Monday 16 August 2010

Video post?

In one scene I had three camera changes. Instead of rendering this as three seperate scenes I opted to use the video post to set up when each camera should take over.

This process seeemed easy enough until I chose to execute the sequence to render the scene. The scene apparently rendered, but I do not know to where it would have been saved as there were no options as to which directory to save the file. As such I ended up rendering each camera view individually then importing them into adobe premiere pro where they were cut and spliced together in the proper order

Rendering problems

When attempting to render static frames from some of the scenes the computers within the lab kept becoming non-responsive. To try and overcome this problem I used backburner to assign the job to several computers at once. However the problem encountered here was that the networked home drive kept going offline.
To use backburner one machine was set up as a manager and then others were connected as servers (including the manager machine itself) The jobs allocated and each server's progress was then viewed on the manager machine using the backburner monitor. This meant having to import 200-300 individual jpeg frames into adobe premiere pro and editing them to work as a whole by placing them on the timeline, selecting all, decreasing speed/duration to lowest amount possible and using ripple edit feature to apply this to all frames.

Other scenes were rendered as .avi files in stages to speed up the rendering time e.g 1 computer was set to render frames 0-50, another was set to render 51-100, yet another to do 101-50 and so on.

The tortoise moves

I used the bones system on the tortoise to make it move. This proved harder than it looked and actually took several tries before I got it to be anywhere near passable. Inverse kinetics were also set up to enable controlled movement  of the bones, but even so found this to be a rather fiddly process despite editing the envelopes around each bone. I think the bones system is one of those things that takes time getting use to, maybe with lots of practise I will become proficient at it.

Wheel rotation on hare

Use of the path constraint to make the hare move meant that the wheels were static. To make them rotate each wheel had a float expression attached. Each wheel was selected and in the motion panel the 'x' rotation was selected >assign controller >float expression.




To ensure that the wheels stayed attached to the main body of the hare I used the schematic view to connect all the parts together





1, 2, 3 go!

At the start of the race I used the path constraint on the hare to enable it to move off the starting line faster than the tortoise.

Opening scene

For the opening scene of the hare and tortoise talking I used the morpher modifier. On the hare I chose to move the head, mouth and both ears.


For the tortoise I altered the position of the legs and head so that they would retract into (and out of) the shell. I also moved it's mouth and head movements.

Friday 13 August 2010

Building the scene

To save time I used the elm tree from the application library. A start and finish post were made up using 2 cylinders each and a plane stretched across them with the word START and FINISH applied as a diffuse material bitmap, although this did create the problem of the not being able to see the sign from the back. However with careful placement of the camera this should not cause any difficuties.

Reference image of which a section of the path was used for to create the path texture.