Crunch Time

I am in full production and no sleep mode. On wendsday I went and shot some footage for shot two and I learned a little something about interlacing footage. It is really hard to track with PFtrack. The reason being is that there are no solid points to track. I attempted to De interlace the footage and that helped a bit however I could not get a good track because of the motion blur it added during a critical camera move. To try to fix it I manually added user points however I was unable to track the footage. I will need to re-shot it this week.

To make up for lost time I pushed on assets. I was able to do a quick render and comp for shot 3. It still needs some work but it is getting there.

I also started work on the spaceship that will be hovering over the city. That and re-shotting the footage will be main focus this week. I hope to have all the CG assets done by Saturday and the footage done by monday night so that I can start rendering and comping my shots.

Shot 3 Test from James Spadafora on Vimeo.

I Have made some progress on Character animation as well. I used the OPSIPA script to create a control rig for my orc. It is robust and a time savor. Normally to create to joy stick controls seen on most rigs now a days you need to set driven keys on blend shapes at different locations on a control curve, which can take a while. The script preps your blend shape to create an intermediary to preserve your original network then provides a GUI for mapping your blend shapes to your control curve. It was also easy to create my own connection inside the hyper shade for the mouth open, which is controlled by joints instead of blends. I used the GUI I made to do a quick lipsync test.