Four: Pre-Vis Progress

I believe I am making good progress with creating the basic elements of my animation. There isn't much movement yet but my plan is to go over and create more refined movements after all the animation is in place and the recordings have been synchronised and sequenced. There might be a slight delay as I believe I have to rework the pose space corrections on the adult model. Hopefully this shouldn't take too long now that I have more familiarity with the system.

I had a feeling that what might help the scene is while Amelia is talking, the attention is on Four. At this point in the story, David might have shut her out and stopped talking, too enamored by the creature that hatched from the cocoon. She's offering him one last chance to communicate but Four has come to dominate his perception of life.

While Four does look pitch-black in the pre-vis, that's more of a side-effect of the mila shader as it is rendered in the workspace, where it renders a shade-colour version of the the top (quite dark) texture map, which would be the monochrome specularity. It am quite confident that it won't come out like that in polished renders.

To test out posing I created a small quick "tester" animation. Far from perfect but it does give me a few animations to start off with and a proof that the model for the juvenile functions reasonably smoothly.

Four: Animation Buildup

A rework of David's lines are in the works, for now I felt it was worth my time to continue the animation, and then re-synchronise the footage to the new lines once a full reading of the script comes back to me.

There was one benefit - while it looks like the movement of Four has errors, these gave me the opportunity to go back and make some corrections to the model, fixing a few errors (the bending of the neck turned out to be an off-zeroed curve, once the values were all reset the spine worked correctly) and attaching some of the finer controls.

Four's initial movements in the animation, that of just sliding round on the ice, will be the foundation. With the grub complete, I can add that one in to better ground the camera and its focus.

Major Project: Camera Positioning

  With frameworks for the rooms in place, I set about placing cameras. Each one would pan around the room, allowing the viewer to explore the environment. The thing I realised I had to bear most in mind, second to taking length into account, was the speed of the camera. Too fast and the viewer would feel like they're flying rather than walking though the scene.

  Ideally I would like to get a playblast by Thursday. I could substitute Four's place with a sphere or a very rough shape for the creature. Whether I can get some sound effects for the doors is down to available time, to which I have Tuesday, while Wednesday at the very latest should be used for assembling the interim presentation. 

  With the tracking cameras, the laboratory does not feel as small as I thought it would have been. In fact it seems quite appropriately sized. Perhaps this plays to some profound effect that while David's quarters on the station are comfortable, he's still a dead-inside workaholic. All the luxurious living in the world is no replacement or comfort for his lost little girl

  Somewhat inspired by the environments from Alien I decided the laboratory needed a pair of viewing windows, which can also clue the viewer as to the room they are approaching. In the final animation there'd be glass, giving a little reflection to the world. But for the playblast an empty pane is enough to get the idea across.

Maya Tutorials: Camera Rig

    The day seemed to come relatively quickly, as today was the tutorial of how to set up a camera rig. There were some rough patches as it was one of those lessons that involved familiarising myself with the locations of unfamiliar toolboxes in Maya but by the secong half I believe I had grasped the use of the required tools such as the connections editor.

    Still, this is a tutorial that I could probably consider with refershing myself with at some point to solidify my understanding.