BaAnna: Hi one and all! Woo! Just realised my last post was on December 2009! Its now April 2010! (ok.. drafted in April, completed in June.) Yes, and "woop-dee-doo!" its already nearing the end of production! *Gawks* O_0 What happened???
Reporter: (silently sips her cup of tea)...
BaAnna: *eyeballs the unnaturally nonchalant reporter nervously* .. yyeah.. I guess I owe everyone an explanation for this extended period of inactivity.
Reporter: its alright. YOUR disappearance has had NO effect whatsoever here. *mumbles: yeah, leaving me here to swat the flies gathering on your moulding posts...*
BaAnna: Omg omg omg.. I have ton of things to say! So much has happened! We went to the Pixar exhibition.. We went to visit 2 studios: Sunwoo & EA just last Thursday... I still owe this blog my specialisation reel and I need to brush up on my demoreel...
But first up! Let me start by explaining the tedious process and extreme amount of concentration and attention needed for production!
PeaNut: Ruff ruff! *bounces in eager beagle*
(Note: PeaNut is my new pet dog in a cube. He's so cute! And he has his own blue food bowl and patch of grass to sit on!)
BaAnna: Oh peaNut! How's my little fluffy wuzzy? My coodle doodles. My sweet pumpkin. My..
Reporter: We're waitinggggg~~~~ *taps the ground with foot impatiently*
BaAnna: erhem.. initially, I was thinking of writing a detailed log for production to record our trials and tribunals, our problems and our little triumphs.. But over time, I decided that its probably not healthy to be nagging online about our petty issues and whatsnots. Therefore! Just gonna point out some important things to note about production:
Dos:
1. Get lots of reference. If you are going for a certain style or look, read more about it. eg. If you wan a Pixar-style, look at the Pixar exhibition. Look at Their preproduction works. Get inspired.
2. Distribute workload. Preproduction's pretty straight forward. Once all the designs are approved, start modeling the characters 1st, fast. Have someone start with the environment.
3. Planning Facial Rigs.
I recommend reading the Stop Staring tutorial from JD. I understand it might seem abit early to do this at this stage but unless you have pros experienced with production, or really hardworking modelers who don't mind to rig, it might be a good time to think about it now. Although the tutorial has a list of blendshapes that can achieve 90% of all expressions, you might want to have your own set of controller names and shapes. My advice, if you're used to Norman's layout, (set driven keys), follow it. Its clean and simple.
4. Modeling:
- Keep that T-pose, motorcycle pose, all's great. Keep your character's feet straight front view but bent slightly.
-Mouth, slightly open/ close, all's fine. But make sure mouth is closed before doing facial blendshapes. It makes things less complicated.
-VERY important for CLOTHED CHARACTERS:
There's so far.. 2 ways (in my limited knowledge) to do it:
#1: It is ok to model clothes onto the body. Clothes can follow the skin weights on the body. Loose bits can be done using Ncloth. This method is straightforward with little mesh complications during skinning but tweaking may be a bitch towards the end.
#2: Model clothes with body as a single piece. Meaning inside the clothes is an empty shell. However! Make sure everything (arms, clothes and legs) are ONE piece and not in pieces.
DO NOT just combine the separate meshes. meshes should be incorporated into each other vertex to vertex is what i think.
5.After modelling, SCALE all of your characters according to your environment (if its not done yet).
Warning: scaling after rigging screws up the skinning data. That means if you have skinned without scaling beforehand, you have to unbind, scale the mesh, rebind and reskin the whole damn thing.
6. Rigging + Skinning
Who to do the rigging? Ideally modelers should do the rigging and skinning also so they understand how well, or badly, their mesh is affecting the rig/skin.
However, it wouldn't hurt for the animators to know how to correct riggs, cus'... when the rigs' messed up somehow and there's no one around, its all up to you.. (plays end of the world music).. or you can bitch to the modelers. XD
7. Animating
If you have more than one animator in your group like us, try to divide work according to your 'stronger' points. If say one of you has a problem with planning, plan the key poses together so that there won't be confusion about the sequence of the animation later on.
8. The Dateline Draws Near.
With the end of production nearing and animation just beginning, we had to decide on how much of the scenes to keep in order to meet up with the dateline.
Note: the point was to just finish production asap, therefore we decided on a 1 minute trailer (haha.. just how long should a trailer be for a 1.5 min clip?) ... In the end, we 'finished' production 3 weeks after scheduled dateline. The other groups completed their entire production about 2 months later (which was recently, mid June).
::VFX corner::
We rendered using beauty pass instead of the traditional passes to save rendering time. You can compare the 2 results (Leon's group: Beauty pass vs Shuu's group: Traditional) here:
Leon's: (to be posted)
Shu's: http://shu-art.blogspot.com/
Our finished product: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/video/video.php?v=400589136550
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Reporter: (snaps) ARGH! GONE FOR 3 MONTHS! WHERE WERE YOU! NO CALL NO NOTE NO NOTHING! *strangles* *slaps slaps* *upper punches*
BaAnna: ack! ack! *coughs* wait you crazy bit*h! I can explAINnnnnn........
(is sent spiraling into the sky and disappears into a star in the horizon; yes.. like team rocket.)
PeaNut: (stones in his little cube)
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In our next episode! .... Good bye 3dsense..
Afternote:
For all you visual people, here's a cool site on what renderfarms look like at Pixar and Lucas. Cool~
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