The Final Stretch

The final week is upon us and animation is almost over. As of Sunday every single shot for Polished Off will be complete meaning we've hit our deadline.

Today I animated Jed sliding in next to the polisher which was really fun as I've been waiting to get him into this finishing pose for a long time. However the file I've been working in is so tempramental its a joke, it literally crashes every five minutes for no apparent reason. I've tried absolutely everything from cleaning up the scene until its almost empty right through to switching users, computers and even deleting preferences. Even Hulse was stumped which is rare. Anyway I simply had to make do with saving every minute and being careful not to click certain things which increased the chances of a freeze.

Eventually I got it to this stage...

Im actually really pleased with the animation I achieved in this shot especially Jed. All it needs now is an unravelling wire which I have no idea how I'm going to do but thats what the weekends for I guess.

From Monday onwards I will be working solely on the final premiere file, importing our mov's, importing sound, and editing. I really believe we can do it for the Friday hand in - its just going to take ALOT of work....

Ed's Death

The hardest part of this shot so far has been the revolving floor polisher which slides into view. It needed to rotate as well as gently rock from side to side before grinding to a halt. I spent several hours trying different methods using the graph editor to its full potential however all of them seemed jerky and unatural. It wasn't until we watched this video of a spinning coin that we realised the base of the polisher never actual rests flat on the floor during its spinning...



Alec then suggested moving the pivot point to the edge of the base rather than the centre which prevented it from sinking into the floor. An obvious mistake but when your pressed for time these things escape you. Anyway eventually I got something I was happy with and then spent the afternoon animating Ed dying. Here is the progress so far....



Tommorow will be spent animating Jed sliding in 'risky business' style.

P.S 2 shots left!

Keep Goingggg

Spent a lot of today tweaking the release pose of the spin shot I mentioned yesterday. This was my first attempt...

This was Ok however I felt it lacked momentum and required more of a hip swivel and thrust. It appeared as if he was simply jumping off of the polisher and not spinning it away from him. Instead I went for this....

The final pose is much stronger and the movement feels much more fluid. I also animated the wire which was mental.

We now only have 3 shots left to animate!

Sneaky Spinning

We decided to cheat the hardest shot of the film today. It sounds bad but with the amount of time we have left and the endless file problems its the only way.

Orginally Jed was to spin around with the floor polisher as if he was ballroom dancing with a woman. I made a start on the key poses however the file continued to crash making it almost impossible to make progress. After two days of struggling and the animation looking like a stumbling drunk I asked Alec whether we could get away with him being just a whirling blur, almost like the tazmanian devil. It sounded stupid but considering the shot only lasts a second and a half and its supposed to represent Jed at his most extreme we decided to test it out.

We did a test animation of the rig simply rotating around at a hundred miles per hour across a distance and did a batch render. Nothing fancy just the model, one light, and a few textures to get an idea of how it could look. We then applied a directional blur to it in AE. The results were as follows...



Pleased with the results and realising that to actually animate each movement would take days we decided to go with it. It's still going to tell the story and its going to save time. All I have to do now is make sure the release pose is animated well, which I started this afternoon. Heres the progress...



Meanwhile I believe we're behind on rendering and composting so I'm going to try and help Simon in anyway possible.

Oblivious

Made a start on this one today. . .

Jed walking away from Ed screaming in the background. I have yet to animate Ed and am still not happy with Jeds facial expression timing however time is of the essence and as Phil said he does look oblivious which is the aim. I have to finish this shot by Monday morning!

Talk about pose to pose...

This shot literally was pose to pose animation and to be honest it kind of works ....





I could go in and add inbetweens and follow through etc however we always imagined this final shot of Ed dying to be ultra fast spazzing. I did animate the oxygen tube as that obviously did need to be flying about during the manic outburst. Considering time constraints this shots done.

Moonwalk

By far the hardest shot I've had to animate this term - the moonwalk. Sliding feet, hip rotations, change over steps, polisher wire, head movement, afro swing, and Michael Jackson swagger all had to be taken into account. Chuck in a deadline of 2 days and it becomes an almost impossible task. I did my best however lets face it, a moonwalk needs at least a week to perfect. I would love to be able to animate this properly with correct timing, better posing, and closer representation of jackson himself. I found a neat video to refer to . . .

I got the key poses from here...



and the timing between steps from here...



