Ive spent the last two weeks rendering what I had. Initially this was just meant to be a test render so I knew what shots to use and what was needed, but as it took so long to do I ended up using it as the final render. As you can see theres a lot of anomalies.. and the final ones would have been done with mental ray and masked onto the maya software render (the profile lines can only be rendered in software)

Overall I wasnt too pleased with the final animation as it didnt really make sense, it wasnt the colours I wanted to use.. the ending was cut short because of the rendering time, I wanted to put a video behind the window, and I wanted to do more with the little guy.

There were so many more toon shaders/profile lines I wanted to include in the animation, At least Ill know how to recreate them to use them in other projects.

I learnt a lot though, and have lots of ideas to use in the future.

It really needs sound.

Rainbow tests

I was messin round with motion paths.. and wanted to have a flowing line follow the curve, like a rainbow for example.. and have the tube to deform as it went along the path like it was rigged. but couldnt figure out how to do it.. if you know what I mean and know how to do it let me know please :) heres a few videos anyway
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Octopus

I spent a while makin the octopus legs move correctly... I couldnt understand why the test videos did not match the rendered images.. i finally figured out that some of the keyframes were one frame too far, which was overlapping and making the animation completely wrong. This serves as a good reminder for the future.

Test 1:


Test 2:
(Ill leave out test 3,4,5,6,7)


the problem with the final render:


Im not sure why its playing too fast though??

Line Tests

Heads..

I spent at least two weeks making the head and rigging the mouth. But as I decided not to have sound, I stopped and just used the head as it was with the mouth closed.