Production 3: Blog Post #8

April 17, 2024

Once again, I spent time working on Scene 5 Shot 5. While I believed before it was ready to render, when I examined it again on a new day some new issues arose.

First, I spent quite some time trying to constrain the camera to the master control of the bird rig and group them together so they could be moved together without messing up the camera movement I spent so long getting right. However, since the rig also has a sine wave deformer on it for the wing movement, every solution I tried for moving everything together ended with one of two outcomes: either the sine deformer continued working and didn’t get deleted but the geometry of the bird as well as the camera moved apart from each other, or the bird and camera moved together and correctly…but the sine deformer ended up being deleted.

I think if I’d had more time I could have figured out a solution to this problem, however once the scene had the correct background, lighting, etc. there was no need to move the bird as the movement is implied with the background of the shot, the animation, and the movement of the camera. .

However, that wasn’t the end of small details that could derail an entire shot. Though I had thought it was working previously, when I re-opened the shot to look over it one more time I noticed that one of the eyes, the one that is most prominent in the shot, had stopped moving with the rest of the bird and now, over the course of the animation, simply looked like it was hanging in the air. After messing with it a bit, I looked through the outliner in Maya and realized that the eye had somehow gotten out of place in the hierarchy, so I put it back in the outliner and the problem was fixed.

This was a more complex shot, especially in the camera movement, than I have generally worked on in the past, and I’m quite proud of how it turned out.

I did the animation and layout for this shot, while my teammate, Bianca Rawling, finalized the lighting and textures for the rendered scene.