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Thursday 8 May 2014

Post-Production: "& Son" Last Minute Shot Fixes

Hello Everyone,

This is probably one of the final posts for the blog, we will probably be knackered after getting our Art of and Technical documents up on here so were just going to let them speak for themselves. We have my show reels for Benjamin and Barnabas rendering away so with any luck It should all go on as one BIG BANG. Anyway this post is about last minute fixes which were found to be in the animation... Ones we could fix anyway.
The images above show Benjamin's head with a Black Hole mask which Sammy asked Stitch to render out as Benjamin's eyes were cutting through his blink cycle. The problem with doing this is it impacts the eyebrows which sadly is a fault in the facial Blend-shapes of the Benjamin rig. We will probably look into this before New Designers to possibly make a sad facial emote that doesn't impact anything but the eyes.

Production: Logging the Exposure Sheets

Hello Everyone,

We are getting down to the nitty gritty now its not long till the flurry of Major project submissions start making their way onto this blog and beyond. Of course we couldn't go out without mentioning a couple of little extra things besides the obvious submission disc art, etc. This post is dedicated to the exposure sheets and their use in production. We have Sammy to thank for the accuracy of these sheets, sheets which seemed so boring to look at.
The image above shows the documentation Stitch had at hand when animating his specific shots. There is also a "sleeve" note in there which Sammy left... Tsk tsk tsk. Anyway from Sammy's original exposure sheets we all went away and used them on hand and crossed out shots as we went along. These shots were all broken up across excel sheets but they could be put into Photoshop thankfully for a little extra editing.

Video Logs: "& Son" Tutorials - Week 32

Hello Everyone,

Well we are getting to the end of this little tale of which I expect there will be quite a bit of rest and relaxation after hitting this deadline. Sammy has been editing away on our final rendition of "& Son" while Chrissie and Stitch have been working on technical documents and Art Of's. There have been a few flaws with certain rendered shots but we expected that there would be flaws and as you all know it takes time to render these out. If there is more to fix we will in due course.

Thursday 1 May 2014

Production: "& Son" Shot 62 Alpha Version

The original shot 62 actually corrupted before we got a chance to tweak it so we had to recreate the entire shot 62 motion from scratch. The good thing though was I already had my end pose as it has to crossfade into the next shot. We needed to convey some level of shock in this shot but Stitch wasn't sure where to start the emote from the 61 so he provided the entire thing for Sammy to cut where she wishes.


Having been loosely told on Monday that my animation was without weight I thought I would use this shot to play with the graph editor a little more in depth... I added a little tweak to Barnabas's arm to add a little urgency. I also tried to spread out the motion a little more and offset areas of it. I will do this more in future animations, we are just out of time for me to figure it all out for hand in and revise every shot.


For these two test renders I wanted to see how the mouth looked on Barnabas when in the shot. I also wanted to make sure that both characters were lit correctly with the correct texture settings. It was also nice to see a small element of what Sammy will be giving us in the next shot. There is a little clipping with the hat but it needs to be there to crossfade successfully.

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx

Production: "& Son" Shot 47 Alpha Version

This shot is probably one of our weakest mainly because it was a little rushed towards the end. The difficulty was found mainly because of pick up put down issue. This would require parenting, duplicate hats and the visibility channel which if were honest didn't do its job when the batch render had been fired. The shot is also quite procedural, defiantly something to fix in the future.


The change log for 47 includes an adjusted crouching while moving forward cycle with the usual third pass animation traits which include idle and blink. There was also subtle motion added to Benjamin. Each character also has hidden models attached to the root of their respective hand joints. The inclusion of the 2D character is also a new feat for this rendition of 47.


In the renders above you will also be able to notice the punchiness of the 2D character in the shot. The hats also recently had their textures applied to the models so that's another feature. There were a couple of issues batch rendering this scene due to the visibility channels being ignored by the batch render. Our work around was deleting the suspect hats and batch rendering again. Anyway...

Take it easy :)
xXStItChXx