Burt

His debut....

Initial silent edit of "BURT"

This is the silent version and very first edit of the final animation. You will notice a few alterations from the original pre vis, mainly the absence of Burt's wife.



It currently has no sound to allow me to see how i've cut the new aniamtion together, then i can lift my pre recorded sounds and lay them in their new places. There is a possibility that i will need to record some new sounds however, i have time allocated for this



There is a slight problem with one of the scenes, something that i managed to not notice until now, and that is the STALK scene, where Burt appears from the end of his desk before climbing on top of it. For some reason its flashing, which means a definite re render as its regarding the final gather in mental ray, but as its only 300 frames i should be able to get that done in the next couple of hours, annoying but not a massive problem.





(Once again uni PCs wont let me paste anything into blogger so you will have to follow this link )

I would also like to add that the colour quality is not correct in the youtube version. It appears much darker and low res following the link below, that the 'real thing.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW3AozQWxLI

Rendering completed

...well almost.

The final 100 frames are rendering now, they may have even finished, and i have composited all of the after effects scenes so they are now ''ready to go''.

I've pretty much got the order of my animation in, following closely what i had laid out in my pre vis, but i still need to add the final few frames.

I was going to post where i was this evening but when i worked on it all at uni today i was in CS5 and i have CS3 at home so it wont let me open what have, which is annoying. However, once Ive collected the final pieces tomorrow, i will definitely be able to post a silent version of my entire animation PRE-EDIT before 1pm tomorrow, then at least i know what to spend my weekend working on.

Some renders

Some initial cockpit renders. Just a simple mental ray batch render, no passes.

(Please consider that these clips go in between other clips so on their own they are totally out of context.)

New end imgination sequence

The dreaded end imagination sequence, cue evil theme tune...

I have been experimenting with several ways to attack this, and much to my annoyance have been animating and scrapping work for the past few days but as it stands what i am working with at the moment is visible on the link below. Once again blogger wont let me embed so you will have to watch via the link. The animation parts still need work but before i go any further with it and waste even more time i thought I'd post the progress.
There is one point i need to add about this, that i have only noticed since uploading it onto YouTube, and that is the two outside plane shots at the end of the sequence see the planes flying to the left of the screen and then Burt running to the right, so i will need to change the direction of the planes in order to make more visual sense out of this.

There will be smoke added (please see previous blog entry) over the final scene to blend out of this and into Burt on the RAF background in a way that allows you to see he's come out of his imagination.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wOuvvs09oQ

DVD case and disk covers

I want to add my personal 'branding' to the DVD case but at present i still haven't come up with anything i really like. As soon as i do i will re post the new design, bu otherwise another job is done.

My ''book'' is now finished, just waiting on a few images i am rendering today and then that is all complete too, just leaving me with my main last few jobs.

These are:

1. RENDER
2. COMPOSIT & EDIT
3. SHOW REEL & BRANDING

As my show reel will mainly be my Final Burt animation as discussed with Alan, i will still need to create about 20 seconds of extra animation to open and end it, but i can work on this while i am rendering rather than do nothing. It also enables me to focus entirely on the 20 seconds and have at least a solid week of animating should i need it.

Smoke test

For the end scene of my project there needed to be more of a 'bigger' emphasis on the explosion of the fly's plane before cutting to to Burt on the RAF background. As you already know I've decided against dynamics in Maya for aesthetic reasons and also time consumption so instead I've tried out a few effects in Adobe After Effects that i could composit with the final animation clips. At the moment the clip is on a black background to better show the effects of the smoke for the blog. I will continue to work on it, and may add a few other layers to get the texture slightly more correct, with slightly varying shades of grey, and by using the toggle transparency i can easily overlay the smoke with no adverse effect on any clips that are beneath it.


For some reason Blogger would not let me embed the clip so instead i've typed the link below...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvwtHI71QgGk

Book

These are some final images I've just rendered to incorporate into my ''book'' for the hand in date. Where Ive been slightly concerned for my actual animation, rather than try and work on it with unsure direction i turned my attention to something i knew i could work on productively. I still have to add a few more images to the book, spell check and write a small piece and it is done :) At least that's another thing i can almost check off of my to do list!

Twenty Two days left....

I feel as though Ive reached a few problems within this project. There are three main things draining my energy and worrying me about the hand in date.

Problem no. 1: I am not happy with ending. I feel that after the pull back from Burt with the logo background to Burt back in the room it should cut soon after as the reference to his wife at the end makes it confusing to the audience what the animation has actually been about.

A few people have questioned as to whether they should feel sad, and it is exactly the opposite. I do still feel i should reference her at the beginning as he falls asleep, but to be honest i think that's all you need to see of her.

Problem no. 2: The transition from ''real world'' to imagination right at the end section isn't clear and I'm still having trouble with how best to portray this.

Problem no 3: My animation is now approximately 3 minutes long and i need to get rid of at least 30 seconds. Preferably id like it to be 2 minutes and it has been commented that i could easily do this, the thing is i would like to know what to cut previous to rendering it all out, as that seems such a massive waste of time.

There are a few other fears that i have regarding this project but the above three are the ones to the front of my mind, and personally most terrifying.

I have been working on refining the animation , making sure objects in the room are also moving in reaction to Burt; For instance items on his desk such as paper need to slide under his feet, the paintbrushes need to move when the glass is moved, the cushion on his seat needs to squash and then grow when he rises from it. Most of these thing have now been put in and i have been cleaning up the animation of Burt himself, correcting some of his poses where i had forgotten how gravity would effect the rest of his body when stood or sat in a certain way. For example in the chair i had him sitting down but not in a rested position, it was all pretty generic and so i have been correcting all of these things.

Pre Vis with in sync sound

Another photo for the mantle piece

Plane Fire

Dynamics in Maya is similar to a filter in Photoshop; they can often improve a scene but also be very generic and obvious. This was an issue regarding my aeroplane fire as i needed it to be almost constant but still fit in with the world that i have created. Dynamics in my scene, probably would have made as much sense as a red letterbox in the middle of the dessert, so i decided to try out other methods.

Eventually i decided to use simple Nurbs to create the 'shape' of the fire and texture them with a ramp shader to give the effect of simple red, orange, yellow fire (simplicity is not the same as being generic, especial if it fits within my world.) I also gave them a glow and upped the transparency so that they no longer looked like shapes, animating them to become visible and extend, then back to invisible and small. Doing this allowed it to look as if they were firing away from the plane and towards enemy's - it also fits in aesthetically.

Some inspiration for this was the 'lilo and stitch' aesthetic, where they have constant fire however, with the help of Disney, are able to turn what should be something quite threatening into something almost harmless. Obviously i didn't want to go to the full Disney extent for this project as it still needed to be slightly dangerous as we are watching through Burt's imagination but if you look at a short lilo and stitch snapshot (taken from a youtube clip) I'm sure you will understand my thinking...

Lilo & Stitch
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIg_otb9yY8)

Nurbs shapes
(without effects)

Rendered snap shot
(nothing smoothed, ignore dash lights)

Retaliation fire