Reflective Report

In this report I will go through the various stages of our production with a focus on how it affected the project, the group, and how it affected Me and my way of thinking about working in a group and producing an animated short.

Going into this production phase from the previous Pre-production period where we storyboarded, wrote scripts and planned out how we were going to make our film, we went in pretty optimistic and i'd even say naive. We thought our planning was good enough and that we did everything very well and i remember being pretty confident about approaching production. When we began production we were a bit stagnant and lacked direction but around week 3 we picked up the pace and figured out what needed to be done and eventually got around to doing some solid work. However we soon realized that we were slowly slipping behind the schedule we had in place and with every setback we were losing more and more time till eventually we had to scrap the first 30 seconds of our animation. Cutting the animation was a bit of a kick in the pants and I was disappointed that we did it, but I later realized that if we didn't cut it we would have actually not been able to finish our film. Another thing that helped us out was that we already had our characters modelled going into the project which meant that we basically bypassed around 2-3 weeks of character modelling. I think that anything that can be done prior to starting the project is a huge help, even something as simple as a set design or some props help out by giving you more time to focus on other aspects of the project and even gives you a bit of wiggle room for troubleshooting which we had no idea would be such an obstacle and time sink.

Problems started arising when we were in our rigging stage, i successfully rigged all three characters but when we tried to apply a facial auto rig, we realized that the character models were not perfectly symmetrical which basically meant that the auto face rig wouldn't function as it needs symmetrical meshes for the script to work. At this point I continued looking for solutions for my character's rig but the others re-rigged theirs using a different auto-rigging plugin but we eventually all got mostly functioning rigs and began animation. The rigs at first were awful, they wouldn't deform well, they would often flip out, and we also realized that when the other characters were re-rigged that it affected the scale of the characters which  brought even more problems to the table as we needed to rescale everything including my rig to the new scales and a huge chunk of time was spent fixing, and finding alternate solutions to the huge rigging mess we had created. I really feel that we would've been better off either rigging the characters manually ourselves from the beginning or simply  doing a test rig before we got to the rigging stage to at least get an idea of which problems may arise and to find a way of making a rig work correctly the first time and not need fixing down the track. Unfortunately we didn't think of that because we went in believing auto rigs were magical one click solutions that worked perfectly every time and we couldn't have been more wrong.

Rigging ended up being a constant concern as we always had something to fix up or modify and it just continued chewing up production time. The next time i need a character rigged I'll definitely do a lot more tests and research into making rigs that will function correctly and be achievable within the time needed and there are various tutorials and tools online that would help achieve that. When we started running out of time it was becoming more and more apparent to us that we needed to be working a lot harder to achieve our goal and this just stressed out the whole team.  Once the stress began to rise our team had some freak outs and arguments and it mainly just made working on the project harder. Disagreements and issues within the group were settled through conversations and going to get our daily coffee actually helped us out with some of these problems because we actually had a bit of a break and a chance to talk about things that are concerning us and helped our mood because we were outside in the fresh air and not cooped up all the time.

When working with a team of people for an extended period of time you get to see what they're 'made of' in a way, it shows which people are prone to stress and pessimism, who is good at dealing with adversity, who can work under pressure, and how people function in a team environment. Even though we had a few shaky moments and disagreements, in the end we were able to come together and finish what we needed to do and our teamwork was generally adequate most of the time. We were fortunate not to have any horrible teammates that would for instance refuse to do work or constantly disrupt the creative process or anything like that.

We did however have some trouble outsourcing our audio work to other students, the lack of communication we had with them led to some confusion and the actual audio we got back wasn't what we were looking for initially. After some deliberation with the other students we were able to recieve a much better version of the audio track for our animation, however a little bit later than we had hoped. I think the fact that we 'hired' these students later into the project than we should've and the fact that we had minimal means of communicating with them is what caused the problems with getting audio. If we were to organize things earlier it would give us a bit more assurance that we will get what we need within a reasonable time frame because its not wise to rely on people external to the project, especially when they are working for free, without a backup plan for audio.

In the end we were able to get all that we needed for the project before the deadline and achieve our 'revised' project goals. All in all working on this group project was quite a roller-coaster ride with many ups like figuring out new things in Maya and actually learning more about the production process, and many downs like stress, technical issues and losing progress, but in the end i am actually thankful for encountering the problems we had because having  experienced adversity in trying to make something i think I've learnt more than if everything went smoothly, the experience has made me rely more on myself and my ability to adapt to changing situations and to really take important decision making much more seriously. From what I've experienced i think in the next project i undertake it is critical to have a completely solid plan for production along with backup plans and to maintain a realistic mindset when deciding on various elements that will be in the production to ensure that which ever project I embark on is well structured, well thought out, and achievable even if I was to encounter problems down the road, and in all aspects a much more solid end product.

Week 16

So this week was a wild scramble to get all of our renders done, and i'd have to say we did a pretty good job. I got the team together and we went into uni Saturday morning and cranked out about 6 scenes of renders with the help of Stuart who set up backburner for us. I was a little concerned that we would run out of time to render because lecturers were saying rendering could easily take up to a week or two but it seems we have everything rendered correctly at this point.

