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...

Send Pix is finished~!

THE ANIMATION 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...

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.

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...