Project Progress Update

PinXwheel Animation Production Inc. Progress Report

The team has now been busy doing the project this past few months. And doing some research in optimizing scenes and finding ways to speed up render times and render work flow. The team has modeled almost 85% of the teaser. Although modeling has reached 80%, we decided to do the first panel. The first panel, as you can see on the final animatics, was composed of many moving gearsinside the clock tower. This was called PANEL_1 and the animation took for about 26 seconds, that's 780 frames at 30 frames per seconds.

Also the gears and clockworks inside the clock tower are all moving , they are all manually animated and scripted to suit the gears movements similar to a realistic gear that can be seen in many films and series. The team had conducted a series of research and development to come up to a script that can be used to create the circling movement of each gears. Also the script is done through MEL(Maya Embedded Language) programming inside Maya UI interface. This is helpful because the gears consists of large numbers and having them setup one by one is a tedious tasks and more importantly would eat up a lot of time to setup each and every gears in the tower.

The script is also useful not just in gears, but it can also be used to almost anything that revolve continuously like that of a gear, one good example are wheels of a moving car. Though some of the vehicle in Gear Centra are equipped by hover panels, some of them uses wheels, and on that vehicles we can use the created script to rotate the wheels continuously when moving, creating a feel of a realistic moving car. Also we have modified the MEL script to have a shake controls so as to create a more realistic results in creating a moving wheel.

The team had also conducted a series of test in render time tests. This includes and concerns more on render time for every passes. The desired resolution were aiming at was at 1280 x 720 pixel resolution, that would mean an HD resolution. But the fact that achieving a high definition movie resolution done on most cinemas nowadays are a bit render time consuming on the machines we currently have. The series of tests reveal to us that HD is not the appropriate format for the teaser right now.

As the result of the tests, an hd resolution film format for the teaser would be a second choice for the team. We had decided to use a NTSC Wide screen format that range for about a 720 x 486 pixel resolution, cutting the render times to a more smaller number and adding different passes for different purposes is now more possible. Although the team must be careful in choosing the right passes for the right scene or shot.