I was responsible for animating shots 1, 5 and 6 of our group animation. Shot 1 was extremely straightforward as it was just animating the camera to zoom in from one point to another and that took no time at all to set up. That scene also already had lighting so I copied those lights into a separate Maya scene I made for shots 5 and 6 along with the environment assets and textures. For these shots I needed two character rigs and luckily Philip had his finished right on time so I used his rig alongside mine. He also created the spear and sword models for me to use. These weren’t ready in time for the playblast but they were ready to use when I needed to do the final render, all I had to do was to parent constrain the hand control to the weapon models and they would follow the existing movement. I unfortunately had to complete the animation really quickly so I could set up character lighting and have enough time to render. I wasn’t able to polish the animation as much as I wanted but I think it still conveys what I intended. These two shots would end up taking the longest time to render, I think this is because there are two materials using transmission and a lot is happening in the scene. I was a bit worried about using our rigs to animate, since they are a lot more complicated with various controls to remember and use as opposed to directly animating meshes like we did with our pre-vis but it wasn’t too difficult.
Playblast of shots 5 + 6
Render test at 540p of shots 5 + 6 which took around 5-6 hours to render with 164 frames total.