Final Project - Breakdown AND other stuff

My internal time clock is totally screwed up.  Crashed out on the couch from approx 830pm and only just woke up an hour ago at approx 230am.  Grrrrrr....  need to work on trying to regain a more normal sleep pattern. :)

Anyway, the above is the breakdown of the Final Project.  I also used this in my demo reel.  I've taken away all the names and phone numbers etc because I don't really feel comfortable with giving out too much information on the internet.

I've been taking a break from doing any meaningful VFX, 3D etc work for about a week as I needed the break away from all homework related stuff.  Now though, I am thinking I should slowly ease back into it this week because I still have things I would like to try to fix and stuff I would like to learn. 

I'm not sure what I would start with yet but I don't want to kill myself over it for now because I really need/like to get a lot of non-work related things done like:
1) cleaning my room (it now looks just slightly better than Neo's room in the Matrix). :)
2) I really want to meet up with some friends that I've neglected for months.
3) I would like to complete work on a computer I've been putting together from parts.  If I can figure out which component is causing this computer to keep shuttting down without warning, I will be able to use it is a gaming computer and then I can start playing Civilization on it. :D  I think it's a faulty power supply and I already have a spare supply that I can put in but for some reason... I feel so unmotivated to mess with it right now.
4) Work on my Japanese homework.  In order to work on this Final Project for school, I am way behind on my Japanese homework.  Tomorrow, I will sign up for my Pre-Advance class so I will need to try and finish this homework and revise as much as possible before classes start again in December.
5) Starting to draw or do digital painting again.  I really would like to get better at drawing but admittedly I have more patience with rotoscoping than with drawing. :)  So it's been a start-stop-start-stop process for me.  I did like digital painting quite a bit and there is this one photo I would like to digital paint... so may start doing that next week.
6) Get a haircut.
7) Work on organizing and uploading tons of photos.
8) Play video games.
9) Start swimming again.
10) Read.
11) Watch anime, Japanese dramas and that ATV drama I've been wanting to finish.
12) Work on models - my Mini-Cooper and other unopened or unfinished kits I have lying around my room.

Anyway, there are a couple of things I could do as well that are VFX related:

1) Trying to get that bin to sit in better in my Final Project.  But I must admit... I am a little sick of the Final Project so am not sure if I really want to mess with it immediately.  But I'm in two minds... if I'm going to mess with it some more, I suppose I should do it now while it's still fresh in my mind.

2) Fix two of my previous projects which have some problems.  I'll upload them so that you guys can take a look at it.

a) baby shot



This shot is called the Baby Shot because we only had 2 weeks to complete this shot from pre-production to delivery date.  This was a difficult shot to accomplish because Shatter and Particles in Maya were very taxing on my computer and there were some other issues with some settings in the Shatter effect that I wasn't sure how to key in correctly that caused Shatter to really stumble during rendering etc.
There are several things I would like to work on in this shot:
- The way the particles interact with the objects on the table can definitely be improved.  I should probably create a dummy keyboard, mouse, monitor etc so that the particles can interact with it in a better way.
- I think I may need to re-track this shot if I want to get the particles to interact better with the objects on the table.
- There are also some masking and shadow problems on the wall that will need to be fixed.
- The coke bottle is tracked okay but not perfectly as it is sliding very slightly.  Will need to fix that too.
- Try and get that coke bottle and that 3d arm to look better in the footage, now they still scream out "I am a 3d object" very loudly.
- And I also think the texture of the wall can be improved as well.  The shatter bits and the particles look kind of crappy to me mostly because the texture looks kind of yuckky to me too.

b) hero shot



This is the second shot that I worked on during my 3rd semester and it's called the Hero Shot because the bulk of the semester was spent working on it.  I've not done the breakdown for this shot either.  Basically, the actor and the table were rotoscoped and separated from the original footage.  The walls, floor and chair are all 3D elements.
There are several things that I want to work on in this shot.
- Replace the material of the floor to a non-reflective material.  While I can still recreate the shadow somewhat better than what I did, the reflection is way too difficult and perhaps even virtually impossible.  Hence, the best solution is not to even do it at all.  If I wanted to try it, my lecturer said I could try just having a puddle of water on the floor and then have half the body reflect in the water rather then try and do a full body reflection because that would be very, very difficult to do.
- Move the wall back and change the material of the wall.  Basically, my bump mapping in that wall texture is way too much and kind of ugly.  Also, since the entire environment save for the table is 3D, I don't have to be constrained to simply replacing the wall from the original footage with the 3D wall.  In fact, I could actually create an entirely new environment if I wanted and would like to do more than just simply moving the wall back.  Actually, this was one of my intentions but I could not finish it in time, so even though I did start on making an entirely new environment, I actually stopped so that I could get the shot ready by delivery date.  In the end, I did deliver on time but with quite a few imperfections. :(
- Fix the shadows.  Basically the shadow that I faked for my actor and the shadow under the table are not good enough.  It shifts at points and is just unacceptable.
- Fix the roto.  The roto on the actor isn't bad in my opinion. =)  I really slaved over this roto because the footage quality is really bad as the school camera is pretty crappy so rotoscoping this shot was very trying and time consuming.  Also, the actor's hair was really hard to roto.  In the end, even though I roto-ed for weeks and weeks, I still failed to roto the last section when she sits down well enough, so I will need to fix that.  Also, the roto of the table is not very good at all.  I had a lot of problem with the table too because I think I made a few fundamental roto mistakes in the beginning and I had to rush to try and fix it in time to hand in towards the end.  Also, the quality of this footage is really not very good at all, so rotoscoping that table turned out to be unexpectedly difficult as sometimes the pixels will shift and then I can't tell table from wall.  Given that this was the first time I rotoscoped anything, I'm actually quite pleased with my initial results for the actor but now I feel I do need to clean it up better.

3) Also, I would like to improve my AE skills so I would like to work through some of the Video CoPilot tutorials that are available online.

4) Work though some video tutorials especially ones on Lighting, compositing, rotoscoping and effects in Maya.  As well as watch some video tutorials on drawing and digital painting.  And although I am unlikely to have time, I would also like to go through some tutorials on 3d modeling.

5) And finally, I would like to learn how to use a node based compositing software.  I think Nuke is the one I would like to learn right now.  So may try and learn some of the basics of how to use Nuke as well.

Okie dokes... end of my very long post which is probably riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, all of which I'm too lazy to fix right now and will most likely never get around to fixing. :)  Of course the chances of me finishing everything I would like to accomplish are completely zero but still, I wanted to write it all down so that I can remind myself of the things I would like to work on.  Also, writing this long post has made me kind of tired, so now I can go and try and sleep again and work on getting my internal time clock back to a more normal one. :)

Good night ya all. :)