Conclusion

Now i can say that the kitchen has been completed fully at a good standard, and i am pleased to say that i am happy with what the team have achieved. Overallfrom the start of the project our group hadcome together to produce a great idea of using tom and jerry theme kitchen as our enviroment. At the very begining of the project our group had a few disagrements and what not, but what group dosent. While disscussing our issues with each other in the formative,we felt that when we settled our differences we though it was time to crack on with the work. What else can i say i enjoyed the project it had its ups and downs but overall it was good.

Modelling the enviroment was something new and very enjoyable to do, seeing the first stage of the project to the final outcome is very pleasing and just shows the hard work and dedication we all put in to it.

Render farm complete

Just came in today at 9:00 to check the render status, and yes it renderd successfully which was good news. Looks like the render farm actually lives up to the good news i hear about it. Well basically at the moment our team is just compositing the movie file in Adobe After Effects where we are adding the transitions and sound files. I will post up the the results for the final outcome of the kitchen scene file.

Thursday night

Just about to leave college closing soon, so i might aswel give an update on the progress thus far. Well basically my section of the scene had already been renderd out successfuly on the local machines and the time it took to do that was 17hrs for 950 frames. We still needed to render out Richards and Deans scenes, and we knew if we had sent it out to the local it would take over 18hrs as they had more frames in there scene. Dean sent his file into the render darm for the first time and oh my it was soo fast and helpful. Dean decided to do a quick test by sending my scene to the render farm and let it render. The time it tooked to render was only 45 mins compared to local which took 17hrs OMG lol.

only 10mins remaining till college closes we decided to send all three of our scenes to the render farm and just leave it over night. Hopefuly fingures crossed it al l goes ok ill report friday to see it it fails or succeeds.

I see changes

From the very begining our first idea we had for the kitchen was to have it set at night where the moonlight will gaze through the window and will cast a shadow around the kitchen. The only source of light from this scene will be from the candles and the moon itslef. One good we had for the moon light was to have dust particles in the air. The next phase of the kitchen was the tom and jerry theme, this i liked the best as it did achieve the theme we were after. The third and last phase we have now chosen and we are going to stick with will be more of a realistic scene. This one is taken from a new york apartment at sunset. Below will be a comparison shot between all the stages we went through on the kitchen.

Render complete

FINALLY render has completed and i think i made a bad decision about letting it render on local instead of render far. Altogether the time it took to render all 950 frames was 17 hours and this was left over night. I heard Same renderd the same amount of frames on the render farm, he had to wait about max 2 hourse for his pending staus to change but after that it renderd 1000 frames in an hour and a half. So at the moment i have imported my renderd scene into Adobe AfterEffecsts and letting it render.

Fisrt attemp at final render

Yesterday was the day we decided it was time to render, after discussing that we were not going to be using the cockroach in any of our scene due to difficulties with the camera and animating all three of us decided that we would produce a fly through of the kitchen instead. After the animating of the camera was complete i started to render my final version of the scene to the public drive with out using the render farm. The reason for not using render farm personally is because i have been hearing a lot of people complaining with the rendered outcome, i decided i would just render it out the normal way.

The total number of frames my scene has is 900 and i have left it to render from yesterday around 9pm. While i am writing this blog ma scene is still rendering but probably has another hour to go. Next post will be on render completion.

My roles, contribution and development

Nearing the end of the team project i have finished all my sections of assigned, here is a list of my involvement to the team.


MODELLING

• Chessdraw
• Shelf
• Sink draw
• Chair
• Table
• Sink cupbaord
• Kitchen interior
• Fisrt Prototype Cockroach
• Broom stick & Bucket
• Plates
• Calendar
• Chopping board & Knife
• kettle
• Bread
  
• Door
• Poster

RIGGING

• Prototype cockroach rig

ANIMATING

• Water flow sink
• Cupboard door
• Broom
• Door
• Microwave
• Washing machine

TEXTURING

• Contribution to texturing

PARTICLES

• Water particle
  

My animations

Catch up!!!!

