#caffeine kick

Our final film is due today, I'll be posting it after the vernissage.  It was a ton of work, but I think I've made something that's fun to watch, so it was worth it.

Some things I cleverly didn't do properly include forgetting the background PNGs for one of the scenes at home (thus I handed it in with just the ambient occlusion BG), not adding motion blur because it consistently messed up the last two frames of every shot I added it to, accidentally animating the camera in one of my shots, and accidentally animating the light in another.

I also ran out of time for the effects like the flame on the candle and steam from the kettle, but I'll try to get it done in the next day or two.  I also recorded a bunch of sound effects this past weekend, but didn't have time to replace them all.

Some shots are better animated than others, and quite often in the two shots, Bean is the better animated.  She turned out to be more fun to both animate and watch, so I focused on her a lot.

The lighting is also pretty inconsistent, and there are some shadows where I'd rather there not be, but I was so busy rushing to animate / render everything in time that I didn't stop to check for mistakes.

This is the polished version of Caffeine Kick, more or less.

I think it’s come a long way from the rough, although it has a lot of room to improve.  In particular, the last shot is too floaty and kind of boring to look at.  I’ve gotten better video reference and will be restarting it in the next few days, so I just have it as a rough here.

Other shots have timing issues because of the playback in maya.  For instance, the book throw is kind of slow because it looked a lot faster while I was working on it.  Things like this will be the next thing to fix.

This weekend I will be recording sound effects, so I won’t have the high-heeled footsteps noise when Bean is walking around barefoot.  I will also texture the book that I keep forgetting about.  Oops.

Overall I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, and I’ll keep working on it so that it will be even better for the vernissage.