After Effects Final Project

This is my final project for After Effects. There are still 7 different title frames, but I combined a couple to make the timing overall work a little better (was getting too long). I really kind of like how it turned out. I put about 10 seconds of the actual film in the clip here in order to show how the titles flow into the film. Each text field is used as the particle for the backgrounds on the title frames. The transition images and animations come from the film itself. The rest pretty much went how I expected it to go when planning it out (see entry below). On a final note, I really enjoyed the class and enjoyed meeting everyone.

AE final project - Preproduction

The very first post on this blog was "The Great Eggscape" project that was done by myself and Thomas Meek and it is basically a live action cartoon. What we spent almost no time doing were the titles. What I would like to accomplish is doing new titles for the project where the text slides in from the sides with particles in the background that are also the names (this is actually why on the particle project I used a particle made of text) in the same color scheme already present on the end titles. My plan is for the entire title sequence to be about 30 seconds in length. I would like to include many text effects as well as mixing in images of the hero egg from the film. The film currently has all the titles at the end but these that I will be creating are to be added to the beginning. There will be seven total title slides with transitions between each of them. My plan is to have the transitions use the egg images as coverage for changing between slides while manipulating the image for improved visuals to (hopefully) have seamless transitions.
Asset List:
1. find main font
2. find font to use as the particle
3. select image stills (or small snippets of animation) of the hero egg from film
Schedule:
Week 1 - compile images, finish story boards.
Week 2 - layout the slides in AE with the film, get basic placement of all elements, get transitions working.
Week 3 (and until turn in) - finish all animations, lighting and camera movements. Polish and render.

First Maya Animation

This is my first attempt at animation in Maya. It went pretty well, although it gets easy to misplace objects. Below is a different view showing how I actually screwed up the first bounce with first the angle and then moving on the z-plane incorrectly. That took me forever and a day to figure out lol.




I had kind of a rough time adjusting keyframes, but finally got it together. I kind of feel the rendering process out of Maya is crazy (really, can't go directly to an .mov or .avi??) but AE easily deals with it of course. Now if I could only manage to make a model that looked half decent...

AE Masks and Mattes

Before:



After:



This is two animated masks. The first is on the skyscraper itself to get rid of the sky around it in the image. The skyscraper is also moving in relation to the forward clip (granted it didn't come out all that great). The forward clip has a mask on the sky to allow the skyscraper visibility. Hair and trees were real problems when doing this. This is one time consuming process, but rather fun. I can see how this would work really well on a well planned shot (avoiding trees and hair type problems, etc).

Maya Lights

Ok, this is my project for lights in Maya.  Back to ye ol crappy Superdome model (which feels even worse after playing around with the cab model for the last set of projects).  This has an ambient light that is suppose to be the sun going down, which it sorta does. There is a bunch of of spots running around the outside as well as the ambient.  I tried to make them look uneven like in the picture of the Superdome, but it only kinda worked.  There is also a bright light in the parking garage area where I first tried a bunch of little lights, but felt the one super bright one looked better.  Lights felt a little more controllable in AE, but maybe it will become more natural later.  This was one of those things that actually felt easier on the mouse than on the pad.  It feels like light tends to "seep" through things at times that I wouldn't expect it to do so, but I have a feeling it might be because of my model. 

3D Layers

Ok, I used my taxi from the 3D project with this because I thought it was nice and shiny.  Youtube is kinda screwing me on the quality of the transfer...the shininess kinda looks just smudged on here.  I have one camera that I have moving in and around on the taxi.  I have one light moving around the car (that's not a fade in or something, its the light moving around in conjunction with the camera moving).  The taxi and the background are 3d layers that I'm moving around as well.  I need to talk with Professor Beans with my issues with bringing a Maya layer in (there just seems to be always something I do wrong when I try to bring stuff across from different programs...had the same issue with trying to make a layer out of a flash file).

Maya materials

I have to admit, I got very tired of seeing my crappy models, so I downloaded one to play with materials on.  I found this taxi.  There are several different materials in this one model.  I tried to get this cheap fake leather for the seats and I played around in the interior with different materials as well.  I also tried to get rubber tires (ok, they look like they are really shined up for a taxi, but hey...).  All are Mental Ray materials.  There is even transparent glass in there, although I'm disappointed I couldn't get some reflection going on them.  I tried to different types of glass for all the lights.  The material on the hubcabs and bumpers is the same, where I tried to get this chrome type color.  All in all, it was fun (really wish I could get my modeling skills to this level though).