I then had to replicate the same movement but with jeds long flipper feet...



Im pleased with the progress made in 2 days however I just wish I could spend more time on it, as I know I'm capable of much better. Tommorows a new day and that means a new shot, ah well, at least it will tell the story...

Ritchie & Sounds

Tom Ritchie saved the day today as me and Alec failed to animate our allocated shots. He submitting shot 55, a hard scene in which jeds reels in the polisher wire. . .

I hope he doesn't mind but I thought it was worth posting to show the progress made. It's definately alot smoother than it used to be, and the timing is much better. It reached a point where he simply didnt have time to perfect it any more, and considering it's only seen for a couple of seconds we called it done. I've already assigned him a new shot which he's aiming to start tommorow.

Although Alec and I didnt animate today we did record the dialogue in the voice over booth - a task which involved a lot of running about and hiring of equipment. We spent the best part of the morning recording Ed (myself) and the afternoon Jed (Alec). We then burned them to disc and kept copies ready for our sound guru, John Solly, to edit. John is also sorting out all of the sound fx at the moment from a list I emailed him at the weekend. Hopefully when combined with the animatic sounds we will have an enormous library of sounds to choose from.

As well as this I made sure Simon was on form with rendering and gave him my improvment requests. He's been doing an absoultely brilliant job lately and has had the patience of a saint so once again cheers mate.

All in all an OK day with Dalli stepping in after lunch to give some advice and much appreciated criticism. I just hope the rest of the week is spent animating now....

Twennie Sev

Shot 27. Jed turning the corner. Not even a second long...

Danger Ally is now Shit Creek

We now only have two weeks to animate 19 shots - not exactly great. However we are speeding up with our animation and Tom Ritchie is willing to animate 2 more shots. If we just keep bashing them out I'm sure we can make this deadline. The only problem will be that those last few shots will have to be rendered and composited in our last week of editing...

43 done - 19 to go!

Fawty Sex

Shot 46. Quite pleased with this one. Jed flings the floor polisher into a microphone position to blurt out a scream...

53 final

Walkcycle Latest & 53 Blockout

Dazzle

My lighting skills are awful so I decided to try and light a textured and posed Jed for a poster I have in mind. Unfortunately I failed miserably and never want to touch lights again. Instead I imported an old setup Alec created for an Ed still a while back. It seemed to work OK although I had to tweak loads of textures and never had time to pose him. More to come on thiss.....

51 & 52

I feel a bit ashamed to be posting these as there's barely any animation occuring in either of them. All I had to do was some subtle vibrations in the hands, handlebars and shoulders. I also added a few cheeky head turns so he's not a complete statue...

51.

52.

(headphone animation still needed)

I spent most of the day rigging the floor polisher with the help of clym and hulsey babes. Its now almost ready for the walkcycle shot tommorow.

Version Deux

Plug So Far

Shot 56 - the crucial unplug of the polisher and plug in of the life support machine. Needs alot of work. Should be done by Saturday leaving me Sunday to do an easy shot and meet our deadline of 31 by Monday....

Shadow Test

Heads Up

Just a quick run through of whats been going on over the past few days:

Simon has now taken over from Grigsbys role lighting the BASE_SHOT, a shot which is seen in more than a third of the film and so is of great importance. He has made a blinding start and with a little supervision from Grigs and countless changes requested my myself has managed to almost get it looking perfect. Below is the latest development...



It's 85% there now. Ed's skin still needs a little work because at the moment he seems to be glowing, this can be achieved by playing around with the inner colour of the ramp. The pillow needs adjusting so it has a few more creases, a lighter shadow at the base and less intensity on the right hand side. Any other changes can be made in post, meaning Simon can then finally start importing animation and rendering it!

Our second year Tom has delivered the goods again this week with shot 21 - the pump breakdown. This was an especially easy shot in which Ed simply had to move his head ever so slightly whilst looking up at the pump. The reason for this being that the depth of field focus changes so the audience won't be paying any attention to the little fellow. Well played Ritchie...



Hopefully Tom can animate a further 3 or 4 shots for us before the end of the term meaning an extra bit of weight off me and Alecs shoulders.

Alec finished the long awaited shot 22 on friday with great pleasure, although you wouldnt think it with the amount of rage that occured soon after. He has since been working on the 'Ding' shot and today completed the POV shot (excluding Jed). I believe he still needs to complete a further two shots this, as do I.

