YPGTTO: Crowds, Gatherings and More

  With a month to go work has been getting intense in the YPGTTO team as we all pursue the project's completion. One of my leading tasks as of late has been assistance in populating the environments with large populations to make the city appear busy and lively.

I expect the next five or six days are going to keep me extremely busy as the team prepares to get everything out the door. But what we are creating so far is looking rather impressive with the numbers the city in the Overture is being filled with..

Four: Refining First Sequence

The final steps are coming along with Four's adult model. With progress made on the model I returned to animating the juvenile. Focus today was on the table, where she jumps up, walks along and then jumps off. I discovered while animating that the sequence felt less jagged and jittery if the keyframes had room to breathe - expanding from a two-frame gap to a three-frame gap during the walking sequence appears to smooth out some of her animation.

Four: Walk Cycle Development

Progress is coming along coding Four's walk cycle. Most of the bugs have been ironed out of a basic cycle that I might see about varying, the main good thing is she's coming to life. Finder details like her facial expressions will be something for later on when the bulk of the animations are down.

Indeed perhaps her tentacles could do with a bit of a bounce to them to make them appear flexible.

Four: Juvenile On Display

  The adult is almost ready for her appearance in the pre-vis, while I worked on her I decided to create a quick turnaround for the juvenile state which textures aside is about finished. Lighting might take some playing around with as without an ambient occlusion node she appears quite dark but with some clever use of light-linking I am sure I can work around this as the model receives well-aimed directional lights very well. 

  I am quite happy with how the rig turned out. The controls around her eyes and for her tongue give some beautiful possibilities. I suppose while there is still some human-ness in her eyes, it works for her, that "glimmer of intelligence" as people say.

Interim Presentation: Four

Four Interim Presentation by Mark Stamp on Scribd

Maya Tutorials: Mental Ray Lighting Techniques Part 1

  These past couple of days I have been prioritising on getting Maya tutorials out of the way. And after a good few hours I am almost done with the Mental Ray lighting tutorials, which have helped me familiarise myself with final gather as well as techniques like portal lights, skydones. and compositing strategies to clean up images and make them look a bit less computer-generated.

  I particularly liked how this image came out using just a skydome, a pair of portal lights and the final gather feature to illuminate a bump-mapped pair of blinn surfaces..

Colo Colo: Better Running Animation

  With the deadline looming I feel I am almost ready to have something presentable. Most of today was spent improving my run cycle animation which thanks to tips from Alan and Julia looks much better than it was. So far I quite enjoy what I have turned out, This feels like a huge step up from my previous projects, and so far I feel confident I can produce something effective by the presentation day on Thursday.

  I don't plan on showing much animation, but I can easily make up for it with turntables and an effective presentation I am sure. As along with the running animation above, I have also planned for an idle turntable and below the footage includes a few seconds of it demonstrating what it does when under threat or acting aggressive.

Group Project: Wednesday Animation Work

Much of this afternoon was spent creating a basic animation as well as putting together all the assets to show what Forge has so far created.

I ended up making more footage than I needed, so I decided to upload a full video of what I had made. This footage is useful as it shows the total progression of the scales as they grow across the Fish's body.

Before the textures were rendered and before the scales were applied, I took a test recording to see how effective the camera was.