Ang Li Lin
/Animation
Sem 7 Week 11 - 3D Previs
While our texture artist is texturing the boy model, the others start doing the 3D previs.
We first divided the work for each of the groupmates according to the environment and sequences, we import the environment and character model as reference. For now, we will be using two free rigs from the web as proxy character to animate.
For the 3D previs, I'm in charge of the the first and last sequence of the film. I use one maya file for one sequence to make it easier as this is the previs stage. First, I will set the camera movement and timing in maya according to our 2D animatics. Then I move on with animating the characters as a simple blocking to see how they interacts. After this, I set the heads up display to make the camera name and focal length visible, so we can monitor the information after playblast the video.
Editing
Our groupmates finish their part and I collected them and edit into Premiere Pro. I will check through the frame to see if the timing is correct, and if there's any problem in the video. After checking, I inform my groupmates and they try their best to amend it as we are also short in time. After checking thoroughly, I give some notes for them about things we can improve for our second stage of 3D previs.
Challenges Faced
At first, our 3D previs is short in time and we have many parts we are still working in progress. There are also naming standardize problem for the camera as each of us may misunderstood about it. Because of rushing the 3D previs, some shots have parent constrain problems when the character is interacting with objects, which we have less enough time to optimize it. There are also parts where the camera icon itself appears in the shot, or some sequence doesn't follow the 2D animatic timing.
Solution
We divided the work for a few groupmates to in charge of some part so we can make our work faster, we also need to have a small discussion to standardize our camera naming. The parent constrain problems in Maya need to be solved in our next stage. We must check thoroughly on our shots for things that aren't suppose to appear in the screen, and the timing problem, we will discuss and look through the technical part.
What's Next?
After our first stage of 3D previs, some of us will continue optimizing in the second stage, while the others will continue texturing the 3D model and start doing our second piece of key art.