Aim of the day 14th May

• Scene 7 shot 7 - √
• Scene 7 shot 15 - √
• Facial animation for the caves - X (I have decided to work on this once the characters a final and ready to go into the scenes)
  
• Fix Cho's rig/skinning - √

GO!

UPDATES

Scene 7 stuff



Ive changed shot 6 to a different angle so that the reverse shot that followed is no longer necessary cutting 2 seconds off the scene! I also rolled the camera a bit on the first close up of Lee reaching the boot to make it look like her arm is coming from the side more rather than the top.


Fixing Cho

As you can see in the picture below Cho's shoulders are crap. This is my fault for putting the joints in the wrong place when i rigged the proxy models.




As I had already skinned Cho there didn't seem to be an easy way to fix the problem, especially seeing as Ive done loads of animation with the rig so couldn't just redo the whole thing or it would mess it all up!

I exported the skin weights for her whole body and then detached her skin and deleted all the rig controllers leaving just the joints. I then repositioned the shoulder joints to the proper places:



I then used the same mel script I used to begin with to make the rig controllers again making sure that they were all named the same as the original controllers. Seeing as we are using references for most of our objects, including characters, it meant that i could just replace the old reference file with this new one and it all updated with the animation in tact!


All the characters have had wrist problems due to my plans for twist links not working out. Originally i thought that the rig script i used supported them. It does but the joints twist the wrong way... So i got rid of the twist joints in favour of corrective blend shapes. These worked ok but went a bit mental when doing anything other than rotating in x axis. Today I had a brainwave and thought that I would probably be able to add in the twist links but use influence geometry instead meaning that I wouldn't have to go back and add joints to the rig.

1. I asked Dan, Anna and Jake each to model their characters with the palms facing down and with a twist in the forearm
2. I created three cubes to act as the twist links that the arm would be skinned to
3. I wrote an expression which tells the fist link to rotate on the x-axis 75% of however much the wrist rotates by on its x-axis. I wrote similar expressions for the 2nd and 3rd links but made them rotate by 50% and 25% respectively
4. This image shows the rotation of each link when the wrist is rotated 90 degrees
5. This image shows how the links effect the mesh and how the twist tapers off towards the elbow.

Test comp

This is the result some comping together I did in After Effects for a shot from the cave sequence.

graveyard sequence

In the original graveyard scene we had the girls being attacked by zombies. It was suppose to be a way of getting lee scared which would cause her character development at the end of the film. However, this scene wasnt really very effective. I suggested that we have some of kittys colthes lying around which would trigger a reaction in lee where she realises that shes worried about her sister who she has not seen since before they entered the ride. This playblast shows the new sequence.

I am particularly proud of the animation of lee trying to grab the boot. It was all hand animated using clusters and NO cloth dynamics or anything like that! :D

Cho adjusts her pants...

Here we have Lee looking at the other two and deciding that shes going to go onto the ride knowing that they will follow. I gave Cho the secondary action of adjusting her pants a bit, hopfully it wont be too destraction from the focus which is Lee and adding the depth of field and focus shifting will no doubt help direct where the audience should be looking.

Updated animatic for scene 01

Shot....7?

shots 1-7 getting there

19 Posts and no cell shaded renders!?

There you go, with a nice thick outline too!

(note, The Ride will not be toon shaded.)

At last

18 posts without a single render done with final gather?! What was I thinking? I guess I should change that right now!

Phew...

Proxy models and rigs in Maya

Oh shit! I forgot to render it with final gather! :O

corrective blend shapes in Maya for muscle deformation and cloth wrinkles and skin weighting.

As you can see in the previous post i didnt skin the high poly very well, in fact i just left the default skin weights and ended up with this


This is similar to what you might get at the elbow or knee joints. Sone good skin weight adjustment would fix this fine but it is possible to fix this by using corrective blendshapes instead. I created a blend shape for the cylinder and the adjusted it at the bent position so that the mesh was not collapsing on itself.



I then set driven keys so that the rotation of the joint turned the blendshape on.

As i said before you can do this with skin weighting so why use this method? Because it can be used to create effects like muscle bulges and cloth wrinkles as well as correcting hard to weight areas.

Referencing in Maya using proxies and high poly models and jazz like that

To enable me to animatie while the others are still modeling we will be using referencing. This means that we can create low poly proxy models for me to animate and he replace them later with the high res meshes.

Here is an example using a cylinder.

Low poly mesh with joints, the mesh is parented to the joints rather than skinned as it is broken into two parts. as well as saving time skinning, it means that maya will run faster while I animate as it doent not have to calculate the skin weights all the time.



I saved the scene as "low poly" and then in a new scene loaded it as a reference


I then animated the low poly version

I saved this and then went back to the low poly file and created i high poly version of the cylinder that fitted over the lowpoly



After skinning the high poly i saved the scene as "high poly" and went back to the animated scene. I then replaced the low poly reference with the "high poly" scene


Because the joint names are the same in both the high and low poly scenes the animation carries across. It is even possible to create the high poly and then overwrite the low poly file and then reloading the reference instead of replacing it.

Making accurate train tracks in Maya

I originally thought the tracks would be easy to make by just extruding along a curve. Turns out that just doing that can cause some problems when it comes to accuracy.

Firstly I made a cruve to represent the path of the tracks.

Then I created two cubes that the tracks could be extruded out of.

Just exturding one face out at a time doesnt work because it move the extruded faces to follow exactly along the curve like this


Combining the cubes and the extuding the faces at the same time works if the track is straight


However, as soon as the curve bends you start to get some unwanted twisting in the tracks

I thought a way to possibly solve this would be to have to separate curves so that each rail of the track could be extruded separately. Simply duplicating the curve however only works if the track is straight

At the bend the curves get closer to gether and are no longer parellel

One way i found to get around this problem is to make an object that represents the cart (or something that can follow the curve) I chose a cube. I duplicated it twice and then moved the pivots of the duplicates so that one was horizontally parallel to one rail and the second was parallel to the other. I then attached both to the curve using attach to motion path.

Moving the pivots meant that the duplicates wouldnt just follow the curve along the middle like what you get when extruding one rail on its own. Instead, they follow paths that stay the same disence away from each other at all times. I then created motion trails from the duplicates



Here you can see hoe they stay the same distance apart all the way along



Next, the motion trails can be converted into curves and the rails extruded along them to create an accurate track!

There may be a way more simple way to do this but i didnt find it! maybe im just stupid?

Lee run cycle test in Maya

Lee run cycle

Kitty run cycle test in Maya

Kitty run cycle

Rigging in Maya

The way we plan to work is to use proxy versions of the characters to animate while the high res versions are being made. Ill use dans drawings to make the proxies to the same proportions as the drawings and then send them to Dan and Anna to make the high res, using the proxies as guids as well as the drawings. For rigging i found a mel script that automatically creates controllers for a skeleton. Its totally customisable so can be added to if needed. It might seem like cheating, but its not! I know how to set up everthing the script does so all its doing is saving time.



Above is the UI for the script. You just need to type in the name of the corrsponding joints and it will create the controllers for each one. Below shows some of the controllers on a bunch of joints.



Get the script from : http://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/animation/zooCST---character-setup-toolkit-2874.html

Cho run cycle test in Maya

Cho run cycle

full animatic with rough sound

warming up for animation

This is one of the actions that lee will be perrforming in the film. However the proportions of the random character rig i decided to use made it rather tough to get into the mind of a 10 year old girl, hence, this is probably not how she is going to move when i come to animate her!

UPDATED animatic

A couple of new frames and all new sound effects! OMDays.