I have been working on the mirror shot since Friday, a scene in which Jed walks past a reflection of Ed screaming, stops, returns to examine it, but simply adjusts his name badge instead - hahaha the crowd go wild. It used to be funny, I'm sick of it now. Anywho its been a nightmare trying to position the two cameras correctly for this shot as we intend to composite 4 layers - the mirror/room, Jed, Jeds reflection, and Ed's reflection. I have almost finished both views, tommorow lunch time is my deadline...



How the scene should look mirrored.



I also completed shot 37 this weekend/this morning, a close up of Jeds bum making contact with the end of the bed...



One last thing - the pump shot and isolation shot are rendering at the moment, so fingers crossed me and Simon can get the trailer together by thursday for Rave Live.

In Recent News

We have now completed 19 shots of animation meaning a third of the film is ready to render. However stress levels have been high lately with a a range of problems occuring everyday such as discovering Daves Jed rig is unscalable, the renderfarm not being able to handle 1080 HD, render jobs failing because of unknown reasons etc etc. On top of this the pressure has mounted on my lighter Dan Grigsby, and my fellow Director Phil has felt neglected due to P.O's tremendous workload taking over.

Yesterday we had a meeting about the situation and I must say tempers were high. For the first time I actually felt the real meaning of stress, so much so that the night before I had to take tablets to calm myself down and get some sleep. To wake up to a heated discussion was the last thing I wanted but at the same time I totally understood where the guys were coming from. Phil has been plodding along with Splay on his own for too long now and its about time he got some more help. Grigsby has felt sucked into working solely on P.O rather than distributing his time evenly which is true, I guess I just never stopped him because he was knocking out such good work.

The meeting ended with an agreement that Grigs will now teach Simon everything he knows about lighting and supervise him at all times in order for the shots to reach the quality they were before. He will now work primarily on Splay shots and any free time will be spent doing shots Simon cant do. I think this is a fair compromise, plus Alec is going to try and spit out a couple more Splay shots.

I actually had a really good day after that and managed to tidy up a shot animated by our second year helper Tom. What he had done was great it just needed the oxygen tube animated and follow through added to the ears. Below is the updated version...



He did such a good job we have already given him a new shot which he hopes to have complete by the end of the week.

I then finished shot 24, one which has been up in the air for a long time now. Again the tube needed sorting, as well as the timing, and ears. Its all cool beans now though.....



I aim to start a brand new shot tomorrow.

Shot 24

Thought I'd post the latest development of this shot seeing as I have been working on it on and off for the last week or so. I'm actually really pleased with it now, especially the deep breath Ed takes after he's cried out for help, a suggestion made by Phil. All thats left is for him to quickly look around in panic ...

Swift Stroll South

This was meant to be posted a few days ago now, its the opening pan down the machine. I had to animate the camera tracking all the way down the main terminal from the pump to the bed. It was really difficult and required the help of Mr Brooks who tweaked my line graph.



Apart from the animated dials and importing the sleeping animation this shot is ready to render, and can form part of the trailer we hope to have complete by the end of the week.

Ham n Cheesy

Easy shots are running out fast. In order to hit our weekly target of 3 animations per week I have had to nab possibly the easiest shots remaining, the bum shake, headphone boom, and floor polisher rev. These are all 2 second snippets of Jed, which when montaged together produce a rythmic reveal of the character.

First up my favourite, the bum shake. I animated this on Easter Sunday whilst munching on an egg and setting up my new PS3. . .



I know its ridiculously simple but it needed to be done well, and the buttocks required serious follow through and overlap! If it were up to me I would have exxagerated the boings even more but Phil has already complained about the obscene wobbles.

I then took a break from staring at Jeds rear and instead animated the pounding headphone on Monday. Again fairly easy, but it had to be timed perfectly to the music...



It was difficult to get it to recoil back to its original shape whilst vibrating, especially as I had extended it so far, however it got there in the end.

Finally today I gave the rev shot a crack. This was definately the hardest of the lot down to the fact that the polisher handle bar needed rigging and the handle itself needed twsiting. By lunch time I had finally achieved a bar that was ready to be revved and imported in with Jed, however when I attempted to clench his hand around the accelorator it wrapped around like bent paperclips on a lump of s***. This lead to me repainting the finger weights and starting over.

