Thursday, December 20, 2012

Starting to Aminate the Short!

Hey guys,

Man, I can't believe it's been a week since my last post.

I have quite literally been working non-stop on trying to animate my short movie.  I have run into so many problems.

First off, when I first tried animating a 10 second video the rendering of it was going to take over 2 hours!  That was because I was trying to render the characters as well as the entire set all at once.  I quickly learned that is not the way to go.  What I was having trouble with was figuring out the many different ways to work around this, such a rendering in separate layers and using backdrops.

Rendering in different layers proved to be way over my head at this point.  Although I believe I understand the concept I still can't quite figure out how it's done.

So, I decided to use backdrops but, I had spent so much time building the set for the shoot I didn't want to throw all of that away. The solution was to create the backdrops of the set from the camera's point of view.  That sounded easy enough but I had to enter the world of using Nodes and although I don't want to get into what that means I will say that it is something I have avoided pretty much since I started animating 3 years ago.

Finally, after a week of trying to figure all this out, I finally have a test video that is 10 seconds long.  Ugh...

Still, the video does have two camera angles as well as some sound.  It's not perfect, but I'm actually excited.  I actually feel as though I'm animating!





Again, that probably was too terribly exciting, but I have to admit that I am pretty happy so far.  Sure, it has some problems, but it is a start.  I'm finally starting to animate something!

I also loaded this video on a popular video sharing website (if you think only a little it's probably the one you immediately think of) as apposed to loading it directly on the blog. I'm hoping the video quality is better than what I've had in the past.  It at least will offer some HD quality this way. Believe it or not, the videos I make look far better on my computer than they do on the blog and I'm hoping this resolves that.  Still, this particular video is way dark, it's my first night scene, so you may not be able to notice.

I know this isn't Xam and Power Dog, but believe me, this little side project is only going to help when it comes time to animating them.

Stay tuned for more...

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