Now that we have come to the end of the year where we handed in our film in Friday just gone, Ive take some time to reflect on the overall project.

I was very please to be working on Anna’s film with Dan Cripps and Dan Ryan as we all get on very well with each other and know that we can rely and trust one another.
From the very beginning we all new our roles in the film. Me, Anna and Dan Ryan will be doing modelling, texturing, concept art, while Dan Cripps will be animating and rendering. We all decided the camera shot from for the storyboards to the block out as we could all discuss and talk about each scene.

The film as a whole has been very enjoyable to work on learning many new things like texturing in Mudbox, using render layers, using the render farm and many other bits. Am very please with the out come of our final film, as it shows off all our skills that we put into the film. Although we still have had our fair share of problems along the way with many things like the rendering farm being stupid, rigging problems and other technical stuff. What it all comes down to is the final animation film at the end and I think this is a good reflection of our 3years at Ravensbourne. There are still a few things that we need to tweak on the film for the RSA degree show as other factors out of our control have stopped us working on parts, but these wont be major changes so it won’t take too long.

Am glad that we have finished our film now and that all the hard work has paid off to produce what we have, but on the other hand a little sad that we wont be working together anymore on a project and seeing other people as much from our class.

Our only other thing to consider is entering our film into different animation festivals and to win as many as possible. :D

Heres a time plan for Easter and the third term.

The other terms time plans can be found on Annas blog page here:

http://therideproject.blogspot.com/2009/06/aims-for-last-two-weeks.html

This is scene one shot seven that I have compositied together and graded to show the different layer involved in making up this scene.
In the image there is a character layer, an enivronement layer, a sky layer, paint effects layer and a shadow layer.
I thought this would be a good way of showing people the different layers in this video below.

The ride scene 1 shot 7 from Jake Childs on Vimeo.

Now we have a render farm one may think that everything would go so smoothly with rendering and things would be rendered a lot quicker then rendering from one pc machine. This is the common thought most people had in our class. Over the last couple of weeks we have had many issues with the farm like;

• Only using one CPU out of 128 which makes it useless. (This was resolved)
• Maya jobs keep failing.
• Simple renders taking ages to render out.
• Getting stuck on one frame making the whole job fail.
• Rendering the frames out saying that its done but only to find the images are blank.
• Finding missing frames when its says its complete.

If there's lots of different jobs going at once and more pending then it WILL be quicker to render on a local machine then sending it to the render farm. The old way seems to be more reliable and less hassle providing that we have computers to work on..

This term is probably the most intensive use that the render farm has been put under. There was always going to be some problems as being one of the first to use this. But hopefully issues can be resolved for the next time.

Here are some screen shots of the cave where you can see inside from the out side.

Forth cave
Third caveSecond cave
First cave

Some more screen shots of the cave in wireframe mode.

Most of this week we all have been compositing together the images that have been rendered out. There has been a few problems with some of the layers where some things in the scene have been left out which means they have to be rendered out again, wasting more time.
But now we have got most of the scene all rendered out and composited, its just a few little things to clean up here and there, so I think its going ok.

For the pictures used for D&AD and the RSA catalogue I wanted a picture of the caves to submit. For this Ive used many layers to get to the final images. This will be the same sort of process used when compositing the cave animation.
In the video below you can see the final image, the layer break down of the picture and then the final images again.

After Effects layer break down from Jake Childs on Vimeo.

Today I started on some of the exterior shots that needed compositing. This was a process of getting the render layers from the render farm and organising this in After Effects so everything is in the right order. You have to make sure that the frames you are importing are at 25 FPS and not the default of 30FPS, this also has to be changed in the overall composition. Other wise the animation time will be off.

Once this is done then the fun starts. I stared adding different effects to the layers and on an Adjustment layer which effects all layers beneath it.

The main effects that Ive added were;

• Brightness & contrast


• Curves


• Exposure


• Hue & Saturation


• Tint


• Glow

Here are some images that Ive done today.

kittys was meant to holding a balloon in the island room, but had to be cut out. So here she is holding a balloon.

Here I was doing more animation of kitty in her cart. I wanted to animate the cart, trying to get the weight right and also have the animation of kitty inside.

Am please with the videos above with the time that I have with this animation. Theres room for improvement but time is of the essences.

kittys room composited togther. The website on the left hand side www.videocopilot.net
is a really really good website for compositing footage and lots of effects. Anyway back to the DOF, in After Efects i set up a simple ramp as you can see. The black part of the ramp make things go out of focus and hte White part is in focus.

This is a proper DOF map, rendered out in maya that is used in our cave sequence. As you can see like the ramp the further away from the camera is darker which is out of focus and the nearer the camera which is lighter is in focus

Ive started doing little animating test in Kitty's cart and her inside the cart.this was quite a challenge as I haven't really done much this this before. I started off just animating the cart getting the speed and the weight right then I added kitty.

Today Ive been finalising my pictures for the catalogue and D&AD. This has been quite a long process, as I wasn't to sure which one to use, but now Ive picked the ones I like and Ive been composting the layers together.

I had slight problems with the depth map as I didn't know how this essentially effects the other layers in After Effects, but in the end I got it to work.

This what Ive done.

p.s hundredth post ! :D

For the animation folder I stared to do some walk and run cycles of my character kitty. Here's whats Ive got ! :D

walk cycle

Slow walk cycle

Run cycle

This weeks tasks are:

• Do some character animation.


• Knock up some renders for the catalogue and D&AD


• Some composite test renders.