this week thus far has consisted of adjusting animations and submitting shots to the render farm, which is honestly not much content to talk about, but there have been some other updates as well.
throughout this week, i have had to go back and forth to the animated shots i did to adjust them based on my instructor's feedback, a majority of it being fixes for animations and curves. a large chunk of the shots we have are almost render-ready, with just a few adjustments left here and there, so i'm confident we could get those done by the end of this coming week and we can get on with the rendering and post production. i already have a shot rendered and ready for post production, but the team agreed that waiting for the benchmark shot (which is the one my teammate is working on) to be done so i could measure up to that ambience. so the way post production works is we take these elements called "passes" which are essentially layers that make up the final image.
the passes are used to enhance the final render, we get to export a shadow, lighting, reflection and shine pass, and with those, we can mess around with their values and sharpness to make the final product stand out from the default render. after the renders are downloaded, they come in EXR format, which we then unpack in AfterEffects to use the passes within the files, on the top are examples of how the passes appear before they are altered.
I've been looking up some good animation videos and came across a channel that has some great tips on how to improve those skills, especially because i lack in the subject. i thought i would give some of their videos a watch and see how professionals go about animating characters. one of the videos stood out for me, as it provided a nice set of tips and exercises for improving animations
Rusty Gray, a professional animator, he has worked in the industry for over 5 years and his advice proved useful to me. one thing he presented that showed relevance was the skills to learn in order to improve animations and how to learn them, he provides some great exercises that focus on different parts of the body. he also mentions that the removal of the arms helps in improving overall body animations, like the spine, hips and legs. "ball bounces prepare you for character walks,character walks get you ready for more complex human movement" (Gray,2019)
this is practically it regarding the progress this week, but i am happy with the amount if work we got done, as the renders are taking shorter than expected and hopefully that goes for all the other shots we have. the passes are all there, which was something i was worried about, as i used go render in the VRIMG format, but my teammate figured out that those take longer to render, so we went with PNGs instead. hopefully i will have some updates on the post production by next week!
REFERENCES:
Rusty Animator. (2019, October 15). How to Get Hireable Animation Skills Fast [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9U_Z2rDe_Q