Production One Blog Posts

I can't believe we are finally here (late but here) at the final blog post. It has been a journey and looking back on post 1 to 27 is crazy. The progress we made and the final product we ended up with is crazy.

In terms of this blog post, I don't have much. If I could just write render, render, render, render, render, and post it I would. I worked on grooming all of the different shots of Barthalamew and then rendering them out. It was definitely a process. Everyone was burnt out and the Knit Wits team most definitely became a little snippy with each other (including myself) but we made it nonetheless haha. For the final week, I worked on the sound while Rianne worked on the edit. I was finally able to add in all of our foley artists sound effects, our voice actors hmmphs and hmms, and our music artists music. With all of the music and compiled shots, the final came out beautiful!

Hello (and sorry for the late blog post its been a hectic month),

When I was supposed to be writing this, we had about 2 1/2 weeks left until the final deadline of our short film Knit Wits! Boy oh boy has it been a hectic last month of production.

For this blog post I wanted to talk about the final hurrah from the fur sim, and boy was it a big one! I feel like every time I figure out xgen fur simulation, it throws another curve ball for me to figure out. It's the gift that keeps giving ;)

We were finally at the cusp of finishing up our scenes to start rendering. We had already started our little yarn ball guys and their renders but Barthalamew the cat had other plans for me... other plans in terms of not properly coming onto the rigged and animated model. It took days of finagling, but I finally came to a solution. Here is an image of the before and after. While subtle when looking at it from an outsider's perspective, when mentioned (and most definitely to me) you can see the difference between the two. Here is the before and after! Before, the fur was coming in with ripples (specifically on his arms and face), and after it no longer has those ripples. I found the before an issue even if it doesn't seem like a big issue here, because we had some closeup face shots of Barthalamew and it definitely did not look good.

Hi!

These past few weeks were texture-mania. I've been trying to finish up all of my texture assets and these are the ones I've got done so far!

Hi there! This week I worked on mostly administrative stuff for Knit Wits and a bit of texturing as well!

I got in touch with our voice actor for brocade, he is beginning to work on some hmphs and hmms for him! We should hopefully be able to hear them implemented in the next production pass or the one after that! I have also been working with our music production artist, he is just about done with the soundtrack which is exciting! I also worked with our foley artist and we should have his foley implemented in the next production pass as well!

Here are the textures as well that I have been working on!

Hello!

This week I have been working on textures! I worked on this plant's textures here. I looked at a plant I have myself for the leaf textures and am pretty happy with how they turned out! I also worked on texturing some picture frames and I implemented the art I made, showcased in previous blog posts!

Here are some pictures of the textures for the plant!

Hi!

This week I worked on Uving a new coat rack asset we added in last minute to the set. I also started working on textures in substance painter. We wanted to go for a painterly style with our textures so they are entirely realistic.

Hi! I don't have much this week to update you on, but here's what I do have. On Tuesday, I worked with my groupmate to fix up some of the yarn fuzz simulations on the characters. We changed up some controls and are going to apply the fixed up simulations to the character's rigs this upcoming Tuesday to see how they work with it.

Also over the weekend I drew another picture for the picture frames within our set. Here it is!

Other than those two things nothing else to report! Going to continue working on textures this upcoming week!

Hello! Welcome back to another blog post!

We are finally in the last stretches of production. For the start of this semester my group and I met up to discuss our priorities and deadlines we have for ourselves for this last stretch.

For the first part of the semester we plan to tie up some lose ends and continue on with animation. While some of our group is working on animation the rest is either working on texturing and lighting to get a more cohesive look for the film rather than the unfinished boring grey look. After all this if things go according to our plan, we will complete rendering by April 20th that is our tentative date. Then for the last 10 days we will be working on compositing and finishing touches.

So far since the semester started I have started working on some textures. We have picture frames on the wall of our title card screen, and so we need pictures for those. On the left is the first picture that I have started and on the right is the sketch to that one alongside another thumbnail of another picture.

