Deadlines and Scheduling


When first starting on the project, i found that i was able to stick to deadlines very well. One of my first tasks was to Model the Prospector character for the film. As a group we decided that we would aim to get the character models finished by Christmas. This way we would have all the time after this to sort out the rigging and animation that would be needed. This was not a problem, here is my individual contract for the film, this was my plan.

 However when the team disbanded. I then found making deadlines and sticking to them very difficult. Where as before i had clear jobs to do and plenty of time to do them I was now faced with having everything resting on my shoulders.

I found it difficult to get my self organised. I had so much to do i didn't know where to start. I decided the best was to do things was most likely to get all the production bits out of the way as soon as possible. I knew that for the animators to be able to start i would first have to have character rigs for them to use.  Once we had Rigs I knew i had time while animation was going on to work on things like sorting out the environment and lighting. However to animate there would also need to be an environment to do it in. therefore I had to have a very basic template of the environment which i could add to at a later date.  Its not an ideal way to work.

After getting a new team, there was not much time left. there was really 6 weeks where the majority of the work would need to be done.

I decided to spilt the work up into sections i could manage, Animation, Production and compositing.

I had weeks 1 and 2 set for finishing any production work, At the time i still had some models to do. I had to model Tent, Fire Pit,Stool, Birds Nest, Trees. I was able to get this done fairly comfortably.

I had also set the animators shots to work on. I had two people working on prospector animation and 2 people on the dog, i had to wait for another team member, Rob Bowles, to finish some work he was doing on his own film before i could set him shots to animate.

Initially progress with the animation was slow, but once the guys got the hang of the rigs, we had a fairly steady pipeline going. I was often receiving new playblasts to check through.

Meeting regularly with the team to keep everyone one track was key to getting this project done.

I was able to use our facebook group to quickly organise meetings whenever they were needed.
The only real problem we had with this was not everyone being available at the same time. This meant that is was difficult for all the team to help each other out with animating and general advice.
But generally i think we did well with our communication. We had no arguments, and the    work all got done eventually.









To help stay organised i divided my time up into what i thought would work best.

I used google calender to set myself deadlines. This was also a good way of keeping organised, by having everything written out i could see what i had and had not done.

Although this did help i still struggled to keep on top of all my deadlines. i found i had not set enough time for certain things or that i came across problems which would mean me spending more time trying to fix things, or find new ways.





The main thing which i struggled with was the environment. I had a look in mind that i was really struggling to achieve. The main part of this being grass. I wanted to use the maya fur tool to create grass. In testing i did come up with some good results. I was happy with the look of this and thought it could look good. As the film is set in a wooded area there would definitely be long grass there.

My only issue with this look is that it may have taken away for the film looking cartoony so i would have had to find a better colour palet to use.




I also had a problem with how the grass worked with the scene i had. i needed the grass to hang over the edge of my cliff scene. like in the animatic. Here you can see how the grass should look. This was proving to be a nightmare with the fur grass as it didn't really work with the edge of the cliff properly

There are several shots in the film where you see this close up so it was important to get it to look right.

This shot for instance, you would see the grass from a distance, but i still wanted it to look right. However, when applied to my scene i got results like the one show below.

Here you can clearly see how bad it looks. there was no way i could use this.

To try and fix it i had to experiment with the surface i was applying the grass to.

I worked out that the Uv's need to be sorted out, as this was how maya works out where to have th grass coming from.


Once that was sorted, i then done some tests with rendering. As my film is all set outside, grass would need to be in virtually every shot. On average the frames with grass in them were taking one hour each to render. My film is around 1 minute 45 seconds this would have meant having 2625 frames worth of film all needing an hour each. This was no where near doable, especially only rendering on my laptop.

I had tried to use the render farm however my test frames with grass failed to render, and on one occasion even crashed the whole thing. I was left with no choice but to scrap the fur grass.

I then looked into alternatives. The next best thing i could see was paint effects, however after testing i didn't really like the results i was getting, it didn't suit the look of my film. There was no really way of customising it enough either. I didn't want something generic looking in the film.

Given more time i would most likely model the grass myself and just use it in places to give the effect.

As it was i had to settle for using a ground plane which i shaped to have some contours on, and then just applied a grass texture to it. Its not really what i wanted but it does work for the film, and given the timescale was the best i could do.