One of the few issues we encountered was actual render settings being slightly different between scenes so there is a small change in lighting throughout some scenes but it isn't too big of a problem because for one its not overly noticeable and two brightness can be altered in editing. Next time when working on anything with more than one environment set i think it would be smart to create a separate file for just lighting setup and render settings so that all scenes are consistent.

Another little hic up we had was that some of our scenes were just too much for the computers to handle and it resulted in 10-20 minute loading times just to open the scene or sometimes Maya would just straight up crash while trying to load the more graphics intensive scenes like my dragon landing scene which had hundreds of pieces of geometry, an animated rig and fire dynamics and shatter simulation all in the one scene.
I think another contributing factor was that our scenes had a lot of unnecessary history as well which didn't help and by that point it was a little too late to start going into all the scenes and deleting history, but it's definitely something i would avoid in the future and just keep my scenes as clean as possible to avoid trouble further down the line.

other than the handful of problems i think rendering was pretty successful and we're just waiting for the final video to be put together now.

(PS. This is not my final assessment post)

Week 15

So this week i have continued working on fixing up some animation scenes and polishing them off for rendering. We have begun rendering and have 2 scenes done so far. We had to re-render one of our scenes because of a camera angle issue that caused Tammy's fishing rod to get in the way of her face and basically block the view of Tammy's head. When i start rendering my scenes i will be careful to get all settings and elements of the shot completely ready before rendering to avoid losing what little time we have left. I also looked for some information regarding how to shoot an action scene and some examples on what camera angles to use and found a few really good links:

-http://www.video-boot-camp.com/how-to-shoot-a-fight-scene.html
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATDnFr25JG8
-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1japIhKU9I

The point of looking into camera shots relates back to being able to get these scenes rendered as soon as possible without any problems and simply making our animation better with some simple camera techniques. Previously when working on other projects i'd just eyeball the camera and basically make up the camera movements on the spot, but after looking at these examples i think spending just a little bit of time to making the camera movements and shots a bit more solid in future projects can go a long way.

Week 14

This week has been more of the same, I've been focusing mainly on doing additional passes for my animation scenes and finishing off the scenes that we need to begin rendering on, which are Tammy's fishing, running, reaction and bow pickup scenes. I've been looking into youtube videos that help with the process, like the use of pre and post infinity for cycling and weighting tangents to produce smoother animation and cleaner key frames. 

Since our animation cameras aren't final i will be looking into some film/action camera techniques to apply to our production. Getting these first few renders will be important so we have an idea of what the finished project will look like but more so to see what we need to adjust for rendering and to also see the amount of time it takes to render our scenes because we've been told that rendering can take a lot longer than you expect.

Post Draft Analysis

Things I've learned so far in the production process:

Team dynamics: Working in a team can have its ups and downs, having a team let each of us work mainly on the aspects of the project we were more suited for and broadened the skill set we had to work with to complete the project, for example Jordan and myself animating and rigging and Amie modelling/texturing.
However, as with any group environment there were problems with things like differences of opinion, getting distracted in class and the occasional mild argument. In future projects it will be important to ensure a team can work well together and have a clear understanding of the production process and that everyone agrees about the direction of the project and its various elements to avoid issues later on and produce a stable working environment.

Time management: Going into the project we seemed to have a clear outline of what needed to be done when and we were pretty confident with the time we had. Once we began production this became another story, we soon found that progression was getting harder and harder every time we encountered a problem. Many of the problems were related to the characters themselves and specifically to their rigs. We had to resolve many problems with rigging over time which really messed with our animation time slot, we even had to do a complete rigging overhaul half way through animation and had a mess of issues with the scale of objects relative to each other. Getting things done a little earlier probably would've helped with this issue, we may have been a little too comfortable in the earlier stages of rigging and simply didn't notice some of the problems that would come back to bite us. In the future when working on a project i will make a concerted effort to making sure things are done right the first time and try harder to get it done earlier, another thing to take into account is that issues will appear in the process of developing a project and taking care of them immediately is important so that you can get back to production as soon as possible.

Animation Techniques: Doing this project has helped with my animation as I've found myself doing things like looking at reference material more, taking criticism and improving on animation, looking into new software and plugins such as Pull Down It which is a physics based destruction system for breaking geometry and doing things like explosion debris effects in Maya. My blocking out animation has gotten better and faster due to mostly working on that and working on polishing and refining animation scenes will help once again in improving my animation skills.

We have three weeks ahead of us and i will be working diligently on this project and completing the work i have that needs to be done. At this time i am optimistic about our animation goal and I'm hoping that what we have to show will be impressive and successful and completed on time.

Week 13

This week i worked on finishing the Dragon fire breathe, Billy reaction and the Tammy landing scenes of our draft animation and also tweaked the Tammy fishing scene so that it is ready for rendering. There was barely enough time to get the scenes we needed for the submission date which was kind of lucky because if we'd had any more problems with rigs or scenes we would've missed the deadline. Even though there was a set schedule for things like rigging, skinning, modeling etc, we didn't account for problems and changes that would need to be made in the future, which really threw a spanner into the works of production.

