Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be going through my process of animating and rendering the hallway 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:
To start this week off, I began with animating the classroom scene. As the deadline is creeping closer and closer, I was strict on the amount of time I spend on each animation as I didn’t want to fall into the habit of perfecting the first few animations and having to rush the remaining animations.
Animation:
Before animating any of the classroom scenes, I forgot to design the exam paper’s texture which was essential for scene 4. I created the texture in Photoshop, using an exam paper template, downloaded from Google, and an “F-” PNG image that was also downloaded from Google. After designing the texture, i went and applied it to the exam paper’s material.
As I was animating my scene, I realised that my classroom had to connect with the hallway environment in order to avoid any continuity. Besides from this point, it’ll look silly if a classroom was just positioned in the middle of a road. Therefore, I imported my hallway environment into this scene.
After importing the hallway environment, I made sure to keep only the geometry that would be seen through the classrooms’ windows, otherwise, the scene would have been cluttered with unnecessary objects.
There wasn’t much animation going on through these scenes, as all scenes required my character to be seated at times. Therefore, I played around with the arms and facial expressions a lot, trying to achieve that stressful look on the character’s face. Furthermore, I worked on animating individual scenes in a way that two scenes would flow well together when transitioning. As you can see in scenes 5 & 6, both scenes consist of the character animated so it performs the same, if not, similar movements.
The Problem(s) I Faced:
One problem I faced was due to time constriction. I originally wanted to include more characters in this scene as it’s a classroom, meaning there are multiple people in the room. However, time wasn’t on my side and I could afford to spend more time animating other characters. This was exactly a priority for me, but it would have been nice to have included
How I Solved The Problem(s):
There was no way of me solving this problem; however, I did work around it by positioning my character rig at the back of the class. He was originally meant to be positioned in the middle rows, as seen in my storyboard animatic, as one scene originally contained a group of students enjoying themselves at the back of the classroom, making the main character seem more of an outsider.
Rendering:
The Problem(s) I Faced:
One problem I faced was after I finished rendering. I noticed one of the PNG sequences had one off-looking frame. As you could see in the screenshots below, for one frame, the background turned grey. I wasn’t sure what was the cause of this issue; however, I didn’t have time to re-render this at the moment. If I had time in the end, I would try and squeeze in a quick render and hope it turns out right.
Another problem I faced was that Maya kept crashing whenever I opened up a scene. This occurred when I was ready to render my last classroom scene via remote access.
How I Solved The Problem(s):
To solve the software issue, I browsed through forums to see if people were experiencing the same problem with Maya 2022.3 version. Fortunately for me, people had experienced these problems before and provided their solutions to fix them. The solution that worked for me was that I needed to untick the “Execute script modes” box whenever I open up my scene.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Animate all hallway scenes.
- Render all hallway scenes.