Eventually I set up the camera with the help of Phil and began animating. This is the work in progress...



Bearing in mind the sheer amount of 'mation' left to be done I may well leave it in this basic stage. we have bigger fish to fry.

Polishing up

I have had to go back and remodel the top half of the floor polisher as unfortunately I saved over the latest file which included all the buttons, handle bars and dial. It didnt take me longer than a morning to sort out, but had to be done as Simon has been waiting for a while now to texture the damn thing.

I handed the file over to him and he applied a number of deformers to the polisher enabling it to bend from side to side and squash upon impact. Although it worked initially upon reflection it was far to laggy and slow to possibly work with. this was due to the untold amounts of history left on the model, a fault of my own. The combine and seperate tools seemed to effect it especially and caused issues when attempting multiple deformations.

Hulse suggested a spline IK with control points, which to be honest wen straight over my head. A quick demo proved successful however we then agreed a few set driven keys would suffice. Hopefully I can achieve this at some point, if not I'm going to grab Dave and see if he can bash it out in an hour or so.

Knock Knock

I modelled this door today in preparation for the establishing shot when the whole room is seen. Continuing the big chunky rounded style I have maintained throughout the ward was fairly easy as I had my original designs to refer to.



The double doors will be seen in the background of a number of Jeds dancing scenes aswell as heard when Jed comes crashing through them at the start.

No time to talk

There is a perfectly acceptable answer for my lack of activity on the blog recently - work. It has been impossible to find time to post the last few weeks due to the tremendous amount of animation we now have to get done.

The situation has reached a point in which if we do not animate solidly everyday until the deadline, then we will fail. The team have worked out that in order to complete the film each animator must complete 3 shots a week, if not more. This is seriously worrying considering we have 59 shots in total, all of which we wish to be top quality. Of course this isn't even including the 17 shots required for Splay, a film which due to story issues has regretably had to be cut short.

I cant really pin point why we have fallen so far behind with the project other than the obvious dissertation setbacks and lack of team members. What we are trying to achieve is essentially two films with one team, a feat yet to be accomplished by any Ravensbourne graduate to date. Therefore we musn't be too hard on ourselves as we are still ahead of other groups and are dealing with double the workload.

Moving on to more positive news, the Ed and Jed rigs have now been completed by Dave. Animation for Ed began almost 2 weeks ago now and a good 11 shots have been completed to a good standard. Grigsby had been knocking out some amazing renders, and Simon has conquered the ncloth sheet for the bed.

Unfortunately I have had a very slow start to animating and for some reason struggled to grasp even the simplest tasks, such as the breathing shot. The opening shot and possibly the most important, Ed has to be in deep sleep, gently breathing up and down with his head rested on the pillow. For reasons unknown I just couldnt do it, no matter how many times I tried and so we fell behind shedule. Eventually I got something I was quite happy with, until Dalli came in and gave his much appreciated opinion. He pointed out all the glaring faults such as the lack of weight, the static movement and bad head placement. I totally agreed with him however we simply do not have time to go back. So after much deliberation I have decided to only attempt to improve it if we have time at the end, and if thats not the case then in my own time during the summer. I would rather have a complete story start to finish than random snippets of incomplete shots.

My next priority is to get cracking with a few easy shots to get the ball rolling, as well as sort out a few models for Si and Grigs. I truely believe we can still complete this film, its just going to take a hell of a lot of dedication.

Petit Pois

Easter holidays have now begun, but not for us. We're staying put until the start of third term simply because we can't afford a holiday with the amount of work still to do.

Animation has finally commenced with Alec & Simon successfully finishing three shots this afternoon! Granted they were only the clock shots, but they were a nice introduction and can be lit and rendered off tonight to boost moral.

I also completed Jeds facial rigging and earphone set up.



A good day, hopefully animation can continue at this pace.

It's all Gravy

I spent today finishing Jed's blendshapes and creating a brand spanking new control box. I had to make sure we had all expressions covered, from the subtle smirk right through to the most extreme shout. After skecthing a lot of them down and running through his appearances in the animatic we decided on a total of 17, which of course can be combined.



After going through the same process for Ed I was actually a lot faster this time, especially when it came to linking set driven keys.

With Dave currently rigging the same file, the dancing dude should be ready to animate by the end of the week! Happy Days.

Testing the rig

Spent a couple of hours testing daves rig today. We have to be sure everythings working before we begin to animate.




