Finished

Heres my final animation of the snake actually in the film, there were a few problems but we chose not to move the body but just the head.

Final Shots

Here are a few render shots from the final film to show the rig of the explorer in full working order; i am so happy that the rig allowed for a dive roll and rope swings; i feel that it didnt hold us back in anyway, which was my fear. I had rigged before but nothing as complex as what i have managed to create for this film. The film looks fantastic too and the animation really demonstrates the rig. I feel it worked out so well although there have been problems theres been nothing i cant fix with them pretty quickly and with no effect to the current animation so overall i am extremely happy.

Animating the snake

So i knew i had to do some animation for my file even though it really isnt my thing at all, however it had to be done. I had previously done a small amount of animation with the tortoise just a short walk cyccyle as a test, unfortunately the tortoise got dropped. Anyway we had a snake already rigged but not texture, therefore i needed to texture it then animate it for a scene in the film. The texturing went well but the UV'ing for it whoever had done it wasent great, but its so small thats its hard to tell anyway. I originally animted it moving along the floor and rearing up. Unfortunately when i imported it into the environment and tried to scale it down it messed up and corrupted. Therefore i had to unbind it and re-rig it to size. It took some time but i managed to get it done and animted in the scene. Heres the test animation for the original movement.

Nearly there!

So close to finishing now! Anyway it was getting to the point where work is starting to get thin on the ground as we had started rendering and just finishing bits off at this point however the kitchen still needed to be textured for when the cooker had blown up. Therefore everything had to be blackened. So i took the original textures i had created and layered up a charred/burnt texture over the top to give the desired effect we were after. Here are a few screenies to show how it went, i am particually pleased with the effect to show how the ash has settled! As the camera only sees a certain amount of the kitchen in the shot ive only needed to texture about half of it for the specific camera.

Lighting

Now that we have began rendering the house interior needed to be lit; having already modelled and textured the kitchen i now had to light it. I have also been given the texturing for the hallway and have taken up what Rob had previously started. Obviously i am not a lighter but i am pleased with the outcomes i have been able to achieve. Initially i was aiming for a light orangery/yellow to the scene as i imagined it to be very early hours of the morning where the sun had just began to rise; however Jonno wanted it so that it was clear it was the middle of the night as opposed to early morning. I therefore changed the lighting to be more of a moonlight feel. I am happy with both the kitchen and the hallway and feel that the light coming from outside through the windows gives that extra touch to the scene. Although my primary area of modelling and rigging is over i feel i have been able to offer help with both the texturing and lighting for the project.

Texturing

So for the past few week or so ive been working on texturing the kitchen ready for the film; having modelled and uv'ed the kitchen it only made sense for me to texture it also. Jonno wanted quite a modern feel to the kitchen so textures were kept quite clean and nothing too fancy to fit with the style of the house. I found it quite a challenge as it is not really my specialism but i am filling in as required to get the film finished. Im very happy now with how it has turned out and can show a small environment from modelling through to texturing. Although it still looks a little plain here once the walls and floor have been textured and the scene has been lit im sure it will look great. So my next task is to finish those off and then move onto the next part, which Jonno will assign me to.

Tweaking the sleeping guy rig

Rob found a few problems with some of the blend shapes for the sleeping guy; when the eyes blinked on one side it moved the eyelid on the opposite side. When both blinked at the same time it messed up. Unfortuntely as we are all aware once a blend shape has been created the only way to fix it is either to delete the cause of the problem or to unbind the skin and re-model the blend shape and re-weight, which would have taken way too much time to fix. I came up with a solution of moving the verts on the blendshape model so that they would not move on the actual rigged character. Agaian in took quite a while but crisis averted and the problem has been solved.