FYP Animation Development

So this week, I started working on another scene for the 3D intro sequence. The main objective was to make the pill look as if it was cruising down the throat and emitting bubbles at the same time. The challenge was to make it believable and cool looking. So instead of moving the pill down the throat, I decided to move the throat while the pill stays in position. I also placed some turbulence to the pill to make it more believable.

After I finalized the second simulation, I went to look for Borko's input and also some issues on rendering the water with alpha. Apparently, there was an issue with Maya's Mental Ray where I couldn't render water with alpha although the settings were correct. I had to spend a lot of time troubleshooting and the process wasn't really pleasant. 

During our dailies on Thursday, Phil suggested we include some audio for our animation. Initially, our group decided to use Benita's friend to help us with audio. However, as we have mini-viva next Tuesday, I had no choice but to work on the soundtracks and sound effects, just to make the current animatic compilation look more polished. 

Timing the soundtrack and syncing with the animation/animatic is a very tedious process. To make matters more complicated, audio was not my specialization. It required lots of researching and sourcing for royalty-free sounds. However, I gave it my best and it turned out quite good in my opinion. I was quite happy with it and so was my group. Anyhow, it was an interesting experience mixing and syncing audio for an animation. 

This week was a very busy week. I had to help out with RED camp for my school of InfoComm Technology. Basically in RED camp, we invite graduating secondary 4 students who just took their O levels examination. We set up this RED camp to give exposure to these secondary school students and show them what courses our school offer. Well since I was representing my course A3DA (Animation and 3D Arts) I did my part to feed interest to all the students whom visited our school. 

Sadly, I was unable to do much work this week due to the RED camp. However, I was able to guide the students in a drawing workshop and also do some sketches for the students. My official role for the whole event was the A3DA tour guide and also the Student Leader for the camp. Honestly, it was a nice short break from our production and I enjoyed the event although it was very tiring.

Well, it is already the 5th week and so far our group is around 25-30% project completion rate. So far we are quite on schedule, but we did encounter some unforeseen circumstances.

For some unknown reason, my Macbook Pro died, and I was extremely unhappy with Apple. On the bright side, I had a very good habit of backing up my work to my external hard disk every Friday, so there was no major loss. However I lost a whole bunch of work I did on Monday morning. Works included proper rendering of the water and the final simulation for our 3D Intro scene. In addition, my Animatic updates were also lost as well, so we even had to cancel our Dailies. 

So, I had to abandon my post and get my Macbook repaired. Man, the repair center was like in the middle of nowhere, and it really got me agitated.

Now, that my laptop was being repaired, I had to redo the particle simulation which I lost previously. This time, things were faster as I understood the procedures better; thanks to the few days of hardcore particle simulation. Then I spent the rest of the noon caching the simulation for further testing.

Apparently BCR day had to fall on Wednesday. Basically, this was an exercise conducted in case of emergency when the school has to be shut down. So we had to do our FYP at our homes, which was not so bad as I got to use my powerful PC workstation. Our main communication network was via Facebook chat and Skype. We also shared files via Dropbox and Facebook. Things went smoothly and our job schedule for the day was complete.

However on Thursday, I had to endure the extremely slow iMacs which the school provided. Simulating and rendering the water was extremely slow to the point that it drove me crazy. I could'nt believe that the iMacs in School was much slower than my Macbook Pro. The only thing I enjoyed working on the iMac was the extremely large screen.

This week was an exciting week. I got to play around with Maya nDynamics, generating particles for my water. I started intensive research on Maya fluid and particle system. To be honest, I was quite intimidated by the technicalities and my confidence level really dropped.

However, I began trying out the maya nDynamics. Although it was quite complicated process at first, I started to get the hang of it. After a while, I was actually having fun working with Maya nDynamics and particles. Maybe I really like doing VFX.

In addition, Borko advised me to use nCloth to help simulate the pill being dragged in by the particles. Using the particles to drive the nCloth was amazing, it really made my job easier and more enjoyable. Borko, also gave me a crash course on how to render water.

