Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be going through my process of animating and rendering scenes 13-24, 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 scenes 13-24 of my animation. Again, I was strict on the amount of time I dedicate to each scene so I’m able to stay on track.
Animation:
For one of my scenes, I needed to animate the camera so that it wiggles and looks like it’s showing the environment from the character’s perspective. I began by creating a motion path and parenting it with the camera.
To get the camera to move around when motioning down the stairs, I created an animation later that consisted of the camera’s translation channels.
The purpose of this would allow me to further control the movement of the camera as it contains a “Weight” scale, where I’ll be able to increase or decrease the weight of the animation.
As mentioned before, I got most of my inspiration from the Paranormal Activity franchise. This sort of camera movement is seen in these types of films.
DISCLAIMER – The footage below consists of frightening content.
For one of my scenes, I was required to parent the rolling pin object to the Wrist control, as this scene showed the character picking up an object to use as a weapon. I thought this scene would be tricky for me at first; however, it turned out easier than i thought.
To save time, I created an animation that I could split into two separate scenes. These two scenes only consisted of the character walking. Therefore, I created one motion path with a time frame of 1-240 frames and parented the character rig to it. the only thing i needed to adjust was the camera animation which didn’t take long at all.
Problems I Faced:
The only problem I faced was when I had to animate the camera so that it shook. I went through a couple of YouTube tutorials to learn how to do this as a few methods just didn’t work for me.
How I Solved The Problem(s):
I learned this method through this YouTube tutorial video that taught me how to create a camera shake animation.
Rendering:
When rendering the scenes that showed the upstairs hallway’s paintings, I notice there was too much light on the painting, which caused it the seem to look off as it stood out too much. To solve this, i went into the painting’s texture and adjusted the settings so that there was less exposure.
Another issue I realised was that in a few scenes, the character’s hair emitted too much specular, causing the appearance to look off to me. This occurred whenever the camera was close to the character’s face, as the Spot Light’s intensity may be too high. To fix this, i decreased the weight of the specular.
Problems I Faced?
One major problem I faced was that the university’s Maya 2022.3 version had trouble rendering. It turned out this was a general problem from their side, meaning I couldn’t do anything about it until they fix it. This led me to render my scenes in the Maya 2018 version.
This led to another problem, as both versions consist of different colour settings, meaning the moment I opened up my scene in Maya 2018, the colour would automatically appear different, even though I haven’t changed anything. There was much I could do about this, other than just eyeballing it and re-adjust the lighting to match how it looked on the Maya 2022 version which was quite difficult. If worse comes to worst, I will just colour correct my scenes in Premiere Pro at the very end.
One problem I realised in one of my PNG sequences, is that one frame appeared different to the rest. I couldn’t figure out the reason why this occurred. However, it was an unfortunate moment for me as I didn’t have time to spend re-rendering that scene, especially in Maya 2018. If I have time in the end, I would try and re-render this scene again.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Animate scenes 25-36.
- Render scenes 25-36.