Monday and Tuesday

Now that we have the workflow and pipeline finalized and working much smoother, I was able to whip out and complete shot 9 in just a day, with touch up work and minor tweakes yesterday. I also was able to play with the motion blur more and found a better way to make it run seamlessly with the character - and that was to use a defocus rather than a blur on the motion vector pass to help smooth out and expand the motion vectors.

Ill have to go back to shot 11 and add that in and make it look good. I also spent time matching shot 11 to shot 9 (both of my shots) for continuity.

Both shots are now finaled.





2 new lighters

I was working on this project in portfolio class yesterday and had two people, Michael Walton and Fred Kim very interested and willing to take up a shot.

Ill be working with them today and tomorrow to get things setup and going for them. With things running smoother right now, it should be quick to get them going.


RENDER PARTY SATURDAY

We are setting up a time this saturday afternoon for the entire team to gather at monty and work on our shots. With everyone there, we can get work knocked out fast and be there to help each other. Its pretty much a grind session - going to come in, stay as long as we can, get some pizza, and get as much work done as possible.

All animation on Captain was finished by neil yesterday. Major milestone! All thats left now is the bird in the last 2 shots. Very quick and easy.



Progress from other lighters:

Based off the work I did this week and Jordans, we have these two images designated now as style frames to be used by all following lighters to match their shots to.

Tues - April 22.

Meeting with Neil on this Tuesday and so I could get caught up on the status of every asset in the project and which were the correct files to reference. Because we were still doing changes to various assets, old reference links were still being used in the latest shot files. Thus, when lighters went to work on their shot, they didnt have the latest information.

No big deal. But first, I needed to sit down with Neil myself and get my shot figured out so I could transfer that knowledge to the others.

So we spent the entire afternoon after class going over EVERYTHING. We went through each asset, found the correct and latest version, put that into its own folder, and reorganized our reference files. Reorganization was crucial. We essentially have one master environment file. This file references each individual asset. The environment file itself is then referenced into each shot where our character animation is stored. This posed some problems for updating our assets.

As per our policy of updating files, each artist is to change the name of his new version to include his initials and date. So a new asset had a new name, which was NOT being re-referenced in each file.

In addition to getting the master shot files back on track, we also needed to clean things up. We had layers coming in from multiple assets as well as unorganized outliner data. So we went back into each one and grouped up our nodes, and renamed things. We also created new layers that people could use that now made sense. IE, hangar only layers, a layer for each plane, a layer for the sky, and for the ground.

At the end of the day, we had done a lot of work. We decided to then tell our team to come find us, and we would walk through getting their shot setup with the correct assets and to make sure everything had the latest textures and positions.



Wed

The next day, we got together again and determined (after doing it with one person) that it would be too time intensive to wait for each person. So Neil and I decided to sit down and go through the first half of the shots ourselves and fix it all for everyone. This took the rest of the day. By the end, we had everything setup and ready to go.


Thursday

I spent the majority of this day re-working my old light rigs and some of the new lights that Jordan was using in his shots.


Friday-Sunday

Went to Tennessee to visit the wifes family after our meeting on Friday.

The meeting went well. Everyone had started their shots. This project is plagued with maya crashes more than any other project we;ve ever seen. We cant track it down. There is no sense to it.

Anyways, progress was being made and we agreed to meet again next week for final shots.

---------------------- New week


Mon-Friday

Spent the majority of this week working on my shot. It was the first shot with all of the new assets, new lighting rig and new pipeline with our character that was close to being finished.

Neil and I decided to use this shot as the template for everyone else. Jordan's hangar interior shot (Shot 3) was to be the template for interior shots, while my shot (Shot 11) would be used for everyone to match.

This was a good thing. But only now, did we realize just how good it was. At the meeting on Saturday, lighters said that it was easier to do their shots knowing now what they needed to match to. We had this same concept at DD.

***

I dont know why we didnt think of that sooner. It was definitely something that we learned and I would apply to any future project.

***

In addition to my own shot, I met with Neil almost every day, and ran into several of the other lights on our project to help guide them and solve any problems. The pace is slow going right now, but it is going.

We set a time on Saturday to meet, as Friday was a major class makeup day for several professors.


Friday

Motion Blur final!

Jordan finished his research on a way to use non maya motion blur. There is a hidden production node in maya that we could use to render out a motion vector pass. This takes seconds. We then have a node that we install into shake and this then takes our motion vector data and blurs it out. The results are good for being a 2d only motion blur. The Maya 3d motion blur is still better, but it quadruples the render time.

We cant afford that.

So this alternative works excellent. because we just got this setup, we dont expect people at the meeting to have their shots motion blurred yet.


Saturday Meeting -

This was the day that we set aside to have our shots done. We had one person not show up, and 2 people who had to leave yesterday on a family emergency.

We kinda expected that things would be messy for the meeting and that people wouldnt have everything done. This project seems easy, but there is really a lot to it, and a lot of fine tweaking.

Most people had their shots ready with just a few more things they were working on. One couldnt render the godray pass, another was still having problems getting the grass to render.

All in all, we have 2 shots that are pretty much finaled. The other 5 are close.


Trouble

We also ran into a new problem. 2 lighters came in saying that they had little time to help out on any more of the project. They did of course say that they will finish their current shots. I understand the position they are in. Im in the same situation with the 2012 project and this one. They are just so time consuming - on top of trying to graduate and get a job and plan on moving across country right after this.

One lighter has 2 shots and she is almost done. She will finish them this week, maybe the week after and then she will be done.

The other lighter said he would finish his work early next week. I did suggest that he take a look at the other shots we had left and see if there was a quick one he could do. We found a shot, shot 14, that was almost identical to what he had before. He said he could do it if he had the time. So we'll see.

Either way, it looks like I will need to pick up the pace and take on more shots than I had planed. Ive already talked to brendan and told him that I need to focus even more on this project than 2012.

There is so much to do, but I think we are well on our way.