Last week of lectures, and our second final lab. the team worked on delegating tasks to everyone for the final project and to start working on our last VR project. I have spent the week modelling our character for the final project, a photo realistic turtle. I've known that modelling organic figures whether they are human or animal are extremely difficult compared to non-organic, but the turtle as been by far the most difficult model I have done throughout this class. Having to model the shell separately from the rest of the body, and then creating the head was hard. the shell was particularly difficult as it is a semi round object, but there are specific bumps and crevices that you have to get correct, also the shell continues below the main body, which you have to model around the legs.

it was a great challenge and a lot of fun! Now other team members are working on texturing the turtle, while others are working on other characters and film editing. Looking forward to seeing our final product.

This week's focus was to work on our animatic, present it to our TA and Prof. Our group ended up changing our project idea due to time constraints. Our project now consists of live film and 3D animated characters. We attempted using new software for camera tracking such as Boujou, had some difficulties putting this file into Maya 2013, Maya couldn't find some of the images and wouldn't render scenes correctly. We spent a lot of time fixing different areas of the animatic in Photoshop and Maya.The animatic has been presented...now we just need to find out where to go next!

This week's focus has been Facial Animation 3. This is definitely the most difficult project yet. Facial animation is extremely complex and for good animation, and all trouble shooting solved, you need to have more than 2 weeks to complete something like this. 

Volunteering to do this for the team, I've run into a lot of issues with facial animation. at first after fixing my mesh to have some form of ears, making the head a little bit rounder, I then had to learn how to create skeletal controls for the face. By following tutorials, I was able to make a fully functional facial rig, fix the skin weighting, and make a controller with set driven keys. Problems that were encountered: the skin would un-bind from the skeleton when a small change was made. actually animating and setting keyframes in the timeline wouldn't work. each time that a key frame was set for a specific mouth movement, and then another mouth movement was added, the original key frame would somehow be deleted. We've had a lot of trouble shooting on this model, after having the rest of the team each take the time to take a look at it, we got things figured out and got the animation up and happening. 

With Facial Animation 2 done, we've been working on our VR experience in Unity, as well as MP3, creating an animated matte painting. This has been an interesting experience, none of us have had experience with Unity before, and so have found somethings somewhat difficult to resolve. The most difficult thing we found was trying to combine the unity character controller with a modeled character in Maya. Our character would float where ever we had indicated the controller to move, and at times that character would randomly fall into space. We finally got the issue resolved and handed in.

This week, working on Facial Animation 2 for our team project. Been learning how to properly construct a face in Maya and add texture to it, making sure the UV's are all in the correct placing.

Ran into some interesting errors where half the face normals were facing the wrong way but on the bottom half of the model, all the normals were facing the correct way. by reversing all the faces and fixing the normals, modelling continued smoothly until finished. 

Also had some issues with Maya creating extra faces through extruding and new vertices that would appear. Appending polygons became difficult because of the random vertices, creating strange shapes and needing to be fixed.

managed to get everything completed on time and handed in.

This week we have started doing our individual image based modelling using the application 123D Catch by Autodesk. Inputing up to 70 photos into the program, where it models your image based on common points.
I modelled the character Ezio from Assassin's Creed 2.

As a team, we have started learning proper character rigging and referencing. We will be completing our storyboard and pitch, budget sheet and technical specifications for the project, to be handed in on Sunday. 

We are also getting a head start on Facial Animation 2 in Maya, to be handed in next week.

We have decided to change our initial idea around, so we are now doing more of a time lapse project. We will be creating different 3D environments that will change over the course of the short film, involving some characters such as the Turtle to show the change in time.

This week we are focusing on working on our matte paintings and character facial animations. We will have posted to the team site drafts of our matte painting and character turn-arounds.

We will also be working on finishing a first script and environment designs that will be placed on our team site.

This week we have started learning how to do Matte Painting in Photoshop. Learning techniques of how to make our own custom brushes as well as layering each part of the image we are creating. How to base our paintings off a base image.

Our team is also currently working on character designs and layouts for our final project.

This week we are finding our team and our roles. My team has elected me as animator and modeller for characters.

We are planning to do a short video game trailer featuring our own version of Koopa Troopas from Mario mixed with Ninja Turtles.