Work from Laura

Okay, as mentioned previously, I intend to use some other in the class as colourists in my film. Well, seeings as I no have a healthy backlog of finished animation, I decide to hand out some of the scenes to Laura Tait, as you may have seen on her blog.

Here's one of them, I'll upload the rest when I have more time, I promise.

Enjoy the fruits of Laura's labour!

Jenn's Set

Well I got my set back from Jenn Hanely, and needless to say she did a fantastic job (especially considering all teh tiny tweaks I asked her to make like the fussy git I am.)

With the set on hand, I ventured back into the wilderness that is Maya, and started texturing. At first I intended to use a toon shader, so I could get black outlines, but the black outlines slowed everything down and were tempramential to say the least. Instead, I did away with the black lines, and instead simply like the toon colours with an ambient light and the results... well I let the video speak for itself.

I still need to put in the thorns and mountains to fit my concept, but otherwise that's pretty much done, ready to put in cameras and render.

However then came a crushing question: what if it didn't match my animation?

Well, seeings as if this was the case I'd have to draw my backgrounds, I quickly rendered out a approximate camera angle to what I wanted for a shot, and composited the image into the background of a piece of completed animation.

The result is below:

Luckily, it seems to work well together, and I have options if later on I decide against it.

Now all I need to do is finish my animation...

Peace out

James

Planning out Animation

Okay I decided to sit down today and make a chart of what animation needs to be done to finish my film, whose doing it and what I've managed to get done. Green squares mean it's done, red means it's pending.

Yeah that's ALOT of red you can see there.

Panicking? Not really, just driven to work harder.

And away I go.

Boiling Fixed

Hey!

Remember my animation?

Remember how the lines wobbled like a ladybird standing on one leg?

Well I fixed that, check this out.

Now the animation isn't 100% finished, but this is more about the lines than anything. Basically after months of working on Toonboom, I remembered that you can select lines. I also remembered that if you can select something, u can copy and paste it.

After realising this, I decided to see what it would look like if instead of tracing over lines when something doesn't move, like here the character's head and body dont move much at all, so I just pasted the lines on a new layer, and drew in what mvoed, rubbing out and redrawing on the rest when needed.

The result? Well my lines don't boil, which majority of people prefer.

...I actually prefer it with a bit of boil, but enough people have said they prefer without, and this was saves time. So this what I'll be doing from now on (have already gone and fixed some previous scenes that were, as the Hobbits say, screwed Mr Frodo) and no doubt I'll stop being a whiny git and learn to like this way.

I'm off to battle evil

and by that I mean animate

Go me, master of bizaare segues.