Acting Up - Production - Progress 4

Today things went a lot better, after getting back from my CoP2 tutorial, I sat myself down, watched some Kevin Hart standup (And a few Dave Chapelle clips)... before getting down to finishing my animation once and for all.

Case of the Missing Blade Texture

As I mentioned in the previous post, I had an issue with one of the textures going missing from my prop, that being perhaps the most important one, the blade's texture. For some reason, while the metallic paint texture (One of the textures that actually came with the software) does seem to show up in the first two renderer modes...

Ignore the fact that this blade looks child-friendly.

... it becomes a shadow of its former self (I make puns when I'm close to losing my mind, so don't mind me... see?) when I try to render it or view it in the third renderer mode.

Having no idea what happened, I had no choice but to try and figure out the problem from the script editor. And while that didn't help me with my texture problem, I was able to give back the blade it's original sharpness when deciphering one of the error messages. So I will be putting this here for future reference.

For some reason, the blade's shape became a smooth mesh (As seen in the first screenshot), and so upon discovering the "Smooth Mesh Settings" in the Attribute Editor, I was able to fix that. Had this smooth meshing occurred when I combined it into a single object awhile back? Possible, especially when the walls of settings were warped when I had tried combining them all together into a single object as well.

Back to the texture issue however, seeing as the prop was a single object, the only way I was able to select a specific part of it was through the Hypershade menu. After selecting the blade alone through the faulty node, I then assigned a blinn texture to it instead, fixing the issue, while it's probably a little too shiny and clean now, it's definitely better than the shadow blade I had earlier.

After bring down the reflection, I then added a tiny little glow to it so that it would stand out a little more in the final animation.

Jump Better, Moom

The issue with this bit of animation was the fact that the speed of Moom falling back down was too slow, and for some reason Moom was lingering just a little too long in the air, as if he was wearing an invisible parachute. And so after improving his jumping pose a little more and adjusting him to jump just a tad higher in the air, I pondered over how to fix the main issue once and for all.

I soon realised that moving the keyframes was not going to be enough to fix the speed of Moom falling back down... I had no choice but to go into the graph editor and use "Linear tangents" on the specific key frames, which I believe worked. I daren't mess around with any of the tangents individually as it was already hard figuring out what was what. With the lingering bit finally removed, I went onto the next issue on my check list.

Cower Better, Moom

This wasn't as troublesome to fix as the jumping one, after adjusting the speed a little more, I quickly fixed one of his legs as he slowly sat himself down (As his knee was previously bending inwards as he slowly lowered himself down). I had also made a few more adjustments to his face (Making him blink a little more and making his pupils focus more on the prop so that it doesn't seem as if he's staring into space) as well as the prop (By making it bounce further away so that he has space when he sits down). 

There was a brief issue with the handling of the prop again (No idea how it happened), but nothing some keying didn't fix.

And finally that was it:

You Camera W-HOA!

Seeing that I came this far, I gave in and gave camera animating a try again. It's not necessarily that hard (Though I haven't given more complex camera movements a try yet), what you need to do is simply create a camera that you will use throughout the animation, it is best to do all of this through the 4 screen layout, where one screen is viewed through the camera while another shows where the camera is so that you can move it in whatever way you want. 

All you need to do is key frame the camera angles you want, and if you want to make the camera move along with the scenes, simply select the desired keyframes, right click, go into tangents and select "Spline". If you however wish to have static camera shots, select "Stepped" instead.

But you have to be careful if you decide to do something else after the camera animating, so remember to deselect the camera you are animating from or disable the automatic keyframing option before doing anything else!

I went for something really simple in the end, where the camera starts off by focusing on the prop's blade before zooming out to show Moom holding it, it's almost pointless really since it was only done for the opening of the animation, but I wanted to give a tiny bit of focus on the prop before the audience focuses on Moom himself. Also, I'm just so glad I finally figured out how to animate with the camera.

And now I will just wait around for the thing to finish rendering again...