Final Blog post.

It's been a while since my last blog post, so I'll try to summarize everything that I've done for the past few weeks in relation to the cinematic project.

Since I have no pictures or videos to show you I'll just write it out.

For the past few weeks I have been mainly working on my 2 animation scenes, the one were X-22 is invisible up on the roof and then lands, and the other one where he stabbed Matt(the second part of it, since the first 25 frames of it were done by Rhys.

I was quite happy with how the invisible landing scene looked but I was pretty disappointed with my last bit of animation, the one where Matt gets stabbed, maybe is because I only had like 2 days to work on it while working on a lot of different things for the project, and possibly because we just didn't fully think about it, since we changed it from what Keat told me to animate, which I did and he approved it, but then at the end some of us decided to change it even tho it was probably too late for any changes.

I also did the VFX on Matt's eyes, which I'm really happy with they way the look, the first time I tried it was a bit hard to be hones, but the second time was a lot easier and I managed to get the eyes done in time. I also created the design of the eyes using the tools in after effects and I also animated it in order to give it a more robotic look.

I also did all the lighting and rendering for X-22 in every scene, this took quite a bit of time since I had to do 3 different render passes to each animated scene, and there 4 different animated scenes all together, that's 12 render passes plus the invisibility pass, oops 13 render passes which were the normal render pass with the texture and lights on, the Ambient occlusion pass and the shadow pass as well as the invisibility render pass.

I wish we could have had one more week to tweak a few things, but I'm really happy with the work we did and I think we all learned a lot of new things.

Eyes VFX Progress

I haven't posted on my blog in ages, because I have been working on a lot of different assessments at the same time and to be honest it has been really time consuming.

Today I managed to successfully do the VFX on one of Matt's eyes, the actual process is really simple but time consuming.

These are a few snapshots of my progress. the blue human eye vfx is animated too.

Animation from this week.

This entire week I have been working on my animation scene, which is the one where X-22 is up and jumps.

First of all, I just want to say that I've been having so much fun working on this project and animating too(my favorite thing to do), I really wanted to animate this scene because it gives me a good chance to try some cool poses......but as soon as I started animating I kinda restricted my self from exaggerating the poses because I create a box to resemble the room, meaning that I limited myself to freely animate X-22.

Today we showed the animations we've done so far to the tutors, I received some really good and constructive feedback for them (Thanks  to Keat, Dane and Blake for their feedback), they all pointed out really interesting things that I should do in order to improve my animation.

Right after the feedback sessions was finished, Keat came to help Jacob and I with our animations, and as soon as he started animating I could see how having a box(room) was restricting/limiting me from achieving a more appealing animation, it doesn't matter if you push your poses too far and break the rig(not actually break it, but you know what I mean) as long as it looks good on camera.



This is the animation that the tutors saw today during the feedback session.

This is the animation after the feedback from the tutors.

I also found out that the Ambient Occlusion render works super well as a camouflage, so now we have two options, one to apply that crazy looking glass material you saw today or to have the camouflage ambient occlusion.

Ambient Occlusion Pass

So last night I decided to try and combine both the normal render pass and the ambient occlusion render pass.

I would like to animate the entire cinematic using both render passes(normal and ambient occlusion) to create a better sense of depth and realism.

Today I decided to give it a go and render X-22 textured with a normal and ambient occlusion pass.


This is a normal render pass with basic(bad)lighting.

This is how it looks after combining the Ambient Occlusion pass to it.

Rig - 14/05/2016

Thanks to Keat and Blake(tutors) now my rig can be scaled from the Main Ctrl without any weird problems.

Yesterday(Friday), while working on the animatic, I had to pose X-22 in a variety of different poses that would give us a better idea of how he might look like once we start animating, I realize that his arms spend a lot of time spread up in the air/roof, and I found that whenever I posed him with his arms up in the air it would create a skin deformity in the shoulders, it'd lose weight making it look weird and stupid.

Today(Saturday) I decided to fix that problem by skin painting those weights, I spent around 20 minutes doing this, but in the end I didn't get the result I wanted, so I came up with a better idea (something I was supposed to do a few weeks ago but forgot :P lol , I ended up creating a clavicle control and that fixed the problem .


The clavicle controls are the long ones that come out from the clavicle area.

Last Week and This Week - 2/05/2016 - 13/05/2016

For the past 2 weeks I have been working on the rig, UVs and the Layout.

These are some the UVs I did for the model. Michael ended up texturing them. Sadly none of us really know how to work with mudbox so I'm not sure if we'll have textures created in mudbox for this week's submission.


Chest armor UVs

Main Body UVs

Pelvis UVs

Right Arm Armor UVs

Right Shoulder Armor UVs

Ribbs Back Plate Armor UVs

Yesterday and today, Jacob and I have been working super hard and staying till pretty late in class to finish the Layout/Animatic. These are a few shot/key poses that I did for it.

This is the Rig Reel that I finished putting together today.

Rigging - 04/05/2016

Today I slept through my alarm and missed on watching Zootopia.

I forgot to bring the latest maya file for the rig back home but I had a previous one saved on my computer, with pretty much the entire rig finished.
So what I did today, in fact a few minutes ago was to pose my character using the rig I built for it and see if anything is wrong with it.

I realized that I will most likely lock the translations for the chest control(which is call shoulder controls lol) because since it is part of my ribbon spine it is quite stretchy and X-22 won't be doing those type of movements. I still have to paint skin weight X-22 (you can see some deformations on his feet) but it shouldn't take too long because the bind skin applied to it didn't cause a lot of crazy weight influences all over the mesh.

I plan to have this fully finished by saturday,mainly the skin weight influences and the hierarchy system(putting everything under the main control Maester)will also tryo to do some basic blendshapes(only doing it if I have enough free time tho), I would like to have at least one for when X-22 is breathing, so he's not just standing still but actually breathing.