OUAN504 - Progress 16.11.15

Today I worked closely with Wing, and together we made a huge amount of progress in a short time. It has really solidified any final ideas and queries that we both had regarding the project and I feel it's moved the project forward a large amount in plenty of time for the final crit a week today. I spent the majority of the day rigging the final character which is the 'smart' pig. During this time, I made the skeleton, created the controls, linked up and parented anything that needed to be as well as linking the controls and skeleton to the mesh. Meaning the last thing to do with the character now is just to add in the weighting and it will be complete. We spoke at length regarding the final steps of our process to complete the animation and we went through each scene and decided who would be undertaking each particular scene. We wrote them down, and saw that there were sixteen scenes throughout the piece and so we've divided it into eight scenes each. Towards the end of the day we spent around 45 minutes talking with Mat about any concerns we had about how to approach certain tasks, and I had several things I needed to ask him about, including:

• How to animate the physical sun and sky to make a time-lapse effect.
• What's the best way to colour the set, discussed toon shader.
• How to allow light to interact with the toon shader colouring on objects.
• How to create lighting from a light source such as a light bulb.
• I also had some queries about how to constrain certain controls on the character.
• Finally, Mat went back over how best it is to batch render, and what options there are to decrease the render time without being detrimental to the scene.

The easiest and best way to animate the sun and sky to simulate a time-lapse between night and day is to use the rotate function, that can be applied to any object but can be utilised here a long with some simple keyframes. By simply setting a keyframe at the first and last frame and rotating the physical sun 360 degrees during the sequence gives the illusion of a full day taking place over a matter of seconds. In terms of colouring the environment, the toon shader function gives you a large amount of control when trying to determine how something looks, and it is also very quick. Using UV mapping for this would have been almost impossible because of the scale of the barn and how many different shapes and objects it consist of, so this was really the best option. I was unsure about how to make the toon shader look less flat, and the way to tackle this is to alter the diffuser option. The default setting for the diffuser option is 0 and when turned up allows the toon colouring shader to interact more with light, and create shadows. This in turn makes objects look a lot less flat and overall better when trying to create a more realistic scene when it comes to lighting and form within the object when the two are combined. I asked about light bulbs as I wanted an internal light source during the scenes set at night during the animation. This was of course to be able to light the set and allow the audience to see the movement and action, but also to create a nice internal glow when the environment is viewed from a distance. Over the course of the past year and the projects I've undertaken, especially the applied animation brief from last year, the importance of lighting is heavily engrained in my mind and I strive to make it as atmospheric and as appropriate as possible each time I'm lighting a scene or set. I wanted to do a test run of the time-lapse scene but I wanted to know the best way to do a quick render by removing any unnecessary features but also keeping the scene in a reasonable quality. These include deleting history, decreasing the size of the frame which personally I think around 640 x 480 is a good size, and even removing various parts of the geometry or meshes in the scene, in the case of the time-lapse I removed the grass as it was around a third of the scene in terms of polycount and wasn't required to test the animation.

Throughout this project I have continually had new ideas as the project unfolds and develops. As the pre-production phase has pretty much ended and we're crossing over into the production stage I have already began to think vaguely of the post production stage and how the production will turn out altogether. I had the idea that for the credits and ending credits to include art work along with the credits at the end. What I thought would be a nice idea would to include still art work of the pigs 'adventures' after their eventual escape. Since the production is so short it's hard to contain a real narrative and I thought despite being a humorous and light hearted ending it may seem unfair that the pigs didn't escape like they wanted. So during the credits the audience could get a glimpse at the idea that perhaps in the future the pigs did eventually escape and had fulfilling adventures - sailing the sea or travelling the world. So just a small idea towards the credits there, this will only be followed up however if time constraints allow for it, and the main production until this point is the main priority.

Overall there was a huge amount of progress and resolve achieved during this particular session and I feel confident from this moving forward with our ideas and a clear sense of where to go from here and what to do in the proceeding steps to complete the animation.