After doing the first scene with the butterfly I learnt that it is important to be able to hide the armature or at least only have the controlling bones visible. I wasn’t able to hide the armature with the way that I made the library link and missed a few frames where a leg knuckle intersected with the wing.
The monster rig will have only the controller bones visible and the other bones on a separate layer.
Well I have an idea for making glowing red eyes for the monster as that freaks me out. I’ll use a material with a full emit value and then model eyelids that cover it. The plan is to then parent lights to the monsters head and in the best case scenario the eylids block the light. If that doesn’t work then I can just automate the lights to turn on. The glowing part can be taken care of in the compositor. We shall see…
Given that there are a lot of elements to the creature I wanted to reduce the armature down to as few controller bones as possible so that it is easy to animate but still fluid and believable. To achieve this everything was an IK chain with limited rotations on each bone. To be honest I am surprised how well this rig functions given the apparent complexity yet very few controllers. (more…)
The new shrinkwrap modifier works fantastic with shirts and fairly well with pants. I had some issues with the pants and had to rebuild the mesh near the feet. Still struggling with making folds and very worried about the mesh deforming correctly for the poses – particularly the first pose where the boy is sitting down.
After running some tests it seems that the way to use the dynamic linking of assets across .blend files is to use groups. This allows huge changes to be made to the asset that gets updated in main file. This is what I wanted to achieve from the start and knew it was somehow possible as that was the touted workflow of Big Buck Bunny. The trick was that I was importing the object rather than having the object and armature grouped and linking to the group. This should allow me to start setting up scenes and animating with partially complete assets. Also another things that sucked an annoying amount of time is that both the armature and mesh need to have the centre-point moved to the world-space centre. This seems to be the way that you avoid the armature/rig disconnection issues that i have been grappling with.
Well after the first full render I have been looking through ways to improve it. I also noticed a z-mask problem of which I posted about on this forum. The solution given back worked fairly well except for the first part of the scene when the butterfly is in the grass: something weird is happening where the final composite is just the grass with a black background – no sky, no butterfly. I also think that the blur on the butterfly (even though the depth of field is supposed to be tracking it) is a bit too much. So I have several options: (more…)
It took about 8/9 hours (I’m still not sure where/if Blender displays the total time taken to render an animation). I’m fairly happy with how things turned out. The background could use a bit more detail and somehow the sky got messed up. After fiddling around I discovered that somehow a texture got mapped to the texture input in the World Buttons. I’m not entirely sure what you use this setting for but at least I can now see some results of using it. (more…)
Figured out and implemented render layers – now working through all the issues that come with the privilege of splitting one’s renders up, namely character foreground/background overlap. Apparently this is solved with the “Zmask” render pass. I’m having issues with the layering as the butterfly goes both in front and behind the trees. I posted and got some good answers, and eventually worked out what I was doing wrong. Also it seems my approach to nodal compositing was a bit off as this one fellow points out, and subsequently made me wonder why I ever did it this way to begin with, that I only need one Defocus (DoF) filter at the end of the chain rather than on each layer.
Got depth of field working so that it tracks the distance of the butterfly at all times.
Z-mask problems
After many trials I finally got what I wanted for the specularity on the butterfly. It shimmers a hint of the thousands of tiny short hairs that coat a butterfly’s wings. My first try I used the noise filter in Blender as a spec pass; what I didn’t realise was that this animates, making the wings look like they had film grain. When I painted a texture, paying more attention to details, it didn’t really work as the light needed to be quite high for there to be any effect and in the actual scene the wings had a flat specularity. After playing with the setting and discovering that I could map the image to “colour specularity” I got the shimmer I wanted. Plus the bloody thing doesn’t sparkle.
Original noise for spec
Image crafted spec
Seems that if I have automatic keyframing on when keying the camera it goes crazy with rolling rotations when I use the free-look camera mode. Solution is to turn the auto-keyframing off and manually insert the keys after using the free-look cam placement.
In order to make use of the NLA animation strip sequencing I needed to create the following short animations: (more…)