rake away as well as speed up the montage. We cut these shots partly because they seemed to kill the montage a bit, but also because we need to approve off shots asap and these shots still needed work. 

The animation quality has improved so much, just since the last version and I am really pleased with how it is wrapping up. 

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Every week recompiled timeline 3-8 (5 versions)

Each week I would set a deadline for Wednesday 5pm or Thursday 8pm (depending on that weeks progress) for all the animators to upload their shots. Often times their shots weren’t uploaded on time and I had to chase them up. 

I then would compiled all the shots in premier pro (Currently 70 shots), resynced up the sounds, edit and add transitions.

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Animation

I also worked on trying to update my animation as much as possible. I really struggled with animating this semester. I knew going into this semester that I would struggle with it, as I haven’t specialised in animation over the course of my degree. This is the main reason I wanted to try animate this semester as I thought it would be productive for me to try something that I need practice in.

However I found it really frustrating - the main reason being that a lot of the time keyframe interpolation doesn't go the way I want it to and I have no idea how to make it move the way I want. Adding in extra keyframes works sometimes, but often it just seems to make it worse. I think my biggest changes though, would be timing of the motion. I struggle with trying to make the motion look natural, and not robotic through timing.

Despite all this, I am really glad I chose to do animation as it made me really want to continue my work with rigging. Animating with rigs, gave me a solid idea of what was missing from the rigs we had, and also gave me a better understanding topology to help deform the rigs. So in the end I think it was a productive experience.

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Here is the new rig test with the updated mesh and weight painting.

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When weight painting for the second time I encountered the same issue I had the first time, which made painting weights on this rig incredibly frustrating. As the fins are so thin, and require so much movement, the weights would clip when when pulled too far. 

No matter how much time I spent painting I couldn't fix the issue. I then remembered the Delta Mesh tool I had used when preparing Haru’s base rig. This tool hardens the mesh so it deforms closer to its original. Adding a Delta Mesh to this rig completely fixed the clipping and improved the deforming significantly. 

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After fixing the mesh I moved onto reskinning the stingray. I made the same mistake I made with the shark, and so I had to completely redo the weight painting on the stingray.

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After increasing the poly count for assignment one. I encountered an issue I haven't seen before. The mesh was creating these odd shadows even though the mesh was completely smooth.

I asked some of my classmates and no one had seen the issue before. So I decided to post on reddit at r/maya to ask for help. However even more frustrating was that none of their suggestions seemed to fix the issue.

However when I went into smooth preview the issue wouldn't show. So I decided to smooth the mesh and then delete the edges to bring it back to its previous edge count. This completly seemed to fix the issue.

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Here is the new rig with all the updated changes to the mesh and the rig.

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One of the suggested changes was to exaggerate the fins of the shark more, but in doing so it knocked out the alignment of the bones. So I next had to realign all the bones and controls.

When I disconnected the original mesh from the rig I used maintain weights so I wouldn’t have to reskin the mesh. However, when modifying the model I deleted the history many times - and it turns out this lost its connection to the weights.

This unfortunately meant that I had to completely reskin the mesh which was frustrating as weight painting is my least favorite part of rigging. However in the end I think it was for the better, as I spent more time on the new skinning and it seemed to turn out for the better.

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Finally I went through and organized all the sound files into folders. Starting with the animator > shot name > sound file.

Now the animators can add the sounds into their shots to help with timing. 

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Next I created a document which listed the name of each shot for each animator. I also included a description of where to place the shots. 

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Sorted all the sound files

So of the course of the 3 recording sessions we captured over 300 sound clips that had to be sorted through and picked out. As this task is incredibly tedious it fell on me to do. Honestly this job sucked! The 300 sounds clips included multiple takes for almost every shot, as well as many clips that included multiple variations of one sound. This can be seen in the waveforms above wich shows multiple takes of a gasp in one shot. 

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After recording most of Haru’s sounds the first assignment we met up to record the sounds for Sensei. The actor for Sensei has quite a strong voice so we had to try and direct him to sound old and frail which has a challange. 

( I didnt take a picture of this session so here is a pic from the first session).

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First, each director was asked to set up render tests to send out to the render farm. Sam set up the lighting for two shots (one in the courtyard and the other in the establishing shot). I then went through and organised all the references into one folder and created render layers for both the environments.

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Assignment 2: Final Portfolio

Link to my portfolio: https://elizabethstevanovic.wixsite.com/portfolio

For the second part of the assessment I continued straight on from the first. My weekly roles as director included overseeing the different departments: texturing, animation, effects, modelling. Large amount of time spend on Shotgun providing feedback for each animator and trying to stay on top of them - making sure they were providing weekly uploads for their shots. At this time the animation team fluctuated with 12 people at it's largest in just this department. I tired to delegate leadership, but sometimes I had to push them to push their team which can be frustrating and seem like it's not very productive.   

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Reflection on Directing and Project Managing

Probably my biggest role across this semester and on the holidays was providing feedback and keeping track of everyone and their progress. Every single day I checked up on the progress of team members on Shotgun or Facebook, and often needed to chase up people for their work. This was definitely my biggest challenge across the semester as it takes up a significant amount of time each day.

I am providing direction for 12 animators, 3 texturers and 3 effects artists, which I have found quite challenging to keep on top of. It really takes away from my time to actually work on the project, especially when I am trying to project manage on top of directing.

Directing has been especially challenging for me on this project. I really want to do right by The Little Monk and the whole team working on it, however I often feel that I am not qualified, or have enough experience to give good direction. I try to take as much feedback as I can and get multiple perspectives and opinions wherever possible. However it has definitely been a big learning experience. However I am glad to be directing in the sense that I get to learn a lot about each part of the production pipeline and have learnt so much from all my team members.

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Once our next version of the timeline was completed we sat down and received feedback from our tutor. This week was really productive as we were able to get assistance in shots that we were really struggling with or just didn’t work. Mel and I then went through and wrote up the feedback and then sat down with each animator to go over their changes.

I was able to approve off a lot of blocking shots this week which is really good news and I am hoping that they will all be approved by the end of next week. I pushed people quite a lot in blocking as I want the shots to look as good as possible, and I hope that the hard work we have put in so far will pay off when we move into rough animation.