Finishing the animatic
I spent most of Friday evening trying to figure out how to get Maya to animate my characters. It took me 3 hours but I finally figured it out and got my first shot (Opening shot) rendered. Seems like the rigging doesn't like it when you try set the character as a whole. Rather it wants each individual aspect of the character to be rigged one piece at a time.As of April 1, Marius and I are recording our placeholder foley. I don't know how Marius feels about it but I see myself re-recording a lot of the audio I want for the finally piece.
I think my biggest obsolete to learning movement in Maya is the graph system. While I have a decent animatic going, I haven't been able to nail down the movements.
Monday April 3rd: Anger, lots of it.
I was working on the animatic, from 5 pm to 9:15 pm on Monday 3 of April. I had everything finished on the animating side and was about to take it into after effects. I copied the file to put it onto my portable hard drive, so I would have two copies in case one got corrupted.This ended badly. I don't know why but an error came up saying that the copy process failed and when I returned to the original file that was on the computer's D drive it was gone. All attempts to recover my work failed and I couldn't get any information about the error from the computer. In short, I lost 4-5 hours work because my working file on the D drive self destructed when I tried to create a back up. As Luke Page and Morgana Penrose can tell you, I was not happy."
This is part of the email I send to my tutor about a self destructing file bomb that deleted 5 hours of work that I did on my animatic. Needlessly to say, I'm angry. Really angry.
I don't get it, I was finished, I was relieved. All the animating was done, all I had to do was edit the shots together and added the music and sound effects. One little copy glitch and poof. Work gone. I don't know what I'll do if I don't get an extension. I was so on course for completion and now it has exploded in my face. I don't have Maya at home yet, so I just lost a lot of production time.
Recovery
I had to remake half my shots (all the ones i lost after the computer error). This took most of Tuesday to do, including getting up early and going to SIT at 7am. Managed to get everything back to where I had it and even started putting it together. Needless to say I was a bit stuffed.Ideas after making the animatic
I think that the beginning sequence with The Dancer waltzing around the stage needs more dynamic shots/ camera angles. I think maybe some shots that are closer to the Dancer. If necessary I could extend that opening sequence to suit the change of camera angles and shots length.Just looking at how my animatic played out, I might have to model Marcus (The old man/ puppet master) after all. While this means more work for me, I think it would be a good chance to practice my 3D modeling. I am working on The Dancers model in class as it is important that her model looks good, as she has the most screen time out of both characters. Being able to ask Rachel for assistance when necessary is a good safety net in that regard, but I need to test what I learned without that safety net.
