End of 2007

One year has almost passed and I still have lots to do with this project. First of all, I really appreciate Professor Albert and my two animator friends Jared and Jim for their helps. I remember I said I will complete this project by May this year in my undergraduate capstone presentation. However, I wasn’t quite realized creating a 3D animated short is such a long and complicated process. With all graduate course works, part-time jobs and freelance projects, it is very difficult to concentrate on this project. Today, I have completed all my graduate courses and one thing left for me is to finish this project. It is something I can’t have any distraction in order to finish. I had to tell my part-time employer that I have to quit it so I can focus on this project. I have to turn down many outside freelance project as well. I just feel I have to have one thing, I mean something major done when I graduate. I will end my school academic life with something is completely not half way done. For me, that is more important than anything else. I will commit 90% of my work time for this project in next half year. The two major parts that I still need to do for this project are animation and rendering/editing/composting processes.

The premiere of PACO will be either end of April or early May. It will be present at IT152 with stereoscopy projectors. It will be a 40 minutes presentation which talks about production pipeline and showing the final piece of animation.

Shot render passes demo

Here I have my first two shots (out of 83) from my PACO animated short. This video show you how I render my shots with render passes. I animated the first shot (PACO jump in and then walk). My good buddy Jim Ward animated the second shot with all characters, PACO, Charlie and butcher.

Chichen Barn (open scene) render test

Here is a render passes test for PACO's opening scene, a chicken barn where PACO got captured. There will have few more passes need to add in the shot. Plate and grass passes, character passes and fur pass. Since 90% our shots don't have any camera movement, so we will only render a single environment image for those shots and then add in passes for character animation. That way will save ton of time for rendering process. PACO is captured in the early morning, so I hope this initial test shot give you a feel of early morning.

Animatics and Reference Video

PACO Animatics is delivered!

After two months of working on our own free time. Jared, Jim and I have finally putted together the animatics. We are happy to see how everything come together so far. We all learned timing, staging and camera angle in this process. For sure we will have more changes in the future process. Our next step will be blocking process and we still need to decide who will need to work on which shot. Here is our animatics, PACO

Storyboard is delivered!

Thanks to Jared's hard work, this is our final storyboard. So far we have about 80 shots in this animated short. In June, we will block out every shots and test the timing for each before we start the actual animation process. Project organization is gonna be crucial in this project, so we have came out with a system to keep files and tasks organized. File naming structure has also created. We also found the Google apps are very helpful and useful in order to keep our production schedule organized. It is very nice that we can share our calendar and Excel & Word Doc in Google appes.

Get going now!

After five months of struggling with my graduate school works (first semester). I finally ready to get back to the PACO project. I got two new team members this time. Jared Price and Jim Ward. Both of them are fantastic animators and that is just what this project really need. We have been working on the revision of the storyboard. We have pretty much settle down all the shots and story. Now, we are in the character testing process, which is very difficult for me to fix all the rigging problems that all characters have. Our next big step is to have a solid animation layout. This project is under the animation phase, so animation will be the main focus until end of this year. Anyway, more story and animation progresses will be posted in here pretty soon. I will also come up with a project timeline by next week.

Here is a simple PACO animation test