Such a long week even though its only Wednesday, SO much changes and SO much fuss. Basicly our group objective was to create an enviroment based on the tom and jerry theme but with a cockraoch instead of the mouse who will wonder around the kitchen. During the last weeks of deadline, our schedule stated that animation will start 2 or 3 weeks before deadline, so we would have enough time to solve any mishaps that may occur during rendering. Wht had happend is that we had fallen behind of the schedule because we just kept on modelling and modelling even do i stated that we need to get a start on the animation. I understand that we are just using one scene which we need to add as many objects in, but still modelling when deadline is near is a no no. Because of this we are no longger animating the cockraoch and placing him in the scene. Yesturday me and dean stayed till 8 trying to sort of the animation for the cockroach by parenting the camera to it so it would come out as a over the head shot. While playing round with the camera while dean was sorting out the lighting, i was getting fustrated as it would not animate to the way i wanted it.

I said is enough it enough and just wanted to smash the screen because i was soo annoyed, we just came to the conclusion of just doing a first person camera fly through the scene instead of our original idea of the cockraoch. What we have done now is for each of us to animate our own camera in three different kitchen scenes so after rendering we just add the lot together. I managed to do my bit with the camera and took a total of 900 frames, still need to add richs and deans ones. The animation i produced of the door and so on will hopefuly be shown in either richs or deans animation, but in the end i still would of like to see the animation between the cockraoch and the kitchen.

Animation of door & broom

These animation are just a rough idea of what is supposed to take place, final animation may be different to these ones. Originally i was going to make the broom fall on top of the cockroach, but due to time we are thinking of removing the cockroach from the scene. Bascily the animation between the broom and the cockroach happens like this. While the cockroach makes hes way back to his exit he looks at the fridge and notices the poster of Alesha Dixon, while gazing at the picture the wind blows down the broom which happens to land on the cockraoch and kills him off.

Washing machine & Microwave animation

Changing storyboard

going through the storyboard there are some scenes that we can not achieve any more for example the clock and some others. Im going to make a quick storyboard and do some changes that can actually be achieved in our scene, nothing over the top

Updating my roles!!

Originally my roles were set as Modelling/Rigging/Animating, as i have done more then i was originally assigned my role are now

Lead Modeller/Animator-cockroach and kitchen utensiles/Rigging/Texturing

Creating water particle

From the early stages of creating the sink we thought that having water flowing from the tap would a nice touch to the animation. To create the water particles i first had to open my kitchen scene, next i made sure i was under the Dynamics heading and select PARTICLES>CEATE EMIITER. I was given the emitter which i had to place under one of the taps mshown below



















After alligning the emiiter under the tap i just produce a quick playblast of the scene, the results showed the water particles going all over the place in different directions and were relatively small particles which had to scaled. What i did to solve ethis problem was to open up the attributer and set emitter type to directional and particle render type to streak. I also changed the direction of the water flow by selecting the emitter and hitting T, this made me change th position of where the water was going to hit.



















The next step was to make the water falling motion more realistic, by selecting the particles i was able to change the gravity of the water under the heading FIELDS>GRAVITY. Changing the Magnitude to 3 under the attributer of the gravity produced a smooth water falling motion down the sink.



The ony problem i seem to be having is that i cant seem to render out the water flow under mental ray but only through Maya Hardware. Hopefully i should have the problem resolved soon and will post up the solution aswel.

Animation of doors

When i began modelling the kitchen i made sure when creating the draws and cupboards, i made them open and close. Here is a example in my short sequence

Quick fly through guide

This is a qucik fly view render i did last night to sum up some of the view the cockroach will be seeing. This was renderd out as a playblast but hopefuly the full redered version will be done soon

Preview of water flow

This is little preview of the water particle effect i created for the sink, i will be posting up the tutorial on how i made it soon

Annoying

just wanted to say cause we are all using different maya files and doing our own bit of adjustment to the scene, the clever idea would be to let the person who is animating use the latest file as this is the final one we are going to use and the other members just carry on with the modelling and import it over when ready. The reason for me saying this is that everytime i import something over to my maya file and make a few adjustments to it i have to repeat the same process again importing what i did to either deans of rich file as they were adjusting the same file also. To me this is just wasting time and could easily be used doing another objective. This has happend few times nw and plz i dnt want it to happen again.

Modelling Bread