I started applying what I learned on my actual scene which I set up on the previous week. Now I was more concerned about getting the right collision of the particles, rate of particles, duration, and the interaction with the nCloth. I also ran numerous simulation to get the right flow of the water and the pill.

On Wednesday around noon, Jin and I left for an Autodesk talk in town. The talk included the new Maya and Mudbox 2014 features and also highlighted VFX software like Softimage and iClone. The most important part of the event was the Maya particles and dynamics demo by the Autodesk experts, which actually was quite helpful.

Wow, it is already then end of week 3 and I'd say we are really working hard. As for the animation side, we are about 5-10% complete. If we continue at this rate, we might be able to enter post-production after the short Christmas break. 

Anyways this week was a very productive week. First, we realized that after removing the 3D sequence from the story, the link between Hero and the environment was pretty confusing. Also, we took into account where the audience will have no idea where the hero came from. Thus to solve this problem, we came up with an idea to incorporate a fresh 3D intro scene which then transitions into the 2D environment.

The Idea was to show that the Hero was the "Antibiotic Reinforcement" from the real world. So basically, the patient eats his medicine pill and the pill travels down the throat. As it travels down the throat, the environment transitions into our current 2D environment. As the pill lands on the 2D Environment (inside the body), the pill opens up and we see the Hero.

Without any time wasted, we pitched this idea to Christina and Borko. With their positive feedback, I immediately started sketching out rough storyboards and finished it within 2 days. With the finished boards, I quickly compiled it in our sausage and it turned out really nice, especially the flow of the story.

On Thursday, we had our dailies with our supervisors. We pitched our new 3D intro sequence and the updated Animation Progress Checker. Reviews were positive, and Borko prompted me to stark working on the 3D environment for particle simulation.

The week started with us having an emergency meeting with Christina regarding the demotivation and a new story. Meeting turned out good as she re-motivated the team and we planned to stick to our current project, discarding the new story we brainstormed over the last weekend. 

However, there was a problem with the storyboard as our Animator Mattathias pointed out that it will be impossible to finish animating everything in time. As a result, I decided to remove all 3D sections of the story. Yes, we removed ALL 3D scenes and assets we created during our 3D prototype and decided to focus only on the 2D side of the animation. 

Surprisingly, I was not sad scrapping all my hard 3D works which I produced during pre-production. Maybe it was because, it was the only way to save our team, and besides, I can always put my 3D works in my personal portfolio!

Anyways I did a quick reschedule and delegated tasks to kick start our production. Oh and we once again changed our working title from "The Surgeon" to "The Hero" as of now.

Also, I quickly finished a 3D model of our antagonist "Hero" for the animators to refer to. Hopefully, this will help out when dealing with difficult poses or peculiar angles.

As the final semester, most of the group members including me, lost that production momentum we had before the 2 months break. So we decided to slow things down a bit for the 1st week. As we looked at our wall of storyboards, we realized that there were some areas we could improve on. After reviewing the storyboards, we called down Christina (Story Supervisor) to look through and give us feedback. 

However, during the weekends, I held an emergency meeting with my group as most of the members lost motivation to continue on with the project. It was not really of a shock to me because honestly speaking, I also lost a bit of motivation. That is when I realized that, too much of a break can destroy the momentum and motivation of the whole team.

Excuses aside, as a Director, I had to make a decision to either keep the project going or to halt all work and disband. As I was trying to come up with a solution, the members suggested whether we can come up with a new story, but a simpler one. After a long thought, I made a proposal that only 1 week will be given to try this new "story" out , and if that fails we resume our project we had worked on for Pre-Production. The risk was too great to commit more than 1 week for the new story, as we already had assets build for our current project.

The members agreed and we started coming up with ideas for our new story. After much discussion, we decided to work on a more personal topic, like for example, "What happens to us when we die and etc... At the very least, the members became more motivated while brainstorming.