Animating, Rendering and issues (as always)

I have been animating and rendering each the first few scenes. I ran into some issues when animating the mother as I am not confident in my animation skills. Reference is of the utmost importance and substantially helpful, I had admittedly forgotten the basics of a walk cycle animation but when I acted out the movements, it reminded me of the process. As walking is such a natural action we aren't even aware of the cycle of movements, I had forgotten about the slight up and down movements we make which makes a significant difference to the appearance of the walk cycle. Eventually I ended up with a scene that I was fairly happy with:

I decided that with the sniper scenes, I will compose the scene to make it appear as though he is hiding behind a bush:

I have decided to add the sniper scope during the editing stages of the production as I feel that it gives the scene more depth as I have experimented with this.

The only major trouble I have encountered so far is the scene with the blood. I have attempted many ways of producing the blood moving across the floor as if it is pumping out of the character as she has been shot. Initially I found a tutorial using nDynamics which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQsTbuH6jns


I played around with the attributes and such things but I was unable to achieve the effect that I wanted, it looked too unrealistic. I saw on forums that many people had suggested Realflow, however, I believe that it is a plug in which you have to purchase and it looks rather complex therefore considering the short amount of time I have left I decided to see if the simple idea I had would work. This would to be to create a polygon 'puddle' shape and just key frame it and move it. This seemed to work but now I need to find the right texture for the blood. I have tried a few different suggestions and have even downloaded a shader but at the moment none of them are looking right. Blood has similar qualities to glass therefore I am going to attempt to make a dark red glass shader.

This is a screen shot of the nParticles with no changes made.

I then changed the colour of the nParticles but it looked really flat.

The tutorial that I followed stated that you could convert the nParticles into Polygons which is what I have done here, I think the tutorial is more based around the blood coming from the wound which in my case isn't visible. 

 I smoothed the mesh and played around with the attributes however it just wasn't looking right.

I decided to use a polygonal shape and downloaded a blood texture from here: http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/shaders/c/beavasoft_blood_shader

This is definitely too light, i tried to change the colour but didn't really achieve good results. 

I have finally done it, its taken me a lot longer than I would have liked especially as it was rather simple, I just assigned the dielectric material and changed the colour to red which looks like this:

Mother Character Production

The next scene of the animation involves the mother character. I have been searching for a couple of hours now to try and find a character rig or model that would be appropriate, however, I have had a lot of issues. Firstly it is important that the character looks appropriate for the role, a lot of the models are half dressed which I don't think is.. Also most of the models are available for 3dsMax, which I do not have because I am using a Mac and it is not available.

I find I constantly encounter issues such as this when I am producing work, I don't think Maya is used as much as the other 3D software available which creates problems gaining accessibility to information and tools.

I have finally found a character which I think would be acceptable to use, now I just have to rig it which I was trying to avoid as my skills are not strong in that area.

I have been attempting to rig the character however as her arms are down by her side this has created some deformation when I move the skeleton therefore I am having to use paint weights. This is taking me a little while as I find paint weights difficult to use, I understand the concept but I don't think the tools are very clear.

I was going to use this character however as you can see in the pictures her hands are touching her body and I have tried to use paint weights for a good hour to fix it and I managed to fix a majority of it but it was too noticeable to use.

So I am going to have to try and find another model to try and rig..

Next I found a good quality model but it was a 3dsMax file, I researched as to whether it was able to convert the file into a file that Maya could read, it is possible however I am using an iMac which does not support 3dsMax..

I am getting increasingly frustrated with all the obstacles that I keep facing however, someone did point out to me that I am overcoming these obstacles by using my knowledge. I am also getting concerned about the amount of time that I have to finish my project before the deadline, the mother character is taking a lot longer than I anticipated and I need to ensure that I have enough time to render and edit.


I had to gain access to 3dsMax to export the file as an fbx., I then loaded it in Maya and rigged the character. I thought I had finally found a character that I could use however when I attempted the render the character in Mental Ray, initially Maya just kept crashing and when it did render, the entire scene was black so I gave up on this model too.

I have attempted to rig four models now and have not had any luck, it has taken me two days to find a character that I am able to use. I did think that I had previously found a character that I would be able to use earlier on in the production stages however that had failed.

I found a rigged female character which I am going to use as I am running out of time. The quality of this character isn't as high as I would have hoped however I need to move on to the next stage as soon as possible.