I had to re paint the weights for the elbow and shoulder because there was a bit too much deforming going on, but that was only a minor issue. The neck could do with a little bit more bend, and the file lags out when you zoom out to view the whole model, menaing you have to playblast any body animation. Apart from that its a dream to work with! I think once these issues are addressed we're all set! Well done Dave!

Catch Up

Due to the dissertation taking over everything lately the project has had to take a back seat, something I hoped would never have to happen. The team have spent the majority of the last two weeks at home staring at blank word documents in the hope that something will appear. However we have been able to churn out the odd bit of P.O work in our 'free' time or on the days we regroup at college.

Grigsby has been working heavily on lighting and texturing the 'Edshot' as well as sorting out render layers and optimum render settings. He has done an absolutely brilliant job of bringing the scene to life and has kept in constant communication over the phone and the blog. Up until last week none of us had witnessed a render which could be classed as 'the final look' of the film, however I now feel we are ever so close to our vision. Below is the latest render (without ramp shader tests), hope you dont mind mate...

Simon has been focusing primarily on textures for the bed and pillow as well as making constant changes to the machine upon our request. Somehow he is able to tap the keyboard and he completes two thousand words of his dissertation so he has been almost fulltime on the project lately!

Dave has finally given in to my constant pestering and completed the Ed rig which is delicious news! After tremendous effort he conquered the stretchy arms and has done a really good job of setting up easy to use controls for the neck spline, as well as the head spline. The eyes along with their controllers have alos been parented to the rig meaning everything is now nice and simps. He will be posting a video of the working file shortly. Hopefully animation can commence later this week (fingers crossed).

I have used project time to foucs on Jed as he has been neglected lately due to the rapid progress with Ed. I had to make adjustments to the model before blendshaping could begin such as extruding eye sockets, creating eye lids, and re locating the neatural mouth position. I also had to reassign some textures as the image sizes were too large for the computers to handle ( resized to 2048 x 2048). However today I began creating blendshapes on the latest textured version....

I managed to kncok 7 out however I soon tired and with the help of Alec decided to see what this baby could look like rendered nicely. He set up a few lights and whola....

Awesome sauce. New renders always reinspire me and fill me with confidence that the boring lamberty file is actually going to look half decent at some point. So cheers Als.

This leads me on to what Alec has been up to. Well truthfully? Not alot. He admitted today that he's been a bit lapse with both projects and has yet to produce enough work. I think the meeting gave him a much needed kick up the backside as he stayed with me till late tonight working on the nightime lighting for the intro scene. Although still fairly basic and with alot of work needed, he managed to set up a lighting system and achieve some soft shadows. He has taken the file home so hopefully he will continue with this at some point...

Other than that, the progress has been slow the last week or so, and with the dissertation hand in fast approaching I cant see the pace changing any time soon. I cannot wait until it is out of the way and we can just work soley on the project!

Oxygen Tube Modelled & Rigged

Unfortunately Alec has been struggling lately with the task of modelling and rigging an oxygen tube so I have had to step in and take over.

What seemed like a simple tube connected to a few clusters actually proved to be far more complex in the end. The tube itself had to be modelled to a length which would allow it to extend from the pump to Ed's mouth with ease, meaning I had to refer to other scene file dimensions. I also had to take into account the movement of the tube and therefore include extra slack.

Once I achived the correct height I increased the subdiv width to approximately 50 and then scaled every other edge loop to achieve the nice ripple effect. After a quick smooth (preview 3), it was simply a case of modelling the mask itself. This wasn't too complicated as it was an entirely seperate object.

When happy with the design, and after centring everything to the orgin and freezing transformations, I set about connecting the two together and creating some controllers. Using the newly discovered wire tool, I was able to deform the tube with a curve made up of 7 vertex points located directly inside it. I then attached clusters to each control point and in turn parented them to snapped locators, making sure transformations were frozen along the way.

The final stages of the process involved hiding the curve, creating a nurbs circle control for the mask movement, parenting the mask to the end locator, and creating a final group control which enabled me to scale and move the unit wherever I wished.






After alot of trial and error, grouping, ungrouping, parenting, unparenting I finally manged to get a working oxygen tube....

