July 25th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I’ll do a quick recap of what I did the last 7 days before laying out my plan for the rest of this week.
As you may have noticed from the title, I managed to work on a few more shots since my last update. I believe I’ve animated almost half the total number of shots. Of course not all of them are entirely finalized yet. However, I’ve edited them into the proper sequence so you can see the progress up to this point.
Download Shot01-10 v1 playblast (2.48MB Quicktime Sorenson 3)
I’ve also done some more render tests to see roughly how long each frame might take to render (average is 2 min on the PCs in the lab and 4.5 min on my notebook). More test renders:
This week’s main plan is to animate 2 new shots. I’ll also probably attempt to work out the exact passes involved in the final rendering and do more tests. Hopefully I can start rendering some proper shots sometime this week.
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July 15th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I couldn’t resist tweaking Shot05 a little more before starting on a couple of others this week. Shot06 was supposed to be completed in 1 day and I allocated 3 days for Shot07. I must admit I’m pretty happy with my progress so far even though I know there are a lot of kinks to iron out. I think I’ve settled into my animating groove if there is such a thing. I’ve gotten some good pointers from fellow students and my tutor (Badger). Here’s hoping the momentum continues eh? Crits are welcome as usual 
Download Shot05 v2 Playblast (304kB Quicktime Sorensen 3)
Download Shot06 v1 Playblast (490kB Quicktime Sorensen 3)
Download Shot07 v1 Playblast (241kB Quicktime Sorensen 3)
I had some issues with Mr. Knox’s rig (misbehaving deformers) which caused me to lose a bit of time, but at least I’ve isolated the problem and found a workaround for now. I’m a little worried that troubleshooting problems and incorporating details (i.e. cloth and facial animation) might end up taking a significant amount of time - much more than I catered for in my schedule. I hope the 2 weeks I’ve set aside towards the end for tackling these sort of things is enough. I also suspect I’ll end up working over more than the occassional weekend. Much as I’d like to avoid it (I was planning for weekends to be rest days and/or daytrips with the family), it seems inevitable. I’d really love to fine-tune the animation as best I can before the submission deadline. Well, there is still the hope that the more I animate, the faster my workflow gets!
PS: I must remember to pace myself…
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July 8th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
It’s the end of the 2-week break and the lab should be filling up with my fellow students from next week onwards. I’ve added the magazine that Mr. Knox will be reading at the start of the film (it’s not textured yet though) as well as the lines on the road. Here’s what the establishing shot looks like now:
Instead of finishing all the models and texture tasks this week, I spent most of the time animating what I consider one of the harder shots for a change. I figure Mr. Knox’s wallet, pockets and Kid’s dirt stains and clothing wear and tear can be set aside for another day. As for animation, I’m adopting the approach of tackling difficult shots mixed with a couple of simpler ones each week. Here’s a playblast of Shot05 that I did. I intend to tweak the cloth animation over the weekend. Tell me what you think?
Download Shot05 Playblast (485kB Quicktime Sorensen 3)
And here’s a sample render of how the shot might end up looking:
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July 2nd, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I’m still not done with the environment just yet but I thought I’d show you what I’ve got so far. It’s quite hard to be productive and focus on work when the brand new and sunlit (we finally have windows) lab we just moved into is practically empty - about 50% of my coursemates are having fun camping out on the sunny beaches of the Algarve while another 30% are back home visiting their folks for the holidays. This past few days I’ve managed to model and texture the buildings, street lamps, bus stop and bus. Regardless, I am pretty much satisfied with the way the buildings turned out, though I’ve still got to texture the road, model a few more props for Mr. Knox, and settle the final texture details for the characters themselves - particularly Kid. According to my schedule, I still have another week left before I need to fully focus on animating, but I figure if I can steal and set aside more hours for animating, the better the final result will be (in a perfect world of course). We’ll see. Anyway, enjoy the test renders!
As usual any comments and suggestions you can offer would be greatly appreciated.
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June 27th, 2006 Ahmad Al-Mahir
I’ll kick off this week’s update with a sample set of Kid’s facial expressions. I’m pretty much done with the set-up now, and I’m liking Kid’s brown eyes and dark red shirt more vs. the old green and orange combination. What do you think?
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