Battleplan

I've figured out I might as well come up with a plan for how much work I'm going to put into this thing. My experience in the military taught me the value of a tight schedule. There's no way around it - this project is huge, and thinking about it as a whole is overwhelming and it's certainly not the way to go. I have to break it down into little pieces, and tackle each at a time, while maintaining some kind of a notion of how the project moves on as a whole.

Since I have 4 free days a week, I've decided to approach this filmaking process like a regular 9:00 - 18:00 job. During the full days, I'll wake up early, get dressed, clean up the office (my room), sit down and work for 9 hours, including a one hour lunch break. It's not that bad really - that's hopefully what I'll be doing anyway for the next, oh, 40 years? Might as well get used to it. So far it's been 2 days, and it's really not as easy as I'd thought. There are many annoying things in the process, which still require a lot of thought, and knowledge in maya. Sitting down for 8 hours when you're not really sure what to do can be aggitating.

Anyway, enough blabbering. Homie's face is nearly complete. I started playing with it and it feels very nice and fast - and it really looks like something I would draw. I set myself up by trying to make a pixar level facial system. Now that I'm done I realize pixar-level is nearly impossible for one person to create - they have so much control a good animator can really work all the nuances and enhance the character. I think I've got the basics down, but sometimes when I was playing with it, I felt I wanted to tweak the eyes just a tiny bit, and the mouth - just an extra level of tweaking would have made my character more unique. No, but I'm really happy, it looks exactly like I wanted it to look. I tamed maya, and made a really playable and fun rig.

Here's homie at his current stage. Note that there aren't any deformers yet, so he's very..... vertical... But u can see the potential right?

Took a Break

But I'm back in action.

I've spent a day on creating a proper eye shader (to be used on both characters), and another on making the bottom squash and stretch. What I did for that was to assign the head a sq/str non-linear and then paint the eye area out of the blenshape (u can paint blendshapes but not non-linears or lattices? C'mon?! - oh and by the way, THERE'S NO WAY TO EXPORT THE WEIGHTS!! Whatever).

And the controls are starting to get hooked up. Today I'll create another one of those sq/str things, along side with a bend non-linear to the top of the head. It's a shame to spend a day on it, but it would be too rigid if I didn't. I expect to finish the ENTIRE FACE ('cept extra stuff like the tongue, teeth and hair) by the end of monday.

I also started to think of a battleplan, since the semester is almost starting. I want to have a test scene (like Rob advised) perfected by september 30th. While I'm doing that, I want to get most of the modeling out of the way, finish lucy's rig as well, and figuring out both character's cloth/hair. That leaves me 6 months for animation and 1 month post, but the post can kinda overlap the animation, we'll see how it goes. I wanna work 8 hours every day, regardless of school, 'cept on saturday (maybe tuesday can be half-a-day).

Finished with BlendShapes

Running low on energy the past couple of days. I think I need a few days off. The eye shapes were, yes u guessed it, more complex than I thought they would be. They still don't look perfect for me, but I think this time I'll let it slide. If I did the entire thing again, I would model things differently, but right now I'm affraid I can't afford to go back and redo everything. It looks pretty darn good - I just feel I would draw it differently... And that's the feeling I unltimately want to have - that I'm drawing each frame, or moving clay puppets around like in stop action. The controls are gonna be geared towards that - everything would be very hands on.

I think I'm gonna take it easy for the next week, let my brain unwind a bit. I just want to tackle all the deformations for the head (I'm gonna need some help with that) - I want to have eye squash and stretch, a tiny top squash and stretch, and a bottom squash and stretch. Probably lattices or non-linears, but it's really frustrating to figure out.

Here's my all my blendshapes all lined up like little soldiers.

Speaking of which, the situation back home doesn't seem like it's getting any better. That's also great for my mood as well... Check out this very smart Arab psychologoist explaining the situation from a very very broad perspective. I couldn't agree more when she says that what's going on in the world is not a clash between cultures, but a clash between eras (copy and paste): http://switch5.castup.net/frames/20041020_MemriTV_Popup/
video_480x360.asp?ai%3d214%26amp;ar%3d1050wmv

Mouth shapes DONE!

Wow.... that was quite a difficult task. This week I'll tie these babies to the control system, and hopefully begin working on brow shapes.

I feel like I need to reorgenize my thoughts. It all seems overwhelming all of a sudden. So there are a few notable things happening. Firstly, I made an investment today by buying an excellent automatic rigging plug-in called 'the Setup Machine', which might pay off. It has quite a few neat features like a very good auto weighting tool, as well as very advanced controls such as bendi arms and legs, and a fully deformable mesh. I don't think I'll be using the later for most of the film, but it's good to have for exreme poses.

I'm also trying to recruit people to my cause. Today I've shown my animatic to a very accomplished animator, Gavin, who teaches at animation mentor, and he gave me his personal email, in case I want his advice on ongoing animation. He has been mentoring me in Imageworks, and his remarks are always on the money. It's also good to establish this relationship in case I submit my reel to imageworks at the end of next year. Additionally, I've made a proposal to a very good animator I've met recently, who's also interning in Sony, Elliot Grossman, by asking him if he's willing to animate a dialogue scene or two, which could also be an addition to his reel by the end of next year. He seemed to like what I have in mind in terms of my character's setup (frankly, the way I see it, in a few weeks I'll have an excellent character with fun controls most animators dream of). I just don't want to end up with a rig that's too complicated. It sorta grows on me. I think that I'll have to decide what is absolutely essential to my character, and erase everything else. My main goal is to create a virtual puppet, and animating it should feel like you're manipulating it with your hands, which means I don't want almost any scrub ons, and the controls should be well defined (extra attributes locked and hidden and most keyable attributes would have limits).

Till next sunday I'm hoping to finish ALL the blendshapes, and, cross my fingers, THE ENTIRE FACIAL CONTROL SYSTEM. I would need some technical help from *ahem* ROB *ahem*

I think it's best if I really repress any thoughts of what comes after that. I felt really overwhelmed today, so many thoughts buzzing uncontrollably in my head about what it would be like next year. One small step at a time. When it's time to panic, I'll panic, but there's no point losing my head over it now. Good thing I have winter break to really really crank it up. Spring semester should be the last stretch - and it's therefor a good thing I'll only have 8 credits left by then, 4 of them are the actual project.

Right now I'm struggling with one thing. I still haven't figured out how to layer the deformations using a few blendshapes. If the head was only one object, that wouldn't be a problem. But I just don't know how to deal with the eyes, teeth, tongue and hair. Come to think of it, I have no idea how I'm gonna tackle hair altogether... YAAARGH.

OK... this is HARD

I dove into the hardest part of the entire film apparently... The blendshapes are so hard to fit together, I really didn't think it would be anything this complicated. And the work is simply painful - just fiddeling around with one vertex after the other. I'm almost all the way through the shapes that I have. Tomorrow I'll try to tackle the mouth open (+ jaw open), plus corners up and down, plus fixing everything that's left. On sunday I'll do jaw rotations and continue the tweaking. Next week I'll do mouth rotations, and hopefully by next weekend I'll be able to begin with the setup for the mouth. Then it's eye modeling and rigging, brow shapes etc.

I don't think I'll be able to animate by sebtember 1st. Hopefully by september 10th (after one session with rob).