Another Day Another Driver

Thats right, more set driven keys. I spent today adding 'stuff' to the facial control box in an attempt to make life easier for us animators. Clusters were attached to the eyebrow vertices, which in turn were parented to floating circles postioned in front of the face. This created a far more flexible and efficent way of controlling the brow expressions.

Next I created a control similar to the open, clsoe, wide, and narrow, but for the tongue. Instead I combined the up, down, left and right bend deformers of the tongue to achieve a really nice monouverable tongue control. It is now able to slap all over the place, as well as tuck in and out depending on the positon of a new slider. I have yet to figure out a set up for the ripple (wave deformer) however I think we should just animate it from the channel box - much easier.

Finally I knocked up a quick animation test before heading off for work. It's only a basic wake up, but it was nice to be able to animate the blends easily for once. Luckily the test proved there were no serious issues with the setup, apart from needing a rig to parent the eyes to.....

End of Term Shots

Below is the shots we felt we were able to achieve by the end of this term providing the following assets are complete:

Ed, Wall, Machine, Cabinet, Floor, Chair, Card, Vase, Lights, Oxygen tube, Bed, Blanket, Pillow.

I definately think this is achievable considering Ed is almost ready to animate, the machine is 90% finished, the bed is well underway and all that is left to do is attach the mask and texture the back wall. Hopefully we can supply Mike with a small teaser of Ed waking up for ROA. Come on Team!!

2. Ed Sleeping

3. Clock

5. Clock - Ticks onto 12:00

6. Lights turn on - Hear Jed come in

7. Ed Sleeping - Jed walks past and Ed wakes up (teaser)

8. Ed Spazzing

16. Ed being like "guyssss"

20. Ed in pain

21. Look up at pump - Pumps breaks down

22. Ed attempts inhale - Fails - Screams at Jed

24. Ends screaming - Looks about

26. Ed notices mirror

28. Ed screams from mirror

41. Ed inhales 1

43. Ed screams 1

45. Ed screams 2

47. Ed inhales and grabs chest

49. Ed spazzing before death

57. Ed wakes up and fills up

Shots

Alec and I divided up the shots in the animatic today in order to suss out how many there were (60), how many were hard (9), medium (26), or easy (25) to animate. The shot listing is colour coded according to difficulty:

1. Opening Shot - Pan down the machine

2. Ed Sleeping

3. Clock

4. Estab of room

5. Clock - Ticks onto 12:00

6. Lights turn on - Here Jed come in

7. Ed Sleeping - Jed walks past and Ed wakes up (teaser)

8. Ed Spazzing

9. Foot tap

10. Finger Clicking

11. Headphones

12. Vroom

13. Polisher

14. Bumshake Upclose

15. Bumshake - Jed, finger snap

16. Ed being like "guyssss"

17. Jed walking towards cam whilst dancing head looking down

18. Ding

19. Estab of room - Jed walking in the distance

20. Ed in pain

21. Look up at pump - Pumps breaks down

22. Ed attempts inhale - Fails - Screams at Jed

23. Ed screaming in background

24. Ends screaming - Looks about

25. POV looking around room (dancing)

26. Ed notices mirror

27. Jed turns around the corner to mirror

28. Ed screams for mirror

29. Jed walks past, notices, ignores mirror

30. Ed leans forward and moves bed and looks down

31. Wheel doing nothing

32. Ed tests the bed moving

32. Wheel moves

33. Ed goes for it and moves the bed

34. Estab of both characters doing there thing.

35. Ed comes up behind Jed.

36. Jed begins bum-to-bed contact

37. Bum hits bed

38. Ed flys back

39. Eds hits the wall

40. Ariel shot

41. Ed inhales 1

42. Jed Moon walks

43. Ed screams 1

44. Jed running man

45. Ed screams 2

46. Jed singing

47. Ed inhales and grabs chest

48. Jed spins and lets go of the polishing machine

49. Ed spazzing before death

50. Ed dies and jed slides

51. Jed's standing there bedside

52. Estab o' room clean

53. Jed turns off machine and walks off

54. Hands follow wire to wall

55. Unplugs polisher and plugs in machine

56. Machine turns on

57. Ed wakes up and fills up

58. Eds sleeps on pillow and track out

59. Copy previous clock and AE the date

60. If struggling for time copy previous Ed waking shot.

Piss shots = 25 Meds = 26 Hard As = 9

It was satisfying to know that a third of the film was made up of really really simple shots, and would take no time at all to animate. The exercise proved beneficial in terms of organisation and has reinspired the team to meet the degree deadline.