Week 12

The main focus this week was just doing more animation, did some cleanup on scenes involving the dragon, fixed some issues with the rig, and blocked out Tammy's landing from a tree scene.





On another note I've seen the value in organizing and properly naming all files pertaining to the project, this was due to lots of file clutter that took a while to sort and confusion amongst the team that could have been avoided by simply naming and organizing files in a logical manner, especially when it takes less effort to do it right the first time rather than sifting through hundreds of files afterwards.

Week 11

After looking at some reference material on youtube and vimeo I finished the dragon's drop and fire breathe animations for his entrance scene. Another thing i did this week was continue to work on Billy's blendshapes for scenes which require him to have facial expressions. So far we are working on finishing off these last few animations and effects and to get a draft version of the project rendered and compiled.

Week 10 Part: B

After re-scaling the dragon entrance scene so that everything is in proportion i began blocking out the dragons fall from the sky summoning clip. I'm gonna look at some landing/falling references and videos to get a better idea of what to do with that scene and make it look better. I think at this point our group is a bit behind schedule and even with the after shortening our story the production process is proving to be a lot more work than we expected. We will need to pump out a lot of animation within the next few weeks and we will hopefully have something good to show for it.

Week 10 Part: A

This week our lecturer Louis helped me out with fixing some issues I've had with the dragon rig such as the rig breaking when it is scaled up and joints flipping outside of the mesh.

Another thing he was able to get working was the fire effect for the dragon's firebreathing scene using maya's nfluids. This was done by using one of the presets called rocket fire and changing values until it resembled something like a flamethrower. I then later did a test render of a frame with the dragon breathing fire onto Billy's shield.

The fire does not look very realistic but i think that is actually an advantage in our case because it seems to fit into the cartoony style we have got going for the animation. I would've liked to have had time to experiment with other software packages and plugins like Trapcode Particular or something a lot more complex like FumeFx, which is something i would like to look into in the future.


Some of the effects that can be achieved with FumeFx:

Week 9

This week we have started to back on track a bit and we are progressing steadily. I spent this week finishing off Tammy's fishing, reaction, bow pickup, and run scenes and finalizing the ncloth configuration for hers and Billy's rigs. i will need to do a bit of cleaning up for some of the scenes to polish the timing and animation curves.


I did have some trouble animating with this auto-rig as it had a few issues with joint orientation and clunky controls. In retrospect we probably should have rigged the characters ourselves as it would've taken about the same amount of time if not less time depending on if you count time spent fixing problems that the auto-rigs have caused. Auto rigs seem to be a quick fix rather than a proper solution, and if you want a rig that will do everything you want it to, you're better off doing it yourself than hoping an auto-rig will solve your problems.


I have also started working on a face rig for Billy since we are about to start animating his scenes.

Week 8

Ive just been finishing off some of the first few animation scenes, they seem to be coming along fairly well.
just posting up the work in progress, I'm still going to need to polish these scenes a bit and get the ncloth to work properly this week.

Week 7

This week we are finally up to the animation stage of the production and i have mostly finished Tammy's first few scenes, i just need to animate Tammy's face when Amie is finished with setting up blenshapes and such. No renders as of yet, still need to do some touching up beforehand.

Week 6

This week we are a little bit off schedule but still working on getting our characters ready for animation. I've rigged the bird for our lightning scene and did a quick test of a flying cycle. Another task i completed was Billy's Ncloth setup but I'm still doing some tests on it as it occasionally messes up.

Week 5

Finally finished off Billy's rig, did a quick deformation test where i simply translated and rotated all of his controls, all that he needs now is a face setup and cloth deformers and he will be complete and ready to animate with.

On Saturday i made a low detailed bird for the scene where Tammy sees thunder in the sky, where we will have birds fly out from the trees for dramatic effect. I'm going to need to give it a basic wing rig so it can flap its wings.

Ideas

Possible solution for cape/tabard deformation on Billy character.
still looking into other possible methods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNshEEsOtJw

Week 4

This week i have mainly been finishing off the skinning of the characters and trying to get them to deform as well as possible. i have also looked into solutions for our characters' hair and clothing deformers for secondary animation and found some interesting tutorials/demonstrations. Other than that things seem to be progressing and we will soon be able to start animating.

Week 3

This third week has been sub-optimal, many of the rigs i created had issues and bugs and some needed to be completely redone. So far all the characters have been rigged and are being weight painted by myself and Jordan. after fixing some major display errors such as weight painting tool feedback not being visible in the viewport, i was finally able to begin re-painting weights on Billy. all in all we should be in good hands for the time being, there is still some secondary rigging that needs to be done such as cloth and other deformers for hair/clothes.

Second week

During this second week I have rigged the Billy character using the Advanced Skeleton rigging plugin and i've started painting weights for his deformations to look right.

 I'm looking to improve upon my rigging abilities from last semesters rigging class and to gain deeper knowledge of how rigs work in general and I believe this will be a good learning experience.

First week

During this first week the group and I discussed various aspects of the project and how to approach it.
Jordan and I began working on rigging the main characters and I've also created a quiver/arrows for our Tammy character.