Saturday 14 March 2009

Maya Maya Fire: Part 2

And so comes the early hours of saturday and i should be in bed resting for another early start in the studio tomorrow, but instead i've decided to be a dedicated animator and stay up doing work, creating that fire movie. So here it is, and again hasn't taken that long to render!


Maya Maya Fire!

Words cannot express how enlightened and joyous i am at figuring out a lot of things (i knew there was some reason why i work mostly during the night!) For starters there's special effects, quite a huge range of things to do here but i'm most focused at messing about at trying to make fire, then there's changing luminosity and colours, and then finally rendering it all. So i saw how you set the render options to do a batch render, which i'm pretty sure we learnt in the first term with the torus, if not, well, it was lurking around in my memories of maya in the first term; but problem arises when you don't know how to actually tell maya to batch render, which the programmers thought to put it under the rendering mode, (well figures really) Render -> Batch Render. Simple really when you sit and work it out, so here it is my first, quick 15-20 minute stab at fire (not the real fire, the fire that's an ethereal blue for my ident fire). It would have been longer, but because i thought rendering took forever i only told it to do a small number of frames out of the 300, it ended up only taking a minute to do 25 frames so i'll do the full video of what i did.



I do really like the way this turned out, exactly the kind of look i was going for in order to create my blue fire, and it does appear to have the eerie feel to it.

Friday 6 March 2009

Live @ 5

Monday. Dread. Rush. Fear. *sigh* Not at all really. I'm sure there could have been some drama, but it just couldn't seem to present itself. I had images of running back and forth between the studio and the broadcasting room, with last minute changes to Astons and the weather maps, that the MA Broadcasters got wrong, but, alas, all the 'last minute' changes were done hours before the show aired. All that needed to be done were the Astons, that tell the viewer who it is we are seeing talking about some issue, and the football and rugby tables and the weather maps, so there wasn't much for me to do since these tasks were taken. So i oversaw how everything was going, and offering some helpful hints, although these were to be very few and of no concern to after effects, seeing as everyone had good grounding in the areas they were working in. Barney, as well as an excellent team name, made to be a very good team full stop, providing us all with a good learning experience and a semi-realistic view on how the news programmes work 'behind the scenes' aka the graphics team sitting rather contently at the back at the room, sniggering at the production team when things go .... how do we put it? .... pear shaped! I stuck it out to see the final Live@5 aired at the back of the room and see the fellow team members work up on the big screen. Although i must admit i'm rather disappointed with the lack of drama in this project :P