Finally we have started animating now, we have gotten several shots done in around five days, which is looking promising when taking into account that we only have 42 shots in total.

However the issues of too many characters is causing problems again, we only have four of the five characters fully finished. I am really stressing out that they're not all finished at the moment, we still need to attach the rig to Coco, and I know full well that, I'll end up having to fix his vertices and clean him up, just as I did with Blackberry and Acorn.

ANNYYYWAYYY I have been testing lighting in Maya, using the mental ray software which is a plug-in rendering software, looking at tutorials, online and magazines. I was able to gain a better understanding on how to create a real sun and sky effect. I also learnt how to attach different lend on the camera to change what the overall effect will be when rendered out, when using the camera with the newly attached lens

Here are some renders I did while testing for a suitable lighting style.

 This set of lighting was not done with a physical sky or sun as I did not know about them at the time, this why they are so dark.

 I found the physical sky and sun.

 After some messing around with the values on the physical sky and sun, i started to gain an understanding of how I would achive the desirsed look I wanted.

 This test here is my favorite by far, the saturation is a lovely rate of 1.5-1.8, low multiply of 1, and a good handful of other values.

I continued to do a few more tests after finding the look I like, just to be sure.

Two Rigs Notice

sorry I haven't post anything in the last couple of weeks, I have been having such a nightmare with the rigs I am currently using.

So what happened is this, I was talking to one of my lectures about how my work was going, and how teaming up with Sancha in the long run will help us both out. I raised my concerns with making rigs for the characters as I have never really made a entire rig for anything in Maya before and my tutor brought up an add-on for Maya called the Set Up Machine, which allows you to automatically create a rig, which has many infulences associated to it. I was forward by my tutor if I did use the Set Up Machine then, I would have to do more skin weighting than if I made my own; which I thought was an alright deal, as I was not confident in my rigging skills and if I messed something up while building the rig, it would set me and Sancha back a bit, and we can not afford to lose time and with skin weighting if you miss a part of the body you can fix it with out having to backtrack to older save files. Anyway I will get to the point of it, basically, I worked on attaching the rigs to the meshes of the characters, that part was fine, it was the skin weighting part which was the part that took the biscuit; no matter what I did, I could not fully clean or apply influence properly. After speaking to the Maya technician, he unfortunately told me (to be bunt) that the rigs were never going to work correctly and to make a new ones from scratch.

This bit of information, was disappointing as I felt that I had wasted two weeks, and gained nothing of value, other than DO NOT EVER USE AUTO RIGS!.

Anyway, rather than being annoyed for too long, I took a seventy video installment, tutorial on how to make a professional level rig, from Digital Tutors. It took me four solid days to get it done, and now I can happily say I can make rigs, weirdly I really enjoyed rigging, I like the techical challage that it provieds, but more importinally is the satisfactions i get when rigging feels good, rather than when I animate, I feel that I don't get much emotional satisfactions when I have put a lot of time into making pieces of animation.

It is safe to say that I am really considering being a rigger as my career choice in life, sadly I only have one item to put into a riggers show reel, so what I might do, is the 3rd years next year and the M.A students is to offer my assistance in helping them complete their films. as rigging can be really tricky if you do not understand what is going on around you. I will also do a lot more rigging during the summer for my show reel.

Here ares some of the still of the past few weeks.

 As you can see here I have stated to make some controls, such as the chest and Center of Gravity (COG) controls for the character rig.

 the images above is me creating a expressions, which are add on nodes/features which are set in the channel box.

 Here I have created the reverse IK foot set up for the rig, with it a foot, toe, heel control.

 you can see the foot bank in action here, which allows the foot to sway side to side.

 This is the lower half of the characters rig, as you can see it is colour coded, so i can easily identify the left and right side controls.

 here is the a shot of the full 3/4 veiw of the rig with some nodes on the left hand side panel.

here is a side view.