Client Project - Final Product

Right then. Back from the Holiday (oh little how it was) and i'm getting ready for the FINAL TERM OF FINAL YEAR OF FINAL ACADEMIC EDUCAAAAAAATION. Yowzerr!

Here is the final product I handed in on Friday 26th March. The first video is the full shot for the Robot Sheep Dog and the second video is the project breakdown video I made to demonstrate the different 3D disciplines that I implemented into the project.

(Don't blink or you might miss it!)





It's a very short piece, the reason is because I had to learn and re-learn some areas of 3D that I don't enjoy or had just never done before such as rigging, rendering layers and compositing respectively.

Problems
Rigging
I faced a lot of problems when I was rigging. First of all I really don't enjoy it, which is annoying because I know that I will probably keep having to do it in the future when I make my own characters! However, the way I got past this was to use Anzovin's The Setup Machine (Maya's equivalent to CAT).
I really like it and i'll probably use it more in the future. It makes rigging very easy. I still had to make changes to the deformation of the dog because parts of him were being squashed about so he didn't look very robot-like, but once the changes were made the rig was quite convincing.

Render Layers:
Before this project I had been meaning to explore the wonder of Render Layers/Passes, but just hadn't got the project to give me the way into it. Exploring this way of rendering really opened my eyes to the possibilities in the future, especially if I want to work fast and efficiently as a Freelancer.
What I had trouble with though was understanding the basic concept that every layer that you render has to be manually customised, so the settings for everything (the scene, dog etc) were different for: Beauty, Diffuse, Shadow, Reflection and so on. Once I got my head round what was needed it became a very logical process, but it just took some time because of the stress of looming deadlines.

Compositing:
Absolutely brilliant! I loved compositing. You have so much control over your footage afterwards, again it opened my eyes to more possibilities in the future. So although I had to learn a new piece of software I enjoyed using it so it didn't take too long, but there was a lot of going back and forth to make changes, especially with the shadow layer. You might notice that the shadow is spikey from the blades of grass beneath it. Will it's actually smooth and what I did to 'fake' that look was apply a displacement effect and some blur. I had to keyframe its intensity a little bit in some areas too, so it really gave a feel of running over different patches of grass.

No Problem
Animation
The animation side went very well, although I did have to make major adjustment to a few areas right at the end.
I started by following the poses in the Animator's Survival Kit, so I had the basis to what the stride and squash and stretch of the main body was going to look like. From here I looked at slow-motion videos of dogs running. But I mainly did everything in a straight ahead method. It was a lot of fun, especially the tail.
One thing I noticed about my animating personally was that I am very reserved! Han-ter at Smoke & Mirrors kept telling me to push the animation further and further. I thought I was but when I did push it further, it went further and I was surprised!! Great learning curve for me.

Anyway, that's all I can write about at the moment. I really enjoyed this project and working with Smoke & Mirrors has been amazing! They're a great company and I hope they will have a spare seat for me there one day.

If you would like to leave me any comments about this project I would really appreciate it. Thank you!



Soundtrack: Eric Dolphy - Out There