Making a breezy post here for a second to let Ben know that my final project is in the file on the servers. Vimeo wouldn't accept my final animation even though I tried to upload it three times and changed my export settings every time. Bleh. I haven't had very good luck with Vimeo, and if was going to be dodgy like most of my recent uploads with them, I'd rather not upload it at all.
SO, in short, I guess everyone will just have to live with being presently surprised at the screening tomorrow afternoon...
Friday, May 15, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Send Pix is finished~!
Of course, I have to add the end credits and render it out. But whatever. LOOK AT IT. Ahahahahaha. I've been working on this project NONSTOP since Sunday. Last night I was up until 4am scanning pictures for the end credits, and then I forgot to turn off my alarm and was woken up at 8am and decided to go ahead and finish the end credits. I'm living off of a steady diet of Ritz crackers, water, and whatever is in arm's reach. My new facebook profile pic pretty much explains how I'm feeling right now...
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Send Pix Process 3
Okay. I'm really, really tired right now. Let's go through this quick:
The awesome: Body animating finished last night!
The lame: I had to render out three times. The first two were fudge-ups because for some reason it was only rendering the first two seconds. After I figured out how to make the render-out work, it would take an estimated seven God-forsaken hours to render. Okay, okay, so I've been a part of projects where scenes take days to render, so it's no big deal, but I was wondering if my poor machine could handle it (and I was very, very thankful that I didn't have to use school computers).
After the render I uploaded the scene into Flash so I could work on the facial animation. Flash is awesome in that no matter what size the file of a .mov file I upload is, it will always lag when I drag my timeline down to listen to the audio. The easy way to solve this is to just turn the video layer invisible, which is what I did.
This is basically what I see while I'm lip-syncing. Which isn't that bad. The thing that sucks is that Jack's jaw moves while he talks, and since Flash lags so much, I can't see if the jaw movements match the lip movements. It's not the end of the world, as long as it doesn't look absolutely horrible when I render it out. After I'm finish with the face animation, I'm going to bring it into After Effects and parent it to his face so it will follow it even through rotations and stuff. The thing that's hard about that is that when he rotates his head while having a specific place he's supposed to be looking (usually his cell phone) I have to guess where his eyes will make contact (like if his head is turned up but he's making eye contact with his phone, I can't tell in Flash whether or not he's really looking at his phone or a little too far to the left or right.)
Here's a picture of what he looks like with his face on his head in the right way. I'm doing the same thing with most of my facial animations where I keep both eyebrows on one layer, both eyes on one layer, the nose and upper lip on the same layer, and then the mouth has its own layer as well. For lip syncing I'm mostly putting in pre-made mouths during the important syllables and then going through and filling out the tweens myself between keyframes. The animation is at 24 frames per second, which is the highest frame count I've ever done for a project before. It's a challenge, but I'm enjoying the results.
The awesome: Body animating finished last night!
The lame: I had to render out three times. The first two were fudge-ups because for some reason it was only rendering the first two seconds. After I figured out how to make the render-out work, it would take an estimated seven God-forsaken hours to render. Okay, okay, so I've been a part of projects where scenes take days to render, so it's no big deal, but I was wondering if my poor machine could handle it (and I was very, very thankful that I didn't have to use school computers).
After the render I uploaded the scene into Flash so I could work on the facial animation. Flash is awesome in that no matter what size the file of a .mov file I upload is, it will always lag when I drag my timeline down to listen to the audio. The easy way to solve this is to just turn the video layer invisible, which is what I did.
This is basically what I see while I'm lip-syncing. Which isn't that bad. The thing that sucks is that Jack's jaw moves while he talks, and since Flash lags so much, I can't see if the jaw movements match the lip movements. It's not the end of the world, as long as it doesn't look absolutely horrible when I render it out. After I'm finish with the face animation, I'm going to bring it into After Effects and parent it to his face so it will follow it even through rotations and stuff. The thing that's hard about that is that when he rotates his head while having a specific place he's supposed to be looking (usually his cell phone) I have to guess where his eyes will make contact (like if his head is turned up but he's making eye contact with his phone, I can't tell in Flash whether or not he's really looking at his phone or a little too far to the left or right.)
Here's a picture of what he looks like with his face on his head in the right way. I'm doing the same thing with most of my facial animations where I keep both eyebrows on one layer, both eyes on one layer, the nose and upper lip on the same layer, and then the mouth has its own layer as well. For lip syncing I'm mostly putting in pre-made mouths during the important syllables and then going through and filling out the tweens myself between keyframes. The animation is at 24 frames per second, which is the highest frame count I've ever done for a project before. It's a challenge, but I'm enjoying the results.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Send Pix Process 2
I was able to get the voice actors in and record dialog last week. I've got about 20-30 seconds into the body animation of the main character. Here's a screenshot of the in-process rig of Zachary.
Not much else to report. Still plugging away trying to make Geoff's deadline...
Not much else to report. Still plugging away trying to make Geoff's deadline...
Monday, April 20, 2009
Send Pix
I always like chronicling the stupid, meaningless adventures of life. I mean, you spend a lot of your life living, and not all of it is exciting, beautiful, or even has to tell a concrete story with morals. The two characters whose precious moments I will be telling is Jack Velasquez and Zachary Flynn.
Proposal
The object of the short is to capture a few seconds in the life of this carefree couple. Jack's character usually means well and tries his best to make his friends and family happy. Zachary, on the other hand, is usually rushed, hasty, and sarcastic, coming off as mean when he doesn't intend it.