Updated Controls

A quick post just to show the progress being made with Ed's facial controls.

New addtions include:

• Squash and Stretch handles, which, believe it or not squash and stretch his face. I created them using four blends and a set driven key system. This will be really handy when we want to achieve sudden jelly like movments, for example the shock wake up, as we can now add aniticipation and exaggeration.
• High & Low bound. A simple control which can alter the postion of the mouth on the face. Slide it up and it sits just beneath his eyeballs, slide it down and it almost reaches his neck! Perfect for the jaw drop.
• Bulge Slider. Originally I wanted to include 3 blends to this set but struggled to figure out a triangles limitations. I decided to leave out the puffed cheeks and create a seperate control for them later on, meaning now when slid to the left or right his cheek puffs up accordingly. Used for pre-screams and anticopation i.e just before Ed explodes!
• Finally I created a rather funky Extreme Scream driver. Simply pull down the jaw in the diagram of Ed and he performs the most extreme of the scream blendshapes. This one deseerved its own control.

Facial Setup

Finally managed to get somewhere today! With the much appreciated help of Alex Hulse and Dave I began to understand what set driven keys, locators, blendshape sets and limitations actually are. I had made the big mistake of creating all my blendshapes seperately, meaning I had about 20 individual blends. Really I should have been creating sets of blends which when combined would form inbetween expressions, such as open, closed, wide and narrow.

So the first task was to delete all existing blends and reassign them in multiples according to the expression. Once all the sets were created I set up a simple slider control with the help of Alex. He explained the process envolved:

- Create blendshape set
- Create curve control
- Merge curves
- Name
- Freeze transformations
- Create curve slider
- Merge curves
- Name
- Freeze Transformations
- Parent slider curve to control curve
- Set limitations of slider.
- Lock off x and z, and set min and max of y by reffering to channelbox.
- Animate - Set driven key - Set
- Select slider - Load driver
- Select translate Y
- Select Blendshape set in channel box - Load Driven
- Select specific blend
- Key (with slider at 0, and blend at 0)
- Translate slider to max Y value, and blendshape to 1
- Key
- Depending on whether you require multiple blendshapes, repeat the process.

I soon grasped the conecpt and began to enjoy creating all the controls. Using the same technique I applied quiver controls to premade clusters. As well as this I made a four way control for the open, closed, wide and narrow by merging 4 blendshapes and the X and Y translations of a locator in a box. Finally I added a high and low bound slider for the mouth to position the mouth wherever we want on the curvature of the face.



Although far from finished with blendshapes still to create I am really pleased with progress made today. I learnt a hell of a lot and I owe a big thanks to Alex and Dave for their time.. I think I now know how to sort out the eyes, eyebrows, eye lids, teeth and tongue....

Heres a quick playblast of the controls so far in action.....

Monday Meeting

Chim Chiminey Chim Chim Cha - Rooooooooooooooo.....

Today the team had a serious team meeting in the morning to discuss the progress of the films. Whilst we are all working hard we agreed that we need to worker harder, faster, and longer if we intend to complete everything for the degree show. Unfortunately the dissertation has become a hinderance to all of us and caused the production to fall way behind schedule. With so many days off for essay writing it is hard to pick up the momentum from where we left off.

Thankfully Splay has enjoyed recent success with test renders looking amazing, textures almost complete and rigging well underway. However P.O has taken a turn for the worse with blendshapes dragging, the light setup causing ridiculous render times, and textures taking longer than expected. As well as all this the rigging is lying firmly in Daves hands, who, at present is rigging Splay. With no new visuals to inspire I must admit I've been a bit disheartened with progress. We simply must start animating midway through the term, but to do that Ed needs to be textured and rigged with facial controls attached - something that is proving to be very time consuming.

As a result I have set immediate deadlines:

Dave must complete a fully functional torso rig by next friday.

Simon must texture the bed by next friday.

Alec must model and rig the oxygen tube and mask, aswell as sort out lighting and help with animation by next friday.

Grigsby must finish all of Jeds textures by this friday, aswell as test skin and wall textures for Ed and Jed by next friday.

Spence must have Ed, the sink and the radiator Uv'd by this friday.

Phil has kindly agreed to chip in with any spare texture/s

I must have all of Ed's blendshapes and test facial controls complete by this Thursday.


