scene 13

so I started on scene 13 on Friday the 13th.... there's a lot going on in this scene as well as the very last scene... so I figured I would get them out of the way. I wanted caustics but I can't afford the mental ray rendering time... soooo I'm playing around with an area light with a procedural texture on it. Movements are still robotic, going to add in movement in the fish head to follow the fish tail... boat is going to move up and down... and avoid having too much movement in the characters that aren't currently speaking

refining the animation

So converted everything to step tangents, and started refining the movements... I want kind of slow and seductive but without looking too robotic. I'm also still tweaking the water... I want a kind of eerie color scheme so I'm experimenting with purples and reds. The water is moving too fast and choppy now though... at least I got rid of that weird clipping that was going on before though. I've also begun work on setting up the next scene with the fish under water because I really want to use caustics on that... which means mental ray and long render times... I had it set up pretty well last night, but now that file freezes at 98% when trying to open it... I might have to do it again from scratch. :(

getting my feet wet... errrr fish torso wet....

So first pass animation... just keys with no graph editor manipulation... lighting and ocean shader still need tweaking also... not animating the mouth until I have my final voice track. This screen capture is actually from my WIP second pass with a lot of adjustments... you should see the difference when watching this clip.

a weekend of frustration

After going through 2 blocks of sculpty and realizing I still need to make teeth, eyes, etc... I scrapped the fish and did a new character. Unfortunately she's not very stable and pretty fragile... I used the same holes from the fish so her legs were close together... the gun was supposed to work like a crutch... but it didn't... at this point I don't really care and I just want to start animating.

final character designs

So more adjustments... made Marv a little more user friendly and added hip control... the spline through his back was problematic so I just removed it and decided to animate his back through forward kinematics.

I decided to skip the animatic with the models and just go ahead and start prepping my first scene... the only change I was going to make involves an extra cut in the cow eating scene... everything else is still timed the same.

Now comes the fun part...

So everything is rigged and seems to be working alright... Lars was easy since he had no skin to bind so I just parented his geometry to a copy of Marv's skeleton. The fish lady had to go through a bit of a redesign because after I put jiggle deformers on her boobs... I realized the little skull pasties where not going to deform right... I'll do updated character design turn arounds and I'm probably going to make updated storyboards using the models... but really I just want to start into the animation... I know the clock on that is majorly ticking, especially with the added window of render time.