Project TFD

 After comping the fire in that shot, I tested it further with smoke over it.  I was hesitant to use this footage because of how it reaches the edges of the video, we had our limitations with smoke footage. Luckily with the effects I provided, I was able to convince many on how the smoke looked. I had the smoke positioned to go up, to start with, putting the smoke video in a diagonal/diamond position. Because of that I decided to use an ellipse-shaped mask on the smoke. To take it further, I resized it out of uniform scale. Next to using smoke for fire, I was to comp some smoke onto the film shots that included an explosion. The best first shot to test that out was LVR360 where the explosion occurs and the same smoke footage I used on the fire seemed most worthy to use again. It took a few tries but we finally got one test approved. Soon I started applying it to other shots and got slightly proud of this one with the camera zoom. Oh and of course, the cityscape was comped on t...

       And so we officially start our rendering chapter and that includes our adding fire to the scenes. Our production includes a large room that is to be on fire, and an active fireplace in the scene after that, and we all thought for sure we would go in the fire simulation direction. We have learned to do that but it would have been time consuming to have learned to perfect it and we were already busy with other areas to make our deadline. Even using it would have taken more time. While we had our mentors last semester, one of them taught us we don't have to have fire in every shot in our first scene, and be cleverly subtle in implying fire using lights in the scenery and using smoke footage. When we received our Post-production teacher, Keith Silva, he convinced us that we can comp in the flames and so far there have been great and easy results out of it as soon as we found the perfect stock footage. As soon as we got into our lighting & rendering chapter, we...

     It is now our last week and some of us have completed our quota of animated shots, are currently working on our last shots, or are making last-minute polishes on our shots, based on our supervisor's notes. I happen to be in all areas of the above. My final shot is BDR110, which displays the kidnapping of the daughter, and the only one to show the Villain. At this point, I'm awaiting any notes for this shot. Other than that, I have received supervisor notes on my previous shots like VTY100 and this was the latest result of such.  Production wise, we have one more shot to be completed and we're seeing great progess on that from our good animator, Kevin. As we near the closing of this chapter, I also write a great thanks to our volunteer animators and rigger, Kevin Nguyen, Francesca Nassir Noguera, and Steven Chao, Alisa and I did our fair share of animation but we couldn't have done it without them. Thank you, Everyone!

      In this semester we have started a class reserved for Soundscape education under Professor Matt Zogaric. In this class, we've learned to edit our sound for our production along with finding crafty ways in providing our own sound effects, not only including dialogue but also foley, the sound within the environment and background, as opposed to the main sound effects that get the spotlight.     For our production, we split our areas of sound editing into three sections, beginning, middle, and end, one for each member, Alisa, me, and EJ. I was in charge of the middle section of our film and we've been nicknaming them Sound Chunks.     It was around this time where we all got to record our foley sounds, that included comic book flopping, fireplace sound, drawer opening, duffel bag movement, etc. We rented the "podcasting" booth in the University Library for a few hours and we each got turns inside to record our sound. We also used this space a few we...

 This whole time we have gone back and forth about whether we were going to visually include the villain in our short film. After some advice from our supervisor, Raquel Coehlo, we have decide to show the villain kidnapping the daughter character. To do that we had to Design him and his oufit, model him out, texture the outfit and make it into a rig.  I made some initial designs but changed it a little since we were seeing just his back side. I didn't think we would have time to fully model and rig him but it all happened quicker than I thought. It was in the nick of time too because I was just getting started to animate the very shot that had him. When suddenly... The texture wasn't working. There were a few errors involving the model being referenced from the hero character. Eventually we got that fixed and I had a little time to add one final piece to the model. The mask for the villain. We were going to do goggles but since we were only showing the back of the head, we jus...

 And so, alongside with rendering, we also made tests with simulation. Thanks to Raymere Mendiola for providing the rig and adding simulation as a switch. It is here where we really put it to the test because it was just there while we were busy animating. I first tested it in LVR170. Mainly because of the starting pose, the simulation setup was confused and so the legs went through the skirt. Also the ends of the back bow were dropping later (as a setup for sim), it was just a little messy. I made some adjustments then by zeroing out the mother's pose and starting 100 frames earlier before the action, so the sim gets acquainted with the pose. Along with that, Ray made further adjustments, switching the sim to a more video game version, more control in the setup. It works better for sure. I also applied this version sim to other shots. Unfortunately it's not the same in working well, the bow was still being wacky, but we're looking to make further adjustments to that. Hopef...