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.