The short will be done in one long take, starting on Jack. He has just turned on his new cell phone and wants to try and call Zachary to see if it works. He discovers that his phone can send pictures to people, so he takes a dorky picture of himself and tries to send it to Zachary. He starts shouting to Zachary, who's in the kitchen, and asks him questions that could be easily answered if they were in the same room. At the very end of the short, Zachary walks in and asks Jack what he wants him to see, and his cell phone beeps and tells him a new picture has arrived. He looks at the picture and rolls his eyes and smirks, leaving Jack a little annoyed.
With this project, I plan to:
1) Tell a very short story is a precise and comical way.
2) Create believable and well-animated characters.
3) Focus on creating a detailed background, since the short will only have one.
Assets
Character rigs:
Each character will need their own adjustable set of-
1) Face
2) Neck
3) Chest/Torso
4) Upper arms
5) Forearms
6) Palms
7) Fingers/Thumbs
8) Adjustable hair front/back
The basic character animation will be done in After Effects. The lip sync and eye details will be done in Flash.
Props:
1) Jack's cell phone
2) Jack's cell phone box
3) Zachary's cell phone
Background
Foreground (table top)
Schedule
The project is due on May 8th, so from this point on I have three weeks to complete it. So far the script is finished, and assets are coming together quickly. Here's a tentative schedule:
Week 1 (April 19th-25th)
+ Finish gathering assets
+ Record voices
+ Begin principle animation
Week 2
+ Continue principle animation
+ Begin lip sync and eye detail
Week 3
+ Finish lip sync and eye detail
+ Finish minor effects/gloss it up/make it pretty.
Since there aren't any camera moves, and a lot of the script is left to be ad libbed by my actors, I'm waiting for recording to be over before I spend precious time mapping out in storyboards. Here's an example of the basic layout (shot with a picture from my webcam... Sorry, my scanner's acting a little off right now.)
I normally use a limited color palette in my animations, but I want this one to be in color. The background will probably be limited to one color, probably dull so it will contrast with the lively colors of the characters. The characters will not have outlines, and gradients will be used for shadows. The characters will be rigged together using the puppet tool in After Effects, and some of the more fluid body movements will be used with the pushpin tool. I've never used After Effects for an animation project before, and I've also never even used the puppet tool, so this will be a learning experience for me. As the progress... progresses, I'll post what I have finished so far here.
The object of the short is to capture a few seconds in the life of this carefree couple. Jack's character usually means well and tries his best to make his friends and family happy. Zachary, on the other hand, is usually rushed, hasty, and sarcastic, coming off as mean when he doesn't intend it.
The short will be done in one long take, starting on Jack. He has just turned on his new cell phone and wants to try and call Zachary to see if it works. He discovers that his phone can send pictures to people, so he takes a dorky picture of himself and tries to send it to Zachary. He starts shouting to Zachary, who's in the kitchen, and asks him questions that could be easily answered if they were in the same room. At the very end of the short, Zachary walks in and asks Jack what he wants him to see, and his cell phone beeps and tells him a new picture has arrived. He looks at the picture and rolls his eyes and smirks, leaving Jack a little annoyed.
With this project, I plan to:
1) Tell a very short story is a precise and comical way.
2) Create believable and well-animated characters.
3) Focus on creating a detailed background, since the short will only have one.
Character rigs:
Each character will need their own adjustable set of-
1) Face
2) Neck
3) Chest/Torso
4) Upper arms
5) Forearms
6) Palms
7) Fingers/Thumbs
8) Adjustable hair front/back
The basic character animation will be done in After Effects. The lip sync and eye details will be done in Flash.
Props:
1) Jack's cell phone
2) Jack's cell phone box
3) Zachary's cell phone
Background
Foreground (table top)
The project is due on May 8th, so from this point on I have three weeks to complete it. So far the script is finished, and assets are coming together quickly. Here's a tentative schedule:
Week 1 (April 19th-25th)
+ Finish gathering assets
+ Record voices
+ Begin principle animation
Week 2
+ Continue principle animation
+ Begin lip sync and eye detail
Week 3
+ Finish lip sync and eye detail
+ Finish minor effects/gloss it up/make it pretty.
Since there aren't any camera moves, and a lot of the script is left to be ad libbed by my actors, I'm waiting for recording to be over before I spend precious time mapping out in storyboards. Here's an example of the basic layout (shot with a picture from my webcam... Sorry, my scanner's acting a little off right now.)
I normally use a limited color palette in my animations, but I want this one to be in color. The background will probably be limited to one color, probably dull so it will contrast with the lively colors of the characters. The characters will not have outlines, and gradients will be used for shadows. The characters will be rigged together using the puppet tool in After Effects, and some of the more fluid body movements will be used with the pushpin tool. I've never used After Effects for an animation project before, and I've also never even used the puppet tool, so this will be a learning experience for me. As the progress... progresses, I'll post what I have finished so far here.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Green Screen
Ahahaha... I uploaded this onto Vimeo but totally forgot to return the favor here.
Green Screen!! from Kachi Riggs on Vimeo.
Green Screen!! from Kachi Riggs on Vimeo.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Tracker Animation
It's 11:56. Still technically Wednesday night.
This one actually has sound, and it's kind of abrupt, so if your speakers are turned up loud, you've been warned.
Kachi Plays Music from Kachi Riggs on Vimeo.
This one actually has sound, and it's kind of abrupt, so if your speakers are turned up loud, you've been warned.
Kachi Plays Music from Kachi Riggs on Vimeo.
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