Maya and HD

Maya isn't accepting the HD videos- even we're sure we've encoded using codecs that worked before. We'll keep working on it.

YES! HD VIDEOS ARE DONE!!!!

Ok, it took a day and we missed showing Mike our Nick ideas with the class but we finally got the High Definition video backgrounds done. They do look sweet. Here are some shots from the videos. It took a day to get the HD videos from the camera onto the computer as it seemed only the tech engineers knew how to setup the one (and only) HD tape deck in the uni- post production students had no idea how to use it!

Anyways, the videos are encoded in Windows Media Video HD making it easy for me to encode it again and change them for editing etc. There are 7 HD videos each around 30 seconds and around 15-30 MB each.

HD

Filmed all the backgrounds we need. Including a shot where water randomly moves- so we can animate a charter moving it. To use the HD footage I need a HD tape deck which only 1 exists in the entire uni. I've got it for a day tomorrow :).

Mouth

The mouth is now moving. This was done by using a skeleton on the mouth as well and weighting it properly. The mouth opens the same way an which arm is extended. This method works well and is easy to animate with.

Bananna Man

Here's the rigged bananna man. I'ld say i'm getting better at rigging now- finally :).

Characters

Here's some characters. Their names could still change though.

Future Research

I should have looked into this earlier but a lot of people in the industry don't seem to use Adove After Effects; they use Autodesk Fire/Combustion.

It's like Maya but more around compositing images and videos.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5562722


http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=5562397

So far, I think Autodesk Combustion is for PC and 'Fire' is for OS x and Linux.

How Family Guy is made

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GL42iKGf7Q&NR=1

This video is about the Family Guy music video but also shows footage of animations of characters before they're sent off to Asia or somewhere to be coloured in and touched up.

Working

We're still sticking to the production schedule, this week is for animating and rendering.

About the DVD- the point

The idea for the DVD came from videos like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeceEtPKOG0&feature=related

This one was made while Seth was still at college. If me and James work on these characters some more we may even get an idea for a whole series planned- so our expearance in making this DVD would pay off as we'ld make another one- including footage from our future series, which would be passed around the industry.

For now though, the video should do well on each of our portfolio projects. Hopefully, next time (when we have a series pitch) it'll be funny enough to show to some network. :)

Update

Side of Captan Man- His cape is animated.

TV Interview

Here are some shots from the DVD which is about finished- oh yea, we made a DVD on us. It's about how awesome we are as animators and a bit about our Nick pitch.

Development

Well, while we wait for the weekend to be over so we can get some help with weights, we'll add some more stuff about charactes onto the blog.

Problems!

We've hit a block. All the characters are weighted and working fine. Only problem we're having is with EggMan and RobotMan. Egg man is almost fixed but there are still problems. When rotating the joints other parts of the model stick with them and get rotated too. This is a massive problem as we can't go onto the easy animation stage without sorting this problem out first. A lot of people in our class don't know what the problem is either- weight painting doesn't seem to be helping.