Camera

We had a group meeting over messenger today as it’s easier to meet up with each other this Monday. We spoke about time and deadlines and Moe caught up with everyone to see where we are work-wise. For time we’re pushing it but with the new dynamics looking so good I suggested to Moe to add another camera angle to showcase them a bit more. So he said I could try out some camera angles for the car and if they fit in well, we’ll use them.

More Tests with smoke- instanced nparticles

Maya comes with some example files, one is the smoke effect that shows that it’s easy to create smoke using the particle tool. Here I created an emitter, configured it to emit blobby clouds (using the software) and key it with the moving car. Then this can be instanced to the other wheels to reduce time on the CPU… the technique is similar to methods used to create the early water in Luisas film (look near the start of this blog) and leaves dynamics (look a few pages back).

Dynamics

Now I have the final scene for the truck I can add dynamics to it. I’m using particles and adding a gravity field constrained to a simple polygon surface on the ground. Here is the first test. The dynamics are brown/purple.

Grass for Moe

Rendered out 250 frames as asked by Moe and exported them to his flash drive as .tif files. Already he’s composited them into the film and they work really well. Here’s a screenshot he sent me of how it’s looking at the moment.

Mo

Had a group meeting with Moe about the film. Things are looking really good, I’ll be adding the animated grass to the film today as well.

Meeting

Met up with Luisa today we discussed the film and progress, she’s been good in telling me what she wants from the rig and how complete the film is. She sent me the rig after it’s been animated and the left hand had been messed up while animating on Mac Maya(if you animate it on Windows Maya it’s fine). So I fixed it from my end and sent it back to her but now Maya crashes when she opens it.

update

Been stressful these weeks. My laptop broke, I fixed it, but keyboard on the laptop was on it’s way out (3 keys wasn’t working) and Maya has been crashing and forgetting my weight painting for the rigs I’ve made for Luisa’s film… regardless of the computer I use. Even she can’t open the weight paint maps for editing on her Mac. I got a new computer though so working is easier and I can work easier on Anja’s film.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on getting the rigging sorted for Luisa’s film. Everyone has been really busy with their own work and it’s hard to find someone who knows more about rigging than I do when it comes to fixing the rig (not saying I’m the best rigger but I know I'm good :D ). The problem seems not to be with the rig itself but with Maya for Mac and Windows.

What I’ve been told is that Maya for Mac and Windows is the same, however me and Luisa are getting to different problems that seems out of my hands to fix. The rig I made works perfect on my computer- the weight painting disappears sometimes but as the rigs are perfect there’s no need to edit them… so no problem there. The problem arises when the file is opened on Luisa’s Maya for Mac. When she animates the left hand alone on BOTH models grows to the size of the character itself, while on Windows the character works perfectly without issue or problems.

I’ve spent plenty of time but I can’t find anything wrong with the rig on my end and I' can’t replicate the problem. We’re meeting up tomorrow to fix this and worse comes to the worst, I’ll be lending her my old laptop (with the broken keys and a new Hard Disk which I installed to fix it when it broke down before).

Everyone’s been stressed these past few weeks as everyone starts to feel the crunch the last thing we need are software problems.