Since the last clip, I have changed the lights. I reduced the energy of the yellow light by half, and added a white light, which doesn’t cast any shadows. This makes the shadows a little lighter, and takes a little yellow out of the room.
I have worked out what was wrong with the textures in the picture frames, so now as the scene moves, the pictures inside the frames don’t move. That was weirding me out!
After the door closes, and the light switch changes colour, there was some flicking of colours for a few frames. I tracked down those rough keys and removed them, so now the lights drop, and the shadows drop on the same frame rather than bouncing back and forward for about 3 or 4 frames.
That’s all the changes I can think of. I was going to do more, but had a friend come around and installed a new graphics card in my machine, and then set it up to run three heads, so that took a bit of time.
Either way, what i have is now up on YouTube, and presented below 🙂
Had a couple goals. I wanted to fix the error where the camera went to far to the left near the beginning of the animation, and I wanted to add a picture frame.
Below is the result;
Did it work?
Well the camera doesn’t go off scene anymore, but the camera action isn’t very consistant. Some parts of it are very slow, while other pats are quick and slightly jerky, so I think I may drop the entire set of camera movments and start from scratch at some stage.
As for the photo frames. Well since I haven’t done the tutorial on basic modelling in Blender yet, they seem to be ok. They meet the shape I had in my mind. My said she plans on sketching a couple portrait pics, so that is why I made them that shape. From the test texture I have on them though, it seems I have more playing around with the settings to get them right, as they seem to move when the camera moves.
What are my next tasks?
Well I have to have another play with the picture frame textures, I may re-do the camera movements, and I want to play more with the lighting, as there is a flash of light after the switch goes off, so I must have missed a key in the lighting, also I want to make the dark scene more noticeable but not by just making it darker, so I am thinking a different shade of colour for the dark scene.
I’ve heard my alarm go off, but I’ve ignored it and missed a few Art Hour sessions.
Today I have gotten back into it.
I decided to do some more work on my little robot toy project I have been laying around with. I set myself a few tasks to see if I could get them done. The tasks were,
1: Texture, add some wall paper to the wall.
2: Light, watching my video at night it seemed ok, but when I watched it on the TV during the day it seemed way to dark, so I wanted to up the light level.
3: Timing, when I was scrubbing up and down the timeline the robot seemed to jump ok, but when played back at the correct frame-rate (24fps in my case) he jumped way to slow.
4: Glowing eyes, when he can’t get through the door, his eyes glowed brighter. This wasn’t two obvious. To enhance this, I made it so as well as getting brighter, they also turned red briefly, just to draw attention to them.
5: Camera movement, there is no movement of the camera in my little scene, so I had better work on that.
With my five objectives, I set to work. Number one on the list was texture. My wife drew me a quick (2D) wallpaper pattern for the room, and the task was to apply this. I tried it a few days ago and things went quite weird. The problem being the two planes which I am using for walls had been created, duplicated, stretched, rotated, and basically played around with quite a lot when I was deciding what type of scene I was looking for. Now with a plain yellowish material they seemed fine, but as soon as I applied a texture to them all of a sudden the patterns were different sizes and different orientations on each wall. Not what I had planned, after all if the guy putting wallpaper up in you room put the up different ways and it was different size pattern on each wall, you’d be pretty mad, unless it lucked out and just looked good. My luck wasn’t that good. I did a little playing, but in the end I just decided the quickest way to fix all the modifications I had done was to delete one wall, duplicate the other wall and give it a quick single axis and slide into position.
Moving on, I decided to work on light. I just upped the lighting level on both the bright and dark scene. This caused the problem where the scene which was suppose to be dark was throwing some pretty heavy shadows, and it was very obvious that I was using the same light source. To quickly fix this, I just turned off the shadows on that light source for the dark scene.
Timing was my next concern. I wasn’t to worried about this, but it just couldn’t be as slow as it was. For this I just went into the graph editor a few times and scaled down on the x-axies. Once I got a speed I was happy with, I just did a few duplications to make more hops.
Eyes glowing more was a simple operation. I just keyed in some colour changes for the eyes at the correct time, and now his eyes are a little more obvious after he bumps into the door.
Camera movement was last on my list. I didn’t really have any set desire for the camera itself, so I just had it follow him and get a little closer, more as a proof that I could make the camera move more than anything.
So here is the results of this session…
What did I think?
Well I’m happier with his bouncing, though it’s still not great. The colour/light seems better during the day. The wallpaper works and is on the walls. The eyes bring a little more attention to them. As for the camera movement, well it nearly works. Unfortunately during part of the scene the camera moves two far to the left for the actual scene, and the wall comes to an end, so I will have to either have less camera movement, or I will need to extend the wall a little more that direction. Either way, I had fun, and I’m working on Blender 🙂
I have been working on my previz. I want to make some progress on it, so I can start looking at the timing, and maybe the camera angles, so I have been pushing a few scenes through.
Done enough for today so I thought I would do a render and show what I have done so far.
The images are a little better this time than the previous previz renders. I haven’t done anything more to the models or anything, I just told it to render to a higher quality.
For that reason the file is a lot bigger, 7 Meg in fact. Because some people have slow internet connections, I don’t want it to just start playing on the page without warning. For that reason, I have this time uploaded the video in a way that you have to click on the link to start downloading or viewing it. If you have any problems, let me know, and I will look into a better solution, but I’ve done enough thinking this weekend, so that is why I am just looking for a quick easy solution to make it available to anybody who wants to look at it.
Often you will see models, mainly the chicks, jumping up an down, and moving side to side. This is often meaning I am trying to demonstrate facial expressions, but don’t have any on the model at this stage, so I just move the entire model around a little to remind me that is what is supposed to happen.
I suppose I should add some audio to say what is happening, but if you follow the video, keeping in mind the last storyboard I posted, you will probably be able to work out what is happening.
Remember, this is just a previz, mainly so I can start working on what needs to be in the video and what doesn’t, and also start thinking about timing and camera angles.
Ok, enough talk, the following link should play in most players, and also work for iTunes, iPod’s, and iPhones link to the video in mp4 format.
“It took me ages and I did next to nothing”, that’s the quote I used over lunch today. No I wasn’t talking about my life, I was talking about the morning I had spent working on my previz.
Now my storyboard has about 21 slides in it at present. I though I would start doing a quick previz on it this morning.
I had already watched a video on the basics of animation, so I figured I would be ready for the basic stuff I had planned.
I started, placed a few objects, set a few keys, moved a few objects, reset a few keys, did a quick preview, and I decided that my camera movement was two fast. I figured, “No problem, I’ll just move the keyframe”, and that is where my morning ground to a halt.
I quickly realized that I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember how the video told me to do it. No problem I figured, I’ll just quickly have a look at the video and remind myself.
Now I watched the video, I watched him do it, and it seemed pretty easy, but the problem was that he was doing it, but he wasn’t telling me what keys and mouse buttons he was using to do what he was doing on the screen. I knew what I needed to do in principal, but the video wasn’t giving me the technical knowledge.
Luckily I was able to ask a fellow classmate (thanks Richard), and he set me right.
After that, I went back to my scene I was working on, and spent the rest of the morning slowly moving frames around, trying to make my previz for my first slide look kind of like I would hope for a first attempt at a previz.
Well, I finally made something. Its just a camera coming up to Rex’s cave, Rex looking either direction and coming out. Rex’s body isn’t animated, just using him as a solid object with the entire thing moving.
Hopefully you can see what I did in the frame below (if it doesn’t show up, you may have to refresh your browser, if it still doesn’t show up, let me know, and i will look into it).
