Week 8

I have been doing the rest of my animation and rendering scenes to see the outcome of my short animation piece, so far I'm liking what I have achieved so far, but my animation needs a lot of work, I'm trying my best to give a good quality design and find that I'm nearly there. My editing and music is going to plan I'm not having any troubles editing and finding the right song to go with my animation.
what I have done is used the duration tool in premiere pro to give the before scenes a slow and joggy pace to hopefully show that its a memory. Also I have some clips blacked out to give the affect of later in the day or future. I notice it a lot because I've been working on it and an audience will pick up on it to just not as much as I see it. I am pleased with the work I have done this term, even if there are loads of things that others believe I need to work on I find that I have reached a personal goal, that I can be proud of.

Week 8-music

These are some music video's of the songs I liked for my short animation piece:

Week 7

For week seven I have started to animate my characters, first I have been praticing to animte and trying out how I can make the two skaters move on the ice and interact with each other. If I find some bits in my pratic animated piece that work then I'll keep them and add them to my final scene.

When using premiere pro I started to edit some footage and see how it plays out.

Lighting: I had a hard trouble with the lighting only because I wanted the two scenes to have an element of night and day. Jared said that if I put a light under the snow texture to bring out the look of winter. It has made a difference with both the scene now it has the mood of looking like to sepertate scenes.

Animation: My characters still feel like their not moving smoothly, I need to work on their movement to have them act towards each other. what is working is the kiss scene that I have made. I didn't want to change that scene at all only because I think that it works well. The only thing that is worrying me is that on the maya8 timeline I have not spred out the action which makes the characters move to fast and when playing it in premiere pro, its showing to fast and when I applied the speed tool, it makes the characters jog. But on the other hand the affecet it has given makes it look more of a memory with its joggy slower pace. So I might keep it in or have to re-do.

Music: I wanted to only have a song in the background and no sounds to make it more of an emotional animation instead of the sounds taking the emotion away from the characters. First off I wanted to use the song 'something happened to my heart' from the film Ronnie and Julie but because the film is so old I wasn't able to either find nor download the song so I had to go though a few love songs.

• Boyz To Men: one sweet day


• Jessica Simpson: where you are


• Faith Hill: there you'll be
  
• Brian Adams: everything I do
  

I did go though loads of loves songs and watching the music channel magic, and had a list made but out of the songs I thought might have gone with my animation are shown above. I am thinking of using the song 'where you are' by Jessica Simpson because the slow and sad pace I think connects with my animation more.

Week 6_Blend shapes_movie_clip

Week 6

For this week I was sorting out my texturing on both my characters and without realising I had to redo the blend shapes for both the girl and boy characters. I had the blends shapes from preivous work but wasn't able to re-connect them to the character models and was unable to get any help to see if I could fix the problem, so I had to re-build the blend shapes once again, but to be honest I think the faces were much better than my previouse ones and am glad to have done them again. I also did do as many heads the second time round because when thinking of the story line I added in extra faces when the was really no need.

I am looking at starting my animation tommorrow just sorting out last min adjustments so its all prepared to begin the animation.

Week 5

I have textured my characters over the last few days, it was very hard because a human body is a difficult shape to texture round but the characters are looking really good I will be going back and sorting the textures out to make them perfect on my two characters. below you will see images taken from the maya8 program, that is my screen shots:

Week 5

For the week five I have been finishing of both my two scenes and begun to weight my two characters, I found the weighting really hard and have been foucing on that for the last couple of days but I have taken out the IK Handles only because it was making the weighing harder for me to use. I have started to get images and textures to start texturing my two characters.
For the boy, I was thinking I wanted him in a brown top, blue jeans and blue gloves both the skates will be white. For the girl I wanted a red coat with black jeans and pink gloves. I will be starting it to day after my editing project has I've been doing my editing project for my other tutor.

I have been told to use planner/cylindrical mapping for the characters since its hard to texture a person without the texture pulling in certain areas. I was told that automatic mapping would be better but since I haven't used it and I'm not able to get help on learning a new texture mapping at this stage, I will try my best in dveloping textures for both my characters using planner/cylindrical mapping.

Week 4_looking at the different scenes

I took some screen shots of both of the enviroments so that you can see the different but I think I might have to change the background of trees, but I do feel like there is either something missing or to take away some bits. I think over the next week I'm going to mess about with changing some of the enviroment to make it look better then start texturing my two characters for them to be weighted and animated.

Week 4-texture/building/images

For this week I was sorting out my second background to make it look like time had passed, For this I changed a few things such as breaking the gates, showing less snow and changing the lighting to make the scene look darker for a different time in life. But both my tutor and two class mates had the idea of having houses in the background to make it look really obvious that it was a different time frame. it took a couple of days to do the three house because of the simple squares, I tried not to spend to much time on the house since they wouldn't be in the scene that long. I think you can tell the two different scene in time because I added in the houses to show over the years later on houses where built next to the lake.
Textures for the house:

Images taken from google to get an idea of the style of houses and what they look like in winter:

Different angle views of the houses I made in maya and other shots showing the texture mapping and bump maps: