Rough Customer

The dead rabbit's lookin' damn good! My only thought is to just dirty him up a little more. Like this...ish:


Other than that tiny thing, I think it's looking freakin' awesome! Nice!

Where would we be without shakes?

What would our film look like if we didn't have shake? Something like this:


And here we are in the land of dystopian green. There's a few errors to address pointed out in the image below...



...now comment, you bastards!

Deglossed around the edges

Here's a new version: better reflections, slightly dodgy AE comp instead of Shake... Animation isn't quite as embarrassing this time...


Refined rendertest...

Shadows need to be tweaked to an agreed level. This is much less on the stylized purple, more to a darker blue.

Bugger'd hand and dodgy textures fixed too. Reflection now only on the outer gloss at about 0.2 reflectivity. Shiny.


H264 compression washes out the colour something fierce.

Freakin' out

This smile is the widest I can make with blue's current controls. Can we add a 'big grin' or something so he doesn't look so freaky?

Also: a picture of some procedural animation gone awesome.

Eye see you O_-

Textures are GO!

Hokay! We can render now! I figured out what was causing the Vram to spak out every time we tried to render a scene with more than one character in place.

2 things:
Texture size
Texture location

As fantastic as the ARNE server is for centralizing everything, it can't quite handle being used as a texture cache as well as a computer can by itself. The solution is dragging the project across to the scratch and rendering locally. The trick to making this work is making sure we move any updated files back to ARNE when we're done, and double checking the project settings each time we start up - which we do anyway...

I've resized all the textures down by an average of 50%. In some cases, even more. Now that the computer doesn't have to Unwrap, filter, light, layer and render 4 4096px square textures per character at 2 characters per screen, it can actually render a frame without crashing!

Here's a bit of maths for scale - an average scene before would calculate about 201326592 bytes of information per frame. That's 0.2 gigabytes (200Mb) of data streamed over a network into random access memory for textures only. Not including lighting, shadows, geometry or visibility calculations. All that cache data is processed to make the single .tga file, which is barely 7Mb...

Now, the same looking thing is only 12582912 bytes. That's only 12Mb (0.012gb) of information to play with for a render. Much easier. The only difference is the texture dimensions.

To prove my point, this is what a production render looks like. Ignore the dodgy reflections...

I vant to suuck your blooood...

Heh, Blue's shoulders were fixed so that they zero back properly. Though that means that we'll have a few shots like this!

planks in a trench

OMFG Aliens!

Ah, lol...

If rabbits could fly...

Experimenting with some clever distortion and stretching techniques, should we decide to make the animation even wackier. Then I got carried away with photoshop.


Yeah, that was too much fun...

Buddy Flick

Working on previs most of today. This is another test of the rigs, another few tweaks and fixes, plus some useful paraphernalia to promote the film. Neil and I did these ones, did you want to do another one Brad? We left space on the board.




There's still some minor texture tweaks to make to:
-Blue & Orange's ears
-Orange's neck line
-Bump texture on Orange's face
-Orange's eye specular and reflections are doing something funny. I'll get to fixing that soon.

I think Blue's texture is ok for the moment...? I changed the file format from .jpg to .tga and we made his eyes brown again.

Orangey goodness

Here's Orange. Just because he's badass. I changed the size of his gun and updated all the textures to his most recent iteration.

Also, his hand was broken. I noticed while pre-vis-ing...

Blue Animation Test

Blue Spew

Blue is born :P

Camo?

This is my hat in the ring regarding Camo on the rabbits. I'm a little iffy either way. Brad was right that it does make it a little busy, but by the same token the plain orange might be... well, too plain.

Ideas?



One idea later, this is what happened. Brad suggested that the bigger camo-style shapes work better, and perhaps take it down 30%. I took it a step further and took it down to 50%... 30% looked too similar.

Same noise, pretty texture

Same clip as before, except this time he's textured and moves his hands a little. Texture is still only rough, but it gives a better idea than just a flat orange.

Rendered with a single Maya software pass and a single directional light with a 2 degree angle for raytraced shadows, depth 5.

Enjoy!

Orange Texture test

Legging it

Leggy run cycle

Modeled, rigged, textured and animated in 2 days. Given, it still needs to be tweaked and fixed, but not a bad effort I thought.

Yes, there are still some dodgy paint weights. Yes, there's a seam along the inside of his pants. Work in progress...

It's not supposed to make that noise...

I've done some fixing of the orange rig. You don't realise how broken something may or may not be until you start using it. Good thing I did too, I didn't want to come across these problems later down the track...

So Orange is fixed, and I did an animation from the 11 second club with him today. From the new Dr. Who methinks...

Whatcha think?

Watch it on Vimeo here!

Leggy

Nnnneeehhhhh... It's legs. Not sure what to think of it.

Meh. Gimme some feedback before I start doing more work on them.

Rig-a-Rabbit

Orange is fully rigged and raring to go! And not a day too soon.

-Full IK/FK blending on the arms
-IK feet with world space position locking constraint
-Adjustable stretch length on all limbs
-Reverse spline IK for the back, turns sympathetically with the head.
-Facial controllers for 53 blend shapes plus tongue, teeth and eyebrow deformers
-Non-spherical eyes that maintain their shape
-Smoothing presets
-Reverse foot bone structure for foot rolling and pivots.
-IK target driven thumbs. Should work easier than ye old FK...
-Ear controllers for flipping, flopping and twisting.

...ooh, and his controllers are colour coded!