Still can't find the memory stick

I have pulled my whole flat apart looking for the memory stick, and have asked everyone from animation, and no one seems to have seen it anywhere, so the likely hood is it's either been stolen or dropped somewhere.

Sean has sent an email out for me, but I'm pretty sure it won't turn up now. The last time I saw it was Monday when I was packing away in the studio, and from there I have no idea what has happened with it.

I am realy frustrated I have somehow misplaced my memory stick, and it's realy not good. Although there is nothing on there that prevents me from finnishing the project, there are videos and files that I wasa transefering to to my harddrive through. My computer is so terrible I have to transfer files onto my memory stick as a temporary precaution to allow space on my laptop to work. I then later further transfer those files onto my harddrive.

So it appears I have infact along with the memory stick lost all of the videos/ playblasts of changes I have made to my fork scene, so I am realy annoyed about that.

I realy hope I can find it, because I am unsure what else is on the stick.

After the external examiner

After today's visit, I was a bit more relaxed to hear that the viewing of work wasn't as strict as I thought, and his visit was more to See how the course was going. He however did go through out idea, and seemed to like it, however like I suspected I could tell he wasn't fully sure of the idea in his head as there wasn't much of the story visually shown to him to go by.

My second scene colour playblasted

Once again due to my ridiculously bad laptop I cannot even open the kitchen file with the coloured textures shown in Maya so I had to pass it across to Josh to re-assign the textures and create a playblast from that.

I think as a whole I am happy with this scene, the real trouble was trying to get the right amount of force in each movement. It really was a huge challenge to get the correct shifting weight whilst remembering that he's always being held back by his tie.I just look forward to seeing it rendered out along with the rest of the film now, hopefully it will look great.

External examiner rush to try get things together

I have wanted to really get things together for the visit tomorrow, and really hoped we could improve what we have to show him. Looking at what we have, we have indeed made improvements however we haven't added more onto the film or put much more together to show, so it looks more like we will be relying on the hand in film.

I hope it turns out OK and he likes what he sees, I'm just a bit nervous as we don't even have a full story of any quality to show at this point.

My coloured scene handin for 9th of May

Hand in day

Today it was the hand in for the films, and although today's hand in was nothing like the final film, we can finally see things shifting in the right direction.

The positive

1. I have got one scene ready to render and am well on the way for the second, so it's looking good for my scenes rendered in time. 
2. The texturing, lighting and rendering is coming along well so far, so it's looking like the quality of the film will be good.
3. The rest of the group are all pushing hard to get the project finished, so I am positive about us doing well.

Issues

There's no particular major issues, just a few things that would have been better, but have been affected.

It is particularly annoying that the computers in the studio cannot render the film as it would ease the pressure of rendering, as everything is having to go through Josh's computer, so it may take a long time to get this complete. I am still optimistic though as we are all still pushing hard and everyone is pulling there weight towards the end. 

Due to time and technology restraints, we've also had to cut down on particles, and effects in the film which is a shame, but I feel we still, have worked around this and made up for the problems.

I just hope it will all come together in the remaining weeks and look and resemble the quality we all wanted from the beginning of the year.

Animation put into kitchen

Pull from the tie

Reach1 post 3

Reach 3 post 3

Tie animation

Reach 2 post 3

Fork section post 7

Fork section post 6

Sorting Zilla out

Scene with Zilla

Changes to Zillas entering

Zillas close up

Zilla changing

Reach 3 post 2

Safe and Pulled 4

Fork scetion post 5

Safe and Pulled 3

Safe and pulled 2

Safe and Pulled 1

Safe and pulled

Fork scetion post 4

Fork scetion post 3

Reach1 post 2

Fork section post 2

Jar of glow worms

After my idea to get Roy to hit and tip over a jar of glow worms, I have been trying to work out how to go about this. Josh has build the Jar and sent it over to me.

First of all I made a poly model of one individual worm. once happy with the shape, I duplicated it many times, and ranged the scales of various worms.

Once bult it was a case of filling up the jar. This was where I ran into a brick wall with my idea. Due to them being poly models the more I did maya couldn't handle it and crashed every time. The image below was as far as I could get with filling up the jar.

In future I am going to get Phil to animate the worms using particles, as it woul dbe less demanding. I will however controll a select few of the worms so I can get beautiful results in the animation and getting them to land and bounce how I want.

Fork section post 1

Fork section post 1

Reach 2 post 2

Reach 2 post 2

Reach1 post 1

Attempted mox of reaches 1 and 3

I wanted to see if reach 1 and 3 would link together in one animation as it initilay looked possible. Unfortunately it turned out terrible, so I'm going to revert to the originial order of reaches 1, 2, 3

Reach 3 post 1

 

Attempt of second grab

I have been trying to get animated a second grab which will be his attempt to get free. I wanted to add an animation where he looked like he was struggling to get free and fighting the pull of the tie.

I found it quite tricky to show the forces of him pulling to the tie pulling the other way. It was hard to show this in an effective way. I still however don't think it's a very good animation so I am going to scrap this grab and try and get a nicer animation that shows Roy's real efforts to get free.

More work on Zilla's entrance

More Zilla edit

Once again I have been giving the animation of Zilla a go, trying to get her to enter through the door. She is is causing me all sorts of problems at the moment, with her short legs and also trying to get her moving right for her weight.

Josh's 3d scene plan

Josh has recently been posting his camera angles of his maya outside scene looking for peoples opinion on the cameras angle for the 1st shot of the film.

After he posted this one, I gave him a little sketch over the top of his to guide him on how I would dpersonally want the shot. I told him to try and keep the windo of the house on the line of thirds so it is a key focus point for the viewer, also I wanter it pulled back to see more of the street on the right hand side to give a bigger and more dramatic effect, of enforcing that there is a huge city surrounding that little unique house.

Josh also made a basic car so I gave him position idesas of where I think they should be placed in the scene along with the sign post with the name of the film.

I also got quite exited and thought up the use of a yellow cab to enforce that it is american and a yellow cab in the car style we have chosen would look realy cool.

Toning down the chef's hat

Fixing Turn

I just had a play with how Roy turns as I was completely happy with the motion/drag he had. I think this one is smoother and is more appealing adn natural.

More hat animation

Hat and Tash working

My latest work with the hat and moustache animation. I really like the hat at the moment and how much drag and bounce I can add to it, it's very fun to animate.