30th post on April 30th!!

It's here!! It's rendered!!!!!!! I have bigger version saved as well, and am rendering a higher quality version of this today. I'm also considering some sounds for the final version. I might want to use a version of the first 45 seconds of this and potentially use some of the parts that aren't being used to create some sounds of the peach hitting her. I want to do this rather than leave silence because I feel like silence with a few sound effects would sound a bit unnatural and out of place for the feeling I want this overall short to give off. The music I chose gives off a really dreamy feeling and adds to the girl really being pretty spaced out and daydreaming. And also I'd think that any world where peaches falling as rain does would be pretty dream-like. Even the sky (though it's only the physical sky) adds to that dreamy feeling for me. Hopefully once it's all put together you think so too!!

progress!!!!!!!!

Everything I was having issues with is fixed and all of my animation is done! Before Wednesday, I want to get the animation rendered and pick sound for it. I have a few in mind, but I need to test the waters before I make a final decision. Below is what the first frame and the last frame are going to look like in the rendered animation. I'm looking forward to the final product!!!!!!!!!

gettin work D O N E

This weekend I got most of the animation for my final done, despite the Cinema 4D license being constantly expired. I opted to just create a base texture for my peaches and then put said texture onto some rounded objects to make my peaches.

see? much better than the last one

The camera animation is exactly where I want it to be. However I'm having some issues getting the peaches to animate quite the way I want them to, especially with the emitters. I tried to make a large emitter to rain the peaches out over a large area...and I ended up with a huge peach falling on my world. Then I tried making multiple emitters. They pretty much rained down in one column, and I want them to fall all around more evenly in the space. I also had a few problems trying to get the timing right, but I'm going to credit that to exhaustion probably. Hopefully tomorrow in class I can fix these things, because if I can I'll be finished with my actual animation and only have to render.

peaches aren't peach colored at all

Today I fit my 2D girl into my 3D landscape! After some trouble trying to get her to actually move a little bit, I got her hair to move just fine. I opted to exclude the animated sky texture, as the physical sky created more interesting shadows and wasn't as distracting.

I'm also experimenting with different ways to fit the peaches into the scene. I have one animation where the peach and the girl are all in one file, and then I'm also working with doing a stand alone peach animation of it rotating as if it's falling. Above is my beginning attempt to try and figure out coloring for the peaches. I'm still working it out. The color everyone thinks peaches are is very much not that color at all.

gif grrrlllzzzzzz

This lil gif is the girl that's going to be sitting under the tree in my final. I might make the movement of her hair more fluid, and I'm planning on making her skin be transparent (for no real reason...I just think it would look really cool...)

hills n trees

All of my stationary 3D parts for my final are modeled! I opted to go for whole objects to make the leaves on the tree rather than exploded objects. It fits the aesthetic I'm going for a little better. I might edit my texture on the bark a little bit, because you can't really see any of the marks that I drew into the texture. Now I have to finish up the 2D animated parts and put them into the space.

I'm thinking I might need to do this in "scenes" to get it right, especially because I'm going to have to switch out the animations of the girl sitting under the tree. Also doing it in scenes might make some questionable parts of doing the peaches easier. I'm considering doing the peach rain as 3D objects in an emitter so they can roll down the hill and make piles when they land, but the texture will be from the coloring I do on the 2D peaches that will interact with the girl under the tree.

peaches!

Made a gif of peaches falling as a test for my final! This turned out a bit more roll-y than I wanted but I figured I'd share any way!

millions of peaches

Okay, I figured out where I'm going with my final project. It definitely does include peaches. I'm going for something a little more simple, though I couldn't resist adding in a figure (though if it proves to be too much, I could take the figure out as she's not really moving at all and the focus is on the peaches).

What I'm thinking I'm going to do is have a hill with a tree (both 3D objects) with a 2D drawn girl sitting under the tree. A peach will fall, hit her on the head, and roll down next to her. Another peach will fall, hit her on the head, and roll down. The next peach that falls will fall near her feet. Then the camera will zoom out to show peaches falling from the sky, all around her piling up.

I want to create a texture for the tree in photoshop, giving it my go to bark texture I usually draw with while still having a 3D object. My peaches will be 2D animated on planes when directly interacting with the figure and then for the rain part will most likely be peach textures on rounded objects from an emitter so they can pile up and fall all around to give depth.

Moving forward from here, between now and next week I want to get the 3D world modeled and a good chunk of the 2D animations done.

final project doubts

I'm looking at my ideas that I started working with for my final project and wondering if they're possible to achieve in the amount of time that I have. I want to do a very detailed narrative animation, involving a girl being chased by an abstract shadow monster through a creepy house of mirrors. I'm fearing that a detailed figure animation like this might not be suitable or possible for this project and I might want to water it down or go for something more abstract. I'm also wondering if I might want to change my idea completely for the sake of rendering time and sanity.

probably something with peaches

Moving forward...

My factory is finally (almost) finished rendering and I'm working now to weave it together in final cut, which I will probably have to do outside of class as I might have around 100 frames left to render by the end of class.

In order to make proper use of my time, I'm going to start doing a few more animation tests in photoshop for my final. These are going to be quick figure sketches moving around, just to get me a little more comfortable with animating (I've literally never animated anything before).

This is going to be a lot of experimentation for me but I'm really excited for it!!!

while i wait for the factory to render...

I'm starting on a new animation, combining 3D and 2D techniques. I'm planning on animating a 2D figure in a 3D space. My idea as of right now is to have someone exploring some abandoned funhouse mirrors. I spent a lot of today messing around with some tests, and using this animation

I worked with fitting it into 3D space. I also started looking for the ideal mirror texture and right now, this is the one I'm most fond of

So now I have to do some more character sketches and animation tests and work on making varied mirrors. I'm also looking into possibly putting animated textures on the mirrors to make my character's reflections a little more...creepy.

laughing into crying

I started rendering this at like.....1:00 pm yesterday....it's still going....didn't make much progress....

When I checked it at 3:00 pm yesterday it said I was at 49 frames, so I'm a little confused about why such little progress has been made and also why it says it's been rendering for 9 hours when in actuality it's been about 23....suspicious..........................

ALSO

For some reason all of the frames before frame 73 are GONE

In the sidebar it shows a small picture as if the frame was rendered but when you rewind it,  there are no frames there. Which is strange because they were there yesterday and I triple checked to make sure I had all frames selected.

I'm considering breaking up the rendering time into a few different computers but I'm a little worried about doing that because I have so many frames to render and it's hard to get past 100 frames overnight for some unknown reason...also my super reflective snow globe fly thru was over 900 frames and rendered just fine, so this is definitely strange.

Star factory!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I finally finished my model for my factory!

 It's now a star factory. I went through so much pain to get it to here, but despite some sacrifices I'm really happy with where it's heading! The only things left to do are some minor camera edits and then rendering (: