Matdawna Jn Philipp's Animation Blog

 IT FINALLY FINISHED RENDERING!! I was sitting through this morning's class when the tutor went over how industry professionals render out their sequences: rarely with backgrounds and with all the settings turned down and slowly increased until it looks right. So... I didn't do either of those. I felt a bit silly, but then again I am only learning - I'm gonna make some mistakes! So, I finally have the end result of this whole module completed and encoded. I'm so glad! For a longer form explanation of how I made this page to go over how I got to this point (including all of my references:  https://matdawnaj-animation.blogspot.com/p/the-frog-and-fly-tests-and-whole-lotta.html

 So, I might be missing some of my class time for the sabertooth tiger we're working on with our other tutor - but I need this to be rendered out. I'm sure it'll be done before the afternoon begins, but I'm not entirely sure if it will be anymore... I got some extra frames rendered out last night, including re-rendering the 9th frame (good job me, cancelling it halfway through it being rendered), but my PC decided it was time to just... well... break? It fully just stopped displaying stuff on my screen - and it didn't revert after an hour so I just forced a restart. I'm worried that this might be a sign..... (It probably isn't, my PC is pretty old ) I'll post an update when this mess is finally rendered out! (or re-rendered in some cases)

UPDATE FROM LAST TIME! I made a big mistake - it was 30 hours, not 30 minutes. So, I said no to that and cranked hte settings back down. Hopefully the tutor for our pipeline-based lessons will let me render through his class - I'd like to take notes from him anyways and I don't wanna risk slowing Maya down by having two files open at the same time. Here's my new plan - get as much of the animation rendered today, and then get the rest rendered tomorrow. I will have to re-render frame 9, but I can cope with that. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. (I'm joking, I'm just annoyed that I misread my own maths and thought it would render lickety split). So, I'm not gonna have any kind of finished render to show for today, but hey I got some pages made! I'm so glad I caught this error now, I'd be sat here all day waiting for this thing to render otherwise.

 Today I decided to do a test render of the final animation, just to see how long it'll take on the university systems. I know that my home PC is a bit, well, unstable - but it is able to run maya as is pretty well (as long as the file isn't a whole gigabyte). So, I started out today by rendering a single frame in the Arnold Renderer - which comes with maya by default. The initial frame took about 1 minute to fully render - but there was an issue with noise in the image, meaning I had to increase the samples the renderer took per frame (and due to not wanting to go through the AOV options and assign passes to this very short animation, I increased each sample by 1 (excluding the camera, which I increased by 2)). To put it simply, today is going to involve a lot  of waiting around - which I will use as an opportunity to not only work on notes for the retrospective piece we need to hand in next Monday, but also to work on other pages that I haven't gotten close  to finishin...

 Today I needed to fix foot slipping on my frog's feet, but I had already begun the process yesterday (but I didn't finish it in one day so that's why this post has been delayed to today). Honestly, to begin with I thought I'd be able to get the World Bake plugin to work, but I really didn't work . It would return error after error telling me it couldn't find the file, even though I'd placed the file exactly where it told me to, This is something I'll have to troubleshoot later anyway, seeing as my deadline is fast approaching - but luckily I had an alternative to this method. I already knew that the fly was moving so quickly that trying to fix foot slipping at this rate would be just, well, pointless. So, I spent some of my time sticking the lil guy to the rock he landed on. This was a terrible decision I can't come back from - mostly because of how time consuming this whole thing was: Each little dot, for those that don't know how 3D software w...

 Good Afternoon again! Today I knew I needed to work on my fly for my final project, so I got to work on that. However, I think I overestimated the amount of time it would take for me to animate an insect (especially after finding not only a very good piece of reference footage for the speed of a fly's legs but also attempting the spider task earlier on in the module) and ended up finishing this in about half an hour. I don't know how long I thought this would take me, but at least I know I can start fixing any foot slipping on my frog now. I'm probably gonna leave the fly as it is though (Except for some adjustments to make sure it actually is  on the rock), mostly because each of the fly's legs were 3 frames each - meaning the movement of the fly is so fast that it'd be a waste of time going through and sticking the feet down each and every time the fly moves. Well, here's a playblast of the actual motion: (it goes by quickly, so try looping it if you want a b...

 Good Afternoon! I'm not very good at posting progress on my work, but I can at the very least begin compiling my progress on my final piece of work leading up to the deadline! So, since starting my second year in university, we've begun learning how to animate quadrupeds (aka Creature Animation) and have been tasked with creating a short animated sequence (about 7 to 12 seconds long) that features a quadruped performing a cyclical action and a non cyclical action. This also required us to create storyboards so we can understand fully what we need and what exactly  we are animating. I... decided to make this hard for myself, I won't deny it. I wanted to take the point of a quadruped and bend the rule as much as I could - not because I didn't want to animate a house cat or a crocodile, but because I thought the challenge of animating a quadruped found doing more unusual cycles would be quite fun! It was fun in the end, but my choices were narrowed down to an axolotl (of ...