Introduction:
In this week’s blog, I’ll be going through my process of animating and rendering all 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:
I began this week off by animating the hallway scenes. Again, I was strict on the amount of time I dedicate to each scene so I’m able to stay on track.
Animation:
As half of these scenes consisted of the character walking, this meant I had to create another walk cycle animation for my character; however, instead of me doing the same job twice, I just imported one of the bedroom scenes that consisted of the walking cycle. Once the bedroom scene was imported, I went and deleted all of the bedroom’s geometry, lights, and camera, leaving only the character rig behind which was already animated for me.
My next job was to create a motion path and parent it to the character’s main control. To do less work, I made sure the motion path was long and had a timeframe duration of 1-240 frames, meaning I was able to create two separate scenes using one animation. The only different between the two scenes was the camera animation, which was fairly easy to adjust.
One thing I forgot to do when modelling and texturing this environment, was to import the additional objects needed for scene 4, where a student is in a meeting with their therapist. This was the only scene that included additional characters. As i mentioned before, i was strict on timing, meaning i could only afford to give the most basic animation for each of those characters. I animated them in a way to make it seem one character is talking, whilst the other is just listening.
Rendering:
I realised 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.
The Problem(s) 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.
Objectives For Next Week:
- Animate all bus scenes.
- Render bus scenes.
- Animate train scenes.
- Render train scenes.