I dont want to be a nasty director, I love my team, but reality has kicked in and I know now that if we keep shrugging off these deadlines and messing about all day we will never achieve the film we all want so badly.

On a more positive note Alec, Grigsby and I stayed behind late tonight in an attempt to render out a decent shot of Ed in mid terror. I really wanted to check that the model looked nice coloured and lit, and more importantly that the blendshapes looked good. Test animations proved difficult due to limited controls and unfinished blends however we managed to get him waking up with a fright - until Maya crashed. Therefore I cant post the little test but we concluded all was fine as long as a decent facial setup is attached and the model is smoothed properly.

We did however manage to render out a nice still of Ed in action. Alec set up a few lights, then we applied a coloured blinn with a subtle fractual texture. The first test was AWFUL....


But after a smooth, an occlusion pass, and light and texture changes we stumbled across something half decent....



Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel....

Got There Eventually!

Blendshapes are well under way now, after a lot of hassle.

X Ray

Simon came up with a genius suggestion yesterday which has solved two problems. The first was the issue of restraining Ed to the bed. We began to wonder whether people would question Ed's ridiculous attempts when he could simply get out of the bed to catch Jeds attention. It was therefore always a known fact that he would have a broken leg or two, but how do we show it? We dismissed the idea of attaching a big ugly cast on his foot for composition reasons and proportions. Restraints were out of the question unless we were going for the mental asylum look. So why not introduce an xray of the patient? A great idea by Mr Harvey - so much so that I made it that night....

It also solves the issue of a blank video screen on the life support machine that needs filling. Hopefully we can have the legs flashing, or red squares zeroing in on the fractures when the camera pans past informing the audience of the injury.

I need to run through the new camera pan with the team tommorow, however I think I've decided the original boring straight pan down the machine is out, and the new querky left to right, up and down pan is in. That way we can cover alot more interesting features on the machine, following pipes and passing the xray, but still finishing up with the patient.

Tight Lipped V.S Open Extreme

Spent the best part of today blendshaping from the most extreme scream to the tiny tight lip. There was a ridiculous amount of vertices to repostion and shrink, not to mention solving the issue of a spontanious burn deformation. In the end miss verall sugegsted I reverse normals and it worked like a charm - cheers much! I need to finish the feet and create 4 or 5 more blendshapes - the squash and stretch of the rig will aid us in exaggerating the screams even more.



At the moment he bares a slight resemblence to this lil fella...

Swanky Stuff

Pretty happy with these new arms. Managed to achieve some definition in around the elbow and wrist, as well as model a fairly detailed hand. I still think it could do with some reshaping and a little less of the goblin styled fingers, but I suppose thats just my style creeping out again! Hands and feet will be complete for Monday so alls good in the hood.





On a more positive note, eye tests were carried out for Jed today and the results were .... well check Alecs blog.

Arm Attempt

Really want to achieve some muscle within eds skinny arms. I extruded a tube earlier in the week and it looked like a pathetic sausage. So after briefing Dave with jeds rig and giving him the model in the morning I continued to work on Ed. I found it almost impossible to model with no reference and so sketched some rough arm designs, scanned them in, and constructed an imageplane setup. I then deleted the hideous frog feet made previously and began modelling the new arms. My deadline for Ed is Friday however I think that will stretch until Tuesday as I still need to complete blendshapes for his mouth. However we are ahead with Jed so it should even out on the schedule...

Daves Rig Requirements for Jed

-Afro needs parenting to head
- Afro needs general wobble.stretch/squash (lattice?)
- Headphones need parenting to head - account for change in mouth shape
- Headphones need to throb/squash & stretch - rig. (lattice?)
- Mouth blendshape facial setup - GUI
- Tongue needs parenting/attatching to mouth
- Teeth - need to follow lips when blenshaped i.e an up and down control
- Head rig - needs alot of bend so he can whirl it to and fro
- Body rig needs to be very flexible (squash and stretch/bend) Needs to be able to perform groovy snake like moves
- Arms need to be able to stretch
- Hands rigged
- Bum clench and expand controls
- Legs need to stretch
- Feet - reverse foot control?
- Not too many body rig controls/rings
- Eyes - stretch/squash/expand controls in channel box - parent to face/

Mirror & Bed Modelling

Sink Sculpting

Still major shit to do to it...