Week 12 – A Difficult week

As the project is coming towards the end, so to, are the difficulties! The week has really been up and down, partly my fault, partly not.

Let get back to that later. This week has all been about finalising all the animations for Bradford, which was quite easy as he is stern and sitting down throughout. However, the most difficult component was the texturing. It wasn’t so much texturing it, but what came after that. As previously with Molly, Bradford texturing went haywire and had a mind of its own once in the animated form. To try to fix this, I went back to the original, deleted all its history, placed the texture and redo the weights, this time NOT taking 7 hours but about an hour and a half. While all seemed fine, I had trouble with the eyes, positioned in some strange locations. Having to do it again, problems persist, but after some frustration, a solution was worked out. How I got to this solution I have no idea as I believe was the same as earlier in the session. Having redone the texturing, playblast the shots again with the new textures.

Playblast was interesting during the week. While most shots worked great, however, there were some that crashed every time it was completed. After doing a number of tests, I discovered it was the sound files I had that caused the crashes. Upon discovering this, I playblasted the shots without sound and tried my best to match it in the layout developed within Premiere, with mixed results. This isn’t of much concern as these are only temps and I hope to have a full mix and sound by next week.

Now for the problems, the biggest being the lack of communication or mis-communication from my end. Not getting into a lot of details, I provided details to the teachers in charge and one thing lead to another to a point were communication broke down for a few days. I hope everything now is OK and we can move forward.

The last thing to go wrong was on Sunday, losing electricity for some six hours. While I am quite ahead of things (in terms of animation and layout for hand in next week), my plan was to start texturing objects along with various lighting test, which has now been put back a day or two.

Generally, I know the end is near but it feels such a long way away. Dr John animation needs to be finished and shouldn’t take too long as he is only in two shots. But my main concern soon is rendering, lighting, texturing and post production, which I hope I can finish, so busy times ahead.