I had spoken out before to Alec about an extension which he granted me. I came in on Tuesday the 2nd and Alec helped me add all the controls for the Bee’s faces so that could be more expressive. I did this by applying “add interest” onto the facial controls. It wasn’t perfect but with little time left there wasn’t a lot I could do.
With the rigs finally finished, my group was able to finish their animations. My scene in the animation is part 2/3 (Kaz and I decided to split the parts up so that the person doing the time lapses wouldn’t have to simple of a task to do), the continuation of Manny’s scene where the main bee flies over to the flower in worry. Then, the next shot of the 2 worker bees looking disapprovingly at him. Finally, the second time-lapse where the “Cheeky Bee” Flies away and the “Phatt Bee” only lingers for a second and continues as well.
Since both my scenes were continuations of my group’s scenes, I was able to use their files to complete my scenes. There was an issue with my Bee’s textures file carrying through to the transparency so when it rendered, they were see-through. This was luckily an easy enough fix, just right click ‘Transparency’ on the lambert attribute channel and the select ‘Break Connection’ and then in the render they now appear blocked out.
Then there was a scaling issue as well, I had forgot to add the ‘Scale’ constraint onto the root controls of the bees so when they were scaled up, their facial features enlarged also.
This was also easy to fix after Alec told me what was wrong.
The animation itself was straight forward. For my first scene, I made sure the worker bees kept flying in the back, whilst I got the main bee to fly up to the flower and look worried. I added a little bit of squash and stretch to the main bee’s body when he flies towards the flower, but you can’t really see in the final shot because of the angle, I do think it makes a slight difference though. The eyelids were easy to control as well, I just angled then to look worried and blink as he flew forward. The pupils were a bit trickier to maneuver, at the controls didn’t properly follow the bee around. It wasn’t really an issue though, just took a bit longer to set up in the right places. I also changed the worker bees’ expressions in the background to a little shocked also as the watch the main bee rush forward which is a little detail I liked. And the basket swinging was fun to animate.
My second shot was the worker bees looking at each other. I had the Phatt bees’ eyebrows come down and awkwardly shuffle his arms and turn his head towards the Cheeky bee. The Cheeky bee also furrows his brows and looks towards Phatt bee and then shakes his head. I angled this shot in a close-up of the two so that the audience can get a clear look at their facial expressions.
My final scene was the second part of the time-lapse. Kaz laid this environment out for both Lel and I’s scenes since it’s all shot from the same angle. This took a while longer because I had to reapply all the textures to the flowers and bees. For some reason, the main bee’s eyelids wouldn’t rotate, and the lattice control was deleted. I didn’t have enough time to fix it, plus I did want to alter the scale of the bee, just so that the animation would be consistent with Kaz’s scenes where the main bee’s eyes also don’t move. The texture of both the main flower and the main bee’s eyes were connected so I had to reapply the eye lambert and the replace the flower model so that it wouldn’t affect the main bees eyes.
Once I had set up the scene, it was straight forward, I just animated the main bee happily hovering over the flower, whilst cheeky bee flies straight across the scene and Phatt bee looks back but then also leaves. I think I added another keyframe into the cloud animation as I only noticed that there’s a slight jump in their movement after I had already rendered the scene.
As for Lighting and Rendering, I didn’t have to change anything in my first 2 shots since it was a continuation of Manny’s scene, to keep up the continuity. Then for my part of the time-lapse, I used the same aiSkyDomeLight that Kaz used in their scenes. I kept the area light the same but changed the directional and ambient light to orange hues. I also added a second directional light in a light pink colour so that altogether the lighting would be like a soft sunset environment. I also played about with the cloud lamberts and set them to a nice purplish colour too.
