Joe Caleno's Blog

 So far, I have animated six of my scenes. Four of these are scenes show The Wonder flying, the last of them, shows it landing on Dekilios. There is a big difference between the animation I am doing now and my most recent Pre-Viz. The ship now moves realistically and fluently. The ship also has a lot more movement, it often tilts and turns as it flies. I have also concentrated on making the ship look like it has some weight. When it turns, it has to tilt itself in a direction. It doesn't just dart around like it did before.  I have also improved the camera angles and camera movement. They are less disorientating and smoother.  The other two scenes, are the static shots of Dekilios. These haven't changed much since Pre-Viz.   The rendering process was quite a long and boring job. At first, I wanted to render on the computers at uni. When I went in, I imported one of my scenes over to a uni computer and realised that my textures hadn’t transferred over. This meant...

  I had a few problems with rigging their jaws. I had errors popping up, telling me that I couldn't skin the jaw because of skin clusters. There was also problems with painting the jaw's weights. No weights could be painted on the jaw. I spoke to Kim and we managed to work out what the problems were and fixed them.  Their jaws now work as they should. 

  Before, the terminal screen was a green screen. However, I changed this and made a screen using Substance. I made a “connected screen” for when the brothers are speaking to Admiral Wakataha. Then, I made an “error screen” for when they are getting close to Dekilios and they lose signal. To animate the screen, I put the two on top of one another. When it was time for a screen change, I keyed the top screen to move down and the one below it to move up. They then swapped around. I also made a third screen. This screen was a black screen which was for when the screen flashes. I think that this is a great way to animate changing screens. It is simple but effective. 

The Starmap is a spherical map which shows the surroundings of where the ship is. The 360 map moves when the ship moves.  Before, today, the inside of the ship had a green screen looking windscreen. I didn't like it. I wanted to show where the ship was without using a transparent screen so I decided on this. It also provides light to the inside of the ship. When The Wonder is in space, the Starmap glows.  When it has landed, the Starmap turns off.

  I have now populated the space scene with stars. I created stars by increasing the emission of spheres which I dotted around the scene. I looked at photos of space for reference, because I wanted to get the brightness of the stars and also the distance between them correct. I am happy with how they look. They make the scene look realistic.  I also worked on the lighting. I wanted one side of Dekilios to be well lit, and the other side of it, in darkness, because this would show the scale of the planet. Anexion appears much brighter than Zern. It is quite hard to see Zern and this is how I want it. I want it to look sinister.

                      The Basin The Bloodlake The Trench The Cave I imported all of the environment objects over to my scenes and placed them. My scenes look much closer to their final look now. They feel much more alive and believable. 

 Next, I am going to get my scenes ready for animation. All of the main textures are already imported over and plugged in. However, I still need to import some assets over to certain scenes. These assets are mostly environment objects like rocks and plants that will populate the scenes. I will also need to double check that the textures have been plugged in with the Arnold Standard Surface and not with a Maya material. The renderer I am using is the Arnold renderer and so if I was to try and render a model that was textured using a Maya surface, it will not render correctly.  I will also need to double check that the scale of objects are correct since I have changed my models quite a bit since pre-viz.

  I used to the auto rig feature for the monster. I had a few problems with moving his legs however after playing around with it for a while I managed to fix them. His legs were not bending at the knee. At first I thought that this was a skinning issue but it wasn't. It turned out to be a problem with the controls. I decided to use a different set of controls in his lower leg rather than his upper leg.  I then decided to test out the rig by putting him in different positions. Movement:  I have taken some time to think about how the monster would move. The Dekilios Monster is big with a large amounts of fat and so isn't very fast. He stomps and lumbers and sways side to side, shifting his weight as he walks. He keeps his head down when walking as he often uses his trunk to blow things out of his way. When he does run, he can only do so for a short amount of time . 

Yobi rig test render I decided to use the auto rig feature in Maya. I had a few problems with their spines, the movement was very unnatural however, after changing some settings around and redoing some of the joints, the rigs worked how I wanted them to. I rigged the hands separately and joined them onto the auto rig. It is very important that his hands work correctly since some of the animation consists of them pressing buttons and using their hands.  Yobi's movement: Yobi is the energetic one out of the two. He moves fairly fast and can sometimes be frantic. His eyes are nearly always wide open and awake looking.  Sangu movement: Sangu has a very heroic stature. He stands upright and bold. A lot of his moments are very heavy handed. He moves slower than Yobi.