This Month’s Overview

This month would see me trying (and to an extent succeed) to catch up and fix long standing elements of my work. We will have lest than 1 and a haft month to complete my work fully after March. The animation process had already begun last month, but I’m not in the state I wanted to be.

 

Problems With Attractors Models

Attractors Model caused many issues during its creation.  As stated last week, the modelling process did already delay the finished animation as the character appears in most scenes.  The main cause of the delay in animation was due to my lack of knowledge of organic modelling at the time.  Also, once the character was fully modelled, I had many issues rigging and weight painting made worse by the eyes and connecting piping.  It caused such a problem and because I was working on my own that my tutor, Henry, decided to help me by creating the rig himself.  It was not all smooth sailing, as the model broke several times when being transferred between computers systems, even after the final model was sent with the complete rig including eye lid movement and pipes.

Even after all of that, the texture became lost with some of the UV maps becoming a mess.  At that point I was tired and worried about my time, so with the exception of the eyes (as their UVs and texture survived), I would ditch Attractor’s current Substance Painter and use the stranded colour textures within Maya. Thanks to the character’s design only using solid colours this worked quite well even if the fabric is a little bland.  If I have more time before hand in, I should try and update his textures with new ones in Substance Painter.

Overall I am very happy to see the villain completed but it took an inordinately large time. I will have to be more careful going forward to not fall into any more technical issues.

   

Animation

I started the animation just at the end of last month and I was able to animated mostly scenes 32 to 42. However I did not keep up with my blog and when going back to catch up on this information, some requirements and points of how the blog is handle was revealed. Next month’s entry will cover the animation process in it’s entirety.

 

For Next Month

I will try to finish up all basic animation and if I have time, go back and fix (or add) small details to refine the overall movement. I will also complete the opening and closing credits. I should also gather sounds online and make a backup audio catalog in case the sound students doesn’t get back to me.