*Chuck (render) still from short "I Am."* Approach: I began this week by creating the complete mouth set to Chucks dialogue for the short. There were a few issues with having the slider control but the key-frames interpolated as "Toggle Hold". Some of the frames between the mouths wouldn't actually stay as the set key-frame and would switch halfway through. This caused a headache, my only solution was for these frames to be hand-keyed until the next sequential mouth appeared. I also began to color and prep some intro scenes for rendering, just to test out lighting schemes. I think the intro scene is the most important, as it will be seen twice throughout the film, and to me appears to represent the philosophic abstraction behind the visuals. Choices Made: I imported Chuck in Maya and began to deal the issue again of transparency of Arnold rendered scenes. Once I unchecked the "opaque" box in Arnold, and changed my naming convention of PNG sequence from _01234 to .1234, it read my sequence correctly and I was able to get the shader to work as needed. It was because of my naming convention having too much frame padding (i.e. [_#####] vs [_####]) and also because of my use of (_)underscore rather than (.) periods. I also decided that changing the audio wasn't the best idea, and decided to keep my original audio. I have also made the decision to cut out some the ending lines at the end of the intro scene. This will leave the intro with a little more of a pondering thought rather than a, "it is for you to decide. now without further ado, repeat after me" (excluded from final output). Inspirational Sources: My inspirational sources this week include being at the open house for ACCAD, and seeing how everyone was happy and ecstatic to work with projects that were happening. I worked with Lipman, a Design student to help showcase her app and collaborative work with professor Price. She worked closely with him on the layout, many people had positive comments and nothing to say when questioned about how the app could be improved. I noted more technical issues and some small anomalies and workarounds while playing with the interface. I was also helped by fellow students on what artists or researchers have done work in visualization that deals with the condition that animation can triumph over text where text fails to succeed. This being realized through animation isn't easy, but considers the implications of using the medium of animation to learn about key ideas/theories that aren't necessarily given a second glance because of imposing information. A classmate (Zach W.) led me to some different researchers in the field such as Greg Smith, Manovich, and Peter Greenway.
Questions Raised & Needs: I have been suggested by my professor to ask a fellow classmate named Lakshika who would be able to aid in the creation of procedural-generated and animation-cached scenes in the short.
*A rendered still from the combined 2D & 3D intro scene of the short, "I Am." [Arnold Render]* Next Steps:
Honestly to just keep working towards creating the short. Change my render modes if things take too long (Arnold takes a while, Toon does not). Consider changing small body motions of Chuck if I think something looks awry. Try to completely render first scene and attempt to try out Toon shaders for backup. Assess how lighting can play a vital part in the opening scenes as well as the others. -Taylor Olsen Comments are closed.
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May 2020
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