Category: Animated Narratives

I worked on the last couple of scenes of the pre-vis this morning. I knew I wanted the old man to be visibly sighing, and therefore I made up a little silly sigh visual just to communicate that:

This is the finished pre-vis as of today:

I showed this to my group and there were some excellent suggestions made:

Between now and Tuesday I am going to edit the pre-vis to hopefully get it running a little more quickly, as the very obvious problem that we have is that it is too long! I have also sent this to Alec and I am awaiting his feedback.

 

I have continued with making up the pre-vis, for which I created a cloud asset for the scene in which the new ghost is working on his grave:

It’s pretty simplistic, but it’ll do the job I think.

I also set up some blend-mode animations for this, however for some reason those did not transfer over with the model and I did not use them. However, I think this is how I will approach the animation of the cloud in the finalised version! And setting this up was great practice.

I tried to control the opacity of the cloud using this guide, however it didn’t work – I actually ended up prefering the cloud at a steady opacity, however.

This is the progress that I have made so far with the pre-vis for today:

After yesterday, we decided that I would do some alterations to the pre-vis in order to make the little details more clear – Corey did a great job, however he was brought into the group a couple of weeks into the concept, and as he was not involved in the process of making the storyboard and animatic, there were – understandably – some things that were left out.

When I opened the file this morning, the outliner was a bit of a mess and I was unable to work with it:

After attempting to clear this up, I decided just to start from the beginning. I gathered all of the assets in separate Maya files and remade the environment as close to the original as possible:

I grouped everything in the relevant categories, and I froze all of the transformations and deleted their histories. After this, I was able to begin animating. I realised that I wanted to have the background ghosts giving some context to the Ghost’s jobs, and I decided to make up a quick wheelbarrow:

I also altered my Noob ghost a little, extending the white inner body to the arms so that the model looked more cohesive. I also took the noob badge that Corey made in the original pre-vis and added it!

This is the progress I have made on the pre-vis so far:

I changed the scenes a little, first to show the background ghost characters gardening, including one pushing the wheelbarrow and planting the flowers – I’m hoping that this will set the context a little better in the opening. I also put the two main character ghost gardeners with the weeds and, subsequently, the new pretty flowers between them, in hopes it makes more sense that the older gardener is showing off his experience, trying to train him. The younger one looks amazed, and then determined and turns to his dilapidated grave project. I will probably jump in and tweek this slightly, and do more of a zoom on the weeds on the noob’s untouched grave! But I’ll figure that out tomorrow.

There’s a little glitch in the background with the ghost character using the smaller props, due to an error that I had with the play blast. However, I feel that otherwise it’s clearer what’s happening?

Hopefully I’ll be able to get more done tomorrow.

In the morning half of Thursday’s class, we were given the Ultimate Walker to animate. I had already done this previously:

I wanted to open my current version to smooth, however it wouldn’t open – so I decided that I would just redo it. It’s a little wonky but I’m happier with it than the original animation:

I made his hips move from side to side a little just to give more exaggeration to the movement of the legs at the peak of the jump, I lengthened the frame of his anticipation pose a little. I could probably slow down his movement from crouching as he’s landed to standing up straight, but I’m happy enough with this to call it finished!

Corey also sent over the progress on the pre-vis:

from our feedback, we have a good starting point but most of the changes we should make are related to timing and camera. Over this weekend, I am going to take the maya file and fix a few specifics in order to fix a bit of timing and make some parts more clear.

I did some little tweeks, including getting Ellie – one of my group partners – to fix the leaves! I added some eyebrows, a mouth and his lil teefs. So cute. He’s just a little goofy guy…

As we were meant to have our ghost models finished and ready to rig by this Thursday’s class, I also decided to attempt to model some hands and arms, with the help of this tutorial:

They’re not great looking, but I tried my best. 🙂

I potentially need the arms to be longer, and thicker at the bottom!