Spoilers

So I have been working on my final Demo Reel for the last two Terms, so about 4-5 months. One of the ways to show progress is to put together an animatic. An animatic is a way to visually see if what you are doing works in terms of timing and shots. Usually done by editing the storyboards together into one video. So if you are interested in finding out what my demo reel is about below is my first animatic.



So it is a little confusing what some of the camera moves are but that is the basic premise of my reel. The next thing to do is to evaluate the animatic and find out what's working and what isn't. The next phase in my reel was to create a slap comp. A slap comp is very roughly putting your digital work on top of the footage. This allows you to figure out how much time you have for any animation and figure out pacing. The next video is my end of Term 3 presentation which has the slap comp in it (plus my spider assignment ... I was too lazy to take it out). Also, in the upper right corner of the video there is my 3D animatic which I used as a basis for my slap comp.



So the demo reel actually changed quite a bit after the slap comp. I wasn't able to reshoot my final plates at the same location so the location is different in my final. Also, there are a few shots that have been changed and all camera's have been locked so that there are no moving shots. The actor in my reel changed too. I asked another classmate who is older and looks more intimidating. Turned out really awesome.

The robot has also been changed. I added more geo to the robot to break up the silhouette a little and completely retextured it so that it looks more gritty and war torn. Instead of white, the robot is now gray and silver. The inside of the cockpit was also changed. Also, originally the idea for the cockpit was to have it covered by glass. But my mentor told me to change it to metal so I wouldn't have to deal with reflections because it would be harder. But recently I changed it back to glass because it looks so much better and the reflections really didn't cause too much grief. The robot now looks like this:

I would post my most recent presentation stuff which has my almost completed reel in it, but I think that it would be a better surprise to see it later when it's finished - which it almost is. I spoke to my mentor and because of how far along I am with my reel he told me he wants it done by mid Term 5. That is in two weeks. But I really only have one week to finish it because he wants to see it next week so he can approve it/give me comments on it before the mid Term 5 Presentation. If I do finish, it means I will have finished my reel 3 months ahead of schedule. This will give me more time to polish it to perfection or if its good enough work on other projects that I could put on my reel. I'm pretty excited at how far along I am but also it has become quite stressful. Well I hope you enjoyed it.

Spider

So this assignment was my VFX project in Term 3. I am now in Term 5 so I'm posting this really late. We were given a rigged, non-textured mechanical spider. We had to texture the spider, shoot a moving shot, put the spider in the shot and animate it. We were told to do a simple shot that dollies from side to side. I decided to do something a little more complicated than that.

Here it is.




So as you saw in my breakdowns there were little black and white checkerboard pieces of paper taped to the walls, desk and computer monitor. These are tracking markers that allowed me to track the footage a lot better than if I didn't put them up. This allows me to be able to recreate a 3D environment that the spider could interact with and receive shadows and reflections.

Also, if you saw I added the pencil on the table that he cuts in two. I thought it came out pretty good. I used a rigid body simulation on the spider that animated the pencil for me. It took quite a while for me to figure out the correct settings to get the pencil to fall realistically and bounce correctly. It would have probably saved me time and trouble if I actually animated the pencil drop by myself, but it I really wanted to figure out how to use simulations. I think it was a good learning exercise.

Hope you guys like it.