Hello fellow sentient yarn ball! For this week, I started off working on replacing the floorboards that Sam created in the referenced sets. We are planning on having them in our play blasts for the preview screening and I couldn't be more excited (they're beautiful and Sam did an amazing job). We also had a standup meeting as a group and talked about our goals for the screening. We plan to have all animation (at least blocking) done by December 2nd, and then we will go into play blasting the shots and for the final 4 days before the screening we will edit our clips together, add the music, and add the voice acting.

Here is the floorboards added in to our sets!

And here is the preview screening goals we planned out today in our meeting

I also started working on a chair model. As a team we decided to add in a few extra props to the staircase room per the critique that we needed more there.

Here's my unbeveled chair so far hehe :)

Hi fellow Barthalamew lover, Apologies for the late post, I had a lot going on last week unfortunately :( But here I am now with not too many updates but big ones! We got some voice acting for General Berry!! Here are the audio files for them :D

Here is the sound for the beginning sequence!

Hi,

Greetings from Earth, This week my group and I focused on what we are going to showcase for production pass #3. We are planning to fully render a hero shot and we want to make sure that specific shots are fully blocked. Here is our plan for production pass #3!

Hello fellow human,

Howdy howdy!

This week our animators started blocking out our animated shots and since everyone else was busy doing that, I was given more loose end jobs until I begin texturing next week. Our set has had some problems from the beginning, so I went in and fixed it up.

Initially we had foster parents and a bunch of cameras that were those foster parents and the root of all evil in terms of our set. We essentially had a monster scene haha. I wasn't happy with how long it took our sets to load sometimes and how you could feel the fps in the maya scene was not to the potential it could be. I went in and created five different sets (one for each room) and filled them with all of our scene objects. Each set was pretty much one Lego set that you could reference into the scene and connect them. This has helped everyone A LOT since we aren't dealing with walls getting in the way of room we aren't even using for our shot and the fps has gone back to its full potential. On top of the fact that we aren't referencing in a million cameras and foster parents. Just a cleaner scene overall!! I also added in a new folder in our workspace: the SHOTS folder. Since we have begun animating and we have a ton of different shots I wanted us to stay organized with where we are putting our shots. Here is what I sent my team so I don't have to type it all out again!

Hello!

Here is what I've worked on since the last blog post!

I've been working on everything rigs. I first started off with the rig for General Berry. So far I've completed his bones and controls. I've also worked on Brocade's rig as well and he is at about the same completion percentage as Berry. Next up I plan to work on getting in the stretchy limbs for their arms as well as skinning and weight painting them.

I have also since then completed the fur sim to 100% completion (unless we run into any issues with it of course)! I used advanced skeleton: an easy rigging tool to add simple bones and controls to him, to test if the fur moves with his geometry/the test rig and it does! Later in the week, a friend helped me get the fur sim moving. We converted the groom to a different type and it started moving which I am very excited about!

Here is a photo of Barthalamew with the test (very quickly compiled) advanced skeleton rig!

Hello! As this is the first blogpost since last semester I wanted to do a little recap on what I worked on this summer and what I have worked on for the past few weeks.

During the summer, I started work on the fur sim for Barthalamew. It was a lot of work and learning but from the various tutorials and help from a fellow student, I was able to achieve the look I wanted. I would say the fur sim is about 97% complete as there are somethings I want to polish up (density of the fur on the face, fur sticking out beneath the paws, stuff like that).

Here is a render I have of him in that 97% completion state!

These are also renders of him with the skin underneath black and the actual fur itself grey. I thought it would be cool to add these in here to see the groom work I've done (it's also much easier to see it like this versus the black ^-^

As for the start of the semester up until now. As a group we first worked on establishing our gameplan for the semester. Here is an image of the goals we have established.

Since then we have crossed out making the emotional map, clearing up loose ends (resizing, renaming, deleting history, freezing transformations, etc.).

I worked on a filled bookshelf model over the weekend which again I will add the images in. We were experiencing a lag issue with out set, and we think the books were not helping. So my team tasked me to combine some of the books together as one object versus referencing in 50 books. Here's to hoping that helps!

Here is the filled bookcase model!