Progress

Doing ok so far although I think I'm still not going to have enough time to do the first scene and the last scene.

All the moving vue backgrounds have been completed. Unfortunately I had to do them in preview quality so that they would render in time (I have a scene that is 1258 frames long) although I'm hoping they'll look ok once they've been blurred and desaturated. Maya seems to be a bit funny with vue, I had to bring a camera in from vue and imitate the camera moves made in maya(easy enough because I just copied the keyframes) as opposed to using the original maya camera in vue.

The dragon has been rendered out in all scenes(except the last shot which I don't know if I'll have enough time to do) and is looking pretty good.

Compositing the dragon and the backgrounds is a bit of a laugh-If I do this in nuke it reads the indirect lighting as bright green instead of the alpha but reads the vue backgrounds perfectly. If I take them into an adobe it reads the alpha on the dragon perfectly but puts a black bar(alpha) through the vue backgrounds;

I modelled the exterior of the train and I'm now currently rendering the train passes. I just modelled two carriages and then reversed them and changed the textures to make it look like all the carriages are different. Its been pretty quick animating the train, I simply parented them to the closest bones in the dragon so that it imitates the dragons movements exactly. I'm going to reuse the windows etc. for the interior if I get time to do the interior scenes.

Now that I got the exterior train out of the way I'm sorting out Phoebe's dress. I was having a bit of trouble with it(she popped out of her sleeves) so I had a look at my cloth report that I did earlier this year. I found out I made the stretch resistance on Earnest 200 which might have been the problem(phoebe was only on 50 which I thought was excessive at the time), I also had higher iterations. 

Animation/Bones of essimer

My original plan of just rendering out the shots in the middle of my animatic if I ran out of time has screeched to a halt because apparently this won't be enough animation to pass the assignment(although it does not specify how much time in the outline). Now I'm attempting to make the full 3.30 minutes in less than 3 weeks. I am doubtful that I will be able to managed this but I'm still going to try.

Have sorted the issue out with the rendering-Rachel has changed the lighting so that it is renderable within the time frame. The problem was that I was rendering almost all shadow due to the shadow angle which gave a nice warmth(the shadows were brown) but increased the render time as well as having 3 directional lights. Rachel put in green indirect lighting which brings out the colour of the dragon as well as having a single brown directional light which gives the same effect as the lighting I had before but with a fraction of the render time.

So now I'm rendering out all the dragon shots. A few I'm going to have to re-render because the first pass the feathers went through the body(I didn't put a rigid body on the dragon because in most cases the feathers are stiff enough not to collide with the body).

I'm rendering out the feathers on the wings and the feathers on the body and face in seperate passes as I could not seem to get those feather systems to work in the same scene(I think Maya might have a limit to how many feather systems it can calculate at one time).

I also spent most of yesterday working out how to connect the maya camera to a camera in Vue which I managed to do successfully-so soon I'm going to be able to do the moving shots of the sky rendered out(although at the moment it's not priority). Although for some reason I can't move the camera up higher in vue without it going black-I think this might be a scale problem between maya and vue but I can think of a few ways that I can troubleshoot this.

I only need to animate one more shot with the dragon in it, the long one at the end which is 1711 frames long. Phoebe needs to be animated in two of the dragon shots before I start the cloth sim but the major shot of phoebe on top of the dragon has been animated and will soon be ready to be cloth simmed and rendered.

A lot of modelling and rigging still needs to be done, this is why I think I might complete the full 3.30 minutes. The inside shot of the train-I'm modelling small things like bottles, jugs, windows etc. and using lattice deformers to create variations. This technique of modelling small componants that you assemble later like lego is the same technique we used on the buildings on essimer as well as on the bone ship. A rough exterior needs to be modelled for two shots. It doesn't need to be too detailed because its moving and in the distance.

Philipe, Hanna and Maria need to be modelled, rigged and weighted. I managed to model Philipe in a day a couple of days ago so Hanna and Maria won't take too long either hopefully. I'm also going to use the human IK. The weighting I won't worry about too much because there is a very limited amount of movement that these characters do in the shot they are in.

Bones of Essimer has also made a come-back, we got in trouble for not completing any of the shots so now we're slapping it all together, not with much success as the computers keep crashing and the tracking won't solve on some shots etc, to be frank I think it should be abandoned so that we can work on our personal projects-at least that way we might have some way of passing the paper.

Unfortunately I'm rendering out the bone ship which I'm not too happy about because it means everybody thinks I'm a total asshole for taking up all the computers. Its going to take several days because there's about a thousand components so I'm going to have to waste time travelling to SIT over the next few days. I pretty much have one shot to render it, there's no way I'm going to have time to render it if there's any mistakes with the shadows(I've made a mock up ship and put a black hole on it to get the shadows to fall on the individual componants)

Rendering issues

Trying to render out the dragon scenes and running into some problems, they're taking too long although they look beautiful. I'm currently expiramenting with rendering using maya software to see if I can render it out that way.

Camera in the ship shot

I've had to change the camera movement in the ship shot to get osseus in, here's the result so far;

getting all the feathers on the dragon(at the same time)

I've bound and weighted the dragon. Because it was a very simple rig and the dragon is such a simple shape it didn't take very long(although it was very annoying doing the mouth which I modelled closed).

Now I'm trying to see if I can put all the feathers in the same scene without the computer crashing. To my surprise the computer handles them very well. Here's the first attempt where I've posed the dragon to see if the feathers move properly;

Some mistakes that I've made is that I forgot to freeze the feathers on the left side of the head so it still had a -1 value. This made the feathers on the head on the left side of the head move in the reverse direction off the head.

I'm happy with the way the body feathers stayed on the body but the feathers need to be stiffer because they stick out too much at the moment because of gravity and the movement of the dragon.

I'm thinking(or hoping) that the problem that I'm having with the wings is that I forgot to attach the feathers to the body.

After these issues are sorted out I'm going to work on having different coloured feathers. By the end I'll probably have 7 or 8 hair systems in the scene.

I've also been working on the bone ship but I've ceased posting pictures because the files are getting so large that I can't render them out without crashing the computer.

Yesterday me and Sarah were trying to get the camera from the end shot with ossues into the maya scene. The problem is that the scale from Nuke to maya is wrong and I can't shrink the camera movement on maya's end as far as I can tell. Sarah was trying to help on the nuke end by messing with the scale of the camera and putting a distance inbetween the tracking markers but it still imported into maya the same.

Even when I decided to scale up the model in maya it didn't seem to work, weirdly the camera seemed to scale up with the model (?!)

This is a big deal because the camera has to be about .002 of its current scale to work to the scale of the bone ship, at the moment it seems positively clumsy and lurchy  because it is so large.

This is extremely aggrivating as it would be possible for me to start rendering if we had the camera movement finalised.