Animating and rendering the first scene

As this animation is taking a long time to render, it is now taking 5 minutes per frame, I am going to animate and render in stages so that i am able to do both simultaneously. I decided to animate the opening scene and whilst that is rendering I will animate the next scene.

Initially, I viewed some reference on YouTube of babies crying in their crib. I noticed that their movement is random, more of a flailing motion therefore that was how I was going to animate the baby and I would have the camera zooming in from outside.

The animating was a lot easier than I anticipated. I think it may be because the rig is simple, before, I have attempted to animate with complex rigs and found it too difficult. I slowly animated a limb at a time until I had a movement that I was happy with. I then had a few issues with the cameras as I haven't animated a camera in a while and when I created a camera, the settings where different so it came out looking like this:

Clearly this is not good so I had to render using the perspective camera but I feel like you have less control of the movement, or I find it easier to use one I have created.

As always in the rendering stages, I encounter problems, after rendering for several hours, I assembled the jpg's into a video in After Effects and here is the video:

As you can see, something weird happens. I am pretty certain that it is the glass material that I placed on the window that the camera is moving through. I was experimenting with different glass shaders and had forgotten to change that window. I had checked before I rendered however the change was so drastic it happened between two frames.

I then changed the glass and rendered it again, however, the glass material affected the mirror material and caused it to be non reflective. The mirror jumps straight from a dull to a reflective material which obviously is not good. I altered the glass again, double checked by rendering particular frames and produced an opening scene that I am pleased with.

Baby Character Production

As I have previously mentioned, I will not be modelling the baby character. I was unable to find a baby rig that I was able to use therefore I had to download a model of a baby. I then applied a simple rig to the character so that I was able to animate it. The model did not come with textures and I have not previously textured a character. As I wanted the characters to look as realistic as possible, texturing was important. I searched for skin shaders and information concerning them, I discovered that Mental Ray has a skin preset that is of a good enough quality in my opinion. I did discover other methods however these appeared extremely complex and I do not think I have the time to explore this particular avenue. I applied the texture and then followed this tutorial as you have to play around with the attributes until you achieve the texture you want.

http://youtu.be/VIYopSeGnoI

I am happy with this texture and am now ready to start animating.

Modelling - Nursery Complete

I have now finished my Nursery scene:

Modelling - Day 11

My scene is pretty much finished now, I just have to add a radiator and a door and then I think it will be ready for the characters. I gathered some reference for the radiator and began modelling which was fairly simple for me, I used a polygon cube which I formed into a rectangle and again used the edge loop tool and extruded the faces in to acheive the characteristics of a radiator.

I then repeated this process for the door and placed it in the scene.

I think that is everything that I want to include in my environment, I will add any finished touches such as the window frames then my scene is ready for my characters.

I am going to find character rigs to use in my animation as my character modelling, rigging and skinning skills are not strong at all and I am restricted to a deadline.

Modelling - Day 10

Now it is time I finally address what I have been avoiding, creating a texture for the fabrics in my scene. Not only that, I was unsure of how to get a realistic looking material shape, with the same characteristics as cloth.

The obvious answer to this is Ncloth, I have used Ncloth a little but I am not confident. I think it has a lot of potential of which I am yet to explore, it slightly intimidates me for some reason. I decided to turn to Google to find out how to make a bed sheet. There were several tutorials on YouTube so I decided to absorb the different methods and experiment with creating some cloth objects.

I was quite surprised by my initiative as I had an idea and it actually worked exactly as I had anticipated and produced exactly the visual I was hoping to achieve. I created an Ncloth from a polygon plane and used the mattress as a passive collider. This resulted in the plane acting like a cloth and falling onto the mattress, eventually as you continue to play the animation, the object is dragged down. As I want a still object, I decided to pause the animation that had been put in place by the Ncloth when the cloth was behaving how I wanted it to - with the appropriate shape, creases and folds. I duplicated the Ncloth which produced a polygonal shape identical to the Ncloth but without the Ncloth attributes therefore the shape was still.

This worked well so I decided to use this method to place a blanket inside the moses basket. I finished modelling and texturing the moses basket which was simple and used the moses basket as a constraint. I placed a polygon plane above the basket and the plane fell into place, again I stopped on the most appropriate frame and duplicated the shape that I was looking for.

Now I have the models done, I need to create some textures, I have gathered a few different fabric textures and am going to experiment with them. 

I experimented with these textures and using bump maps and eventually ended up with a shader that I was happy with. 

Getting close to finishing my scene now.