Telling Tales: All of my Rendered Scenes

I never thought I'd see the day where I had successfully managed to model and rig a character, and use it to animate 30 seconds worth of animation, but that day has arrived! I've managed to get all of my scenes rendered and I couldn't be happier, Maya was starting to drive me insane from working on it day in and day out.

I had saved animating the montage of falls until the end as this way I would know for sure how many clips I would be able to fit in the remaining time, but because we had planned out our animatic pretty much to the T in terms of timing, I found that I still had 8 seconds for the montage which is what was originally planned.

As a reference for this scene I had to look for another video. Previously I had been working from a YouTube video called "10 Month Old Baby Learning To Walk" (which is what we had also based our original timings from different sequences in the video) as a reference for how the child was going to interact with the sofa and walk away from it and I had also looked at another video called "Baby Jude Stands Up For The First Time" as a reference for how the child was going to stand up unaided towards the end of our animation. For the montage I wanted to find a video that featured a quick fire of clips of a child learning to walk so I could get a feel for how my own montage was going to play out. I found a time-lapse of a little girl learning to walk and I thought it was just what I was looking for. Though the video had a lot of the child standing around, as well as interaction from other people, I was still able to use certain falls as a reference, looking at the motion and the timings between each of the keyframes.

10 Month Old Baby Learning To Walk - Reference One

Baby Jude Stands Up For The First Time - Reference Two

Time-Lapse of Baby Learning to Walk - Reference Three

I was able to animate the scenes relatively quickly for the montage and to save myself a bit more time I re-used some of my fall sequences that I had previously animated. I simply created a different camera and changed the angle of it, as well as the position of the child in the scene. I think this was a good idea as it now means we're closer to post production, and also I don't think it's too noticeable that the animation has been re-used. Even so, if it is noticeable I still feel it is acceptable to recycle animation especially as it is being used for a montage, which is kind of the point of a montage anyway. 

All of this was relatively easy to do as I was following my reference videos as a guide, and by this point I had gotten quite used to animating in Maya (animating walking and falling sequences were starting to get a little bit repetitive), it was the rendering that I seemed to have problems with. I had set up my render settings exactly the same across all of my scene files before I began rendering so I know that the visuals would be universal, but when I came to batch render some scenes it would get stuck at the first frame. This really confused me as my render and camera settings were exactly the same across the board, yet some just didn't want to render. I googled my issue and found that a number of people were having the same problem, and the general idea I got was that it was to do with the recent Maya update. I'm still not quite sure what the problem or how to resolve said problem (in the end I just kept reopening the files and trying again and eventually I got results) so I'm not sure how I can avoid it in the future, but if I ever do come across this again I shall have to see whether there have been any updates on the forums that I checked out regarding this issue. 

All My Rendered Scenes - Completed 30 Seconds of Animation

I imported all of my image sequences into After Effects to see how they played back and I'm really happy with them. Some of the shots are a bit darker than I expected due to the camera angle but I think it shall be okay to leave as it is as the change in lighting in the space is - in my eyes - realistic and expected. I shall see what Emma thinks, and see how her frames look once they're rendered. If she feels that they're too dark, or that they don't work well with her material then I can look at altering the levels in post-production. I can't go back and increase the Ambient colour of the material/giraffe texture as it was at the highest it would go before it started to distort the colours of the texture altogether. 

Now all that is left to do is to get Emma's animation sorted so we can stitch it all together. I'm really excited to see how it will look when we put it together because my animation doesn't have a great deal of narrative as a stand alone piece.