Sunday 27 January 2013

Spec Anim 2

I seem to have fallen behind alot on keeping this blog up to date but things have been crazy busy with uni and Christmas. I'll be spamming it a lot in the next few days as I try and catch up. There's also a new design layout in the works that should improve the layout and appearance of Sakura Animation. It's due up Wednesday unless something else crops up, so watch this space.

Back onto uni work. Quite awhile ago we finished Spec Anim 2 which was split into 2 groups. You could either do coding or compositing. In my wisdom I picked compositing and regretted the decision.

For week 1 of compositing, we had to pick a model, rig it using the Set-up Machine and animate it doing a basic walk cycle. So far so good.

In Week 2, we did storyboarding, LAVs and animatics in prep for animation. Using the footage I shot, I then  took it into Boujou in preperation for dropping an animated model into. I had a few issues with Boujou since it couldn't read the dimensions and depth of my scene, but this was easily fixed by upping the number of trackers boujou sends out to test the footage. Storyboarding and thumbnailing have always been my weakness since my drawing skills aren't very strong but I tried my best with these.

All the issues and problems came bundled up in one massive ball in week 3. These included the animation I very carefully plotted and timed not fitting into the film footage, After Effects crashing every single time it got to a certain point of rendering my scene as well as my computer breaking and losing the licenses for Maya somewhere along the way. All in all a terrible week for work. The resulting work was then, quite obviously not up to any decent standard but by that point I was staring the deadline in the face.

Although I had many many issues with this project, I think the best thing to do is accept it as a bip and move onto the next. And of course, majorly clean up my computer.