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