Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be going through my process of animating and rendering the bus and train scenes, discussing the problems I went through and how I was able to, and not able to solve them. Lastly, I’ll be listing my personal objectives that I set myself to complete by the end of next week.
This Week’s Task:
I began this week off by animating the two bus scenes, which didn’t take me long at all as there were only two scenes.
Bus Animation:
For both bus scenes, I purposely didn’t animate the camera as I wanted them to be static shots. I treated these scenes more as a transition, from my character being home to my character being at school. For the first scene, all I had to do it position the character on the seat, and animate the neck and head controls so that he performs a head turn. Other than this, all I had to do is animate his facial expressions.
To make my life easier for scene 2, all I did was flip the Geometry and re-position the character, camera, and Area Light, giving the impression the character is now positioned in a different location in scene 2, in comparison to scene 1.
One thing I realise was that as the bus would continuously be moving, meaning I would need a moving background that’ll be visible through the windows.
To do this, I created two Polygon Planes and positioned them outside both visible windows.
The next thing I did was to look for reference footage on Youtube, one being from the side-view, and one is from the front view.
I took both of these videos into Premiere Pro and shortened them down so they had the same duration of my scenes in Maya (3-4 seconds).
The next thing i did was export both clips as a PNG sequence as that’s the file format that Maya requires.
I used Phong material for both of these animated backgrounds.
Once I added the PNG sequence to the material, I made sure I ticked “Use Image Sequence”, otherwise the video wouldn’t play.
Rendering Bus Scenes:
Before rendering, I had a quick look at how my scene appears in Arnold Render View, and notice the background was way too dark. To fix this, I created Area Lights to a position outside the bus’s geometry, aiming towards Polygon Planes. This managed to brighten up the background nicely.
Train Animation:
My train animations were pretty much the same as my bus animations, as these will also be static shots and used as a transition, from my character being at home to my character being at school. As the train would continuously be moving, the way the bus was, I also needed to make an animated background for this train environment. As this train gave the impression it could be an overground train, I found a reference that showed a lot of land.
I repeated the same steps as before and took the video into Premiere Pro, trimmed down the clip’s duration, and exported it out as a PNG sequence. I then created a Polygon plane and positioned it outside the train’s window and applied the PNG sequence to it.
Rendering Train Scenes:
The same situation occurred whilst rendering, I noticed the animate background appeared too dark. Therefore, I did the same as last time and created Area Lights outside the train’s geometry, aiming toward the Polygon Panes.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Composite all scenes together in Premiere pro.
- Post-Production: Colour Correction.
- Browse For Sound Effects.
- Sync audio SFX to animation.
- Render Final Animation.