Solved

We found out what the problem was, Andy helped us out and explained that it was due to the geometry render stats. Primary visibility, receive shadows and cast shadows had to be checked on. When we re rendered our geometry was now visible and renderable.

Rendering

Animation progress is going well, however we have discovered a weird issue when attempting to render the character animated shots. When rendered, Frank's body mesh is invisible. Only his hair eyes and vest are visible. We suspected that there was no lambert on the character so we re applied a new base texture on the mesh, this did not solve the problem. We also tried reversing the face normals, this didn't work either, we now think its something to do with either the layer setup, however everything seems to be set to visible or that the mesh is for some reason set to unrenderable. Hopefully we can solve this issue tomorrow with some advice/ suggestions from fellow students.

Animating: Playblast

At the moment the animating is going well, it is slow on occasions but then again we are not proficient animators and we are working with an unfamiliar rig. The rig is not perfect either but it shall do. We shall have to be careful when animating so as not to deform the rig too much so that odd pops and tears begin to appear. Also we have to try to be clever with the camera angles so as to hide or at least disguise some imperfections with the rig. We are using the playblast playback function in order to view our animations in real time as playing back the animations in the timeline/ viewport is useless and does not give you an accurate indication of what the animation is looking like. This method is a long winded one and there is a lot of trial and error involved.

Joe Meeting

I had a meeting with Joe to discuss his compositing progress. He explained that he had completed a couple more shots. However he was still finding that the colour correction on his laptop was slightly out of sync with our reference images. Joe had a feeling that this was after effects and its colour balance settings. Despite this, he had shown me what he had been up to and his shots were much improved and the he had done a good job on matching the colour as closely as he could to the reference composites. I also instructed him to adjust the brightness and contrast by increasing brightness and decreasing contrast so that the images were not so dark. I also suggested that he tone down the vignettes as they were too overpowering to the images. Overall I was pleased with his progress and his efforts.

Before

Far too red and dark.

After

Much nicer, bright and clearer. The colour of the wood matches the reference image and the vignette has been tones down.

Acquiring Sounds Effects

Im going to see if I can get hold of a sound effects hard drive in order to download some useful Sound Effects for our animation short.

I managed to acquire a collection of decent sound effects from the SFX External Hard Drive (HD).

I found useful interior household foley such as footsteps, door slams, clock ticks etc.

It was tedious to sift through all the sound files however as there were many folders and many of the sounds themselves were not categorized or named.

Meeting with Tara

I spoke to Tara and she has said that she will try to paint the weights in Maya 8.5 rather than 2011. She explained that it was due to backwards incompatibility and that it is due to the fact that 2011 uses paint weights interactive, where 2008 does not. Tara agreed to try and solve this issue by instead working in Maya 8.5. She then gave us the new rig with the blends connected to the face of our character. When I opened the file I was very glad to see that we had finally received the character with everything connected. The blend shapes were connected to the rest of the character rig with the joints, bones and handles etc. The clothes were also wraped around the character using the wrap deformer, so when the character moves the clothes deform and move with the character body geometry.

For some reason when manipulating the handles in order to move the character's limbs etc this caused Maya to lag. Its is not completely unusable however it is annoying. I tried to solve this issue by decreasing the subdivisions of the mesh and deleting any unwanted components within the scene and deleting history. I discovered however that in doing this the connections between the bones and the character and the blends with the face were removed. Also the painted weight history no longer existed. So I could not use this function. I tried using delete deformer history and there were similar problems. When key framing and animating, I experienced lag and this was not a good way of seeing how your animation is working. I shall have to use the play-blast function instead in order to see how the animation is looking. I was also recommended by Josh to turn of any textures, animate in normal mode rather than smooth preview and turn off the visibility of the clothes. We discovered that the wrap deformer was using up a lot of memory as the computer had to calculate how the clothes were behaving every frame that it was being manipulated. This could be solved by painting the weights of the clothes on the character, however I am told that this would be extremely difficult. The thing is we should have modeled the character and the clothes as a single mesh rather than separate geometry. Due to the fact that Alex and I had very little experience when modeling the character we did not realise this would be an issue. Lesson learned and if only we had known. But what we have is workable and we shall make do with what we have because it is too late for any changes now. Remodeling the character would be out of the question as we would be severely putting us behind schedule and the project would be at risk. Quite frankly I just want to start animating.

We discovered that Josh's suggestion of turning off the textures, the clothes and animating in normal component mode rather than smooth preview did lessen some of the lag issues we were experiencing. We will need to monitor how the clothes are behaving on the character and if the body geometry is permeating the vest geometry. We will have to look at the animation via the playblast function to bypass the laggy playback when viewing the animation through the viewport and timeline.

Tara's Rig. I do like how she colour coded the handles to make the rig more easily understood and navigated.

Tara Rig Problems

Tara sent me her rig file to see if she could rectify our problem of merging the blends with skeleton rig and try and do a better job than Clym and improve upon his work. I opened up the file and the rig was horribly distorted, warped and stretched. The mesh appeared to have exploded upward. Im not entirely sure what had happened but I suspected that it was due to an incompatibility with software and the two conflicting Maya versions, however Tara did say that she would try using 8.5 which I assumed would be a safe bet. I have worked with 8.5 in the past and there were no problems. I could not understand why there would be an issue. 2008 and 8.5 are essentially the same version.

I agreed to meet up with Tara the following day to try and resolve the issue. Abs said he would come in and see if he had any suggestions. I may have to upgrade to Maya 2012 to avoid these recurring issues.

Here is a picture of Tara's rig .mb file.