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: