Final stages

After I have finished all the rednering I went onto editing the final product. In Premiere I have assembled the still frames from Maya and added the lip sync as well as some sound effects and music like walking sound effect or sad music at the beginning.

3D bump maps

In my 3D model house I bump mapped the frames to make them more realistic.

Process of animating Norman

After I have completed the modelling and texturing of my scene, I have started to bring my idea to life by animating the main characters in our case Good Norman and Evil Norman. At first I decided to tackle the scene with the most attention to animate which was the staircase walk. Before we were introduced to the IK movement, I have used the normal rigging and made Good Norman walk up one stair case however his movement looked uneven and had a stop motion feel. After completing this, our teacher showed us how to use IK movement, using this is simpler because it can have realistic poses, with that I moved onto animating  the stair walk again, this time I bent his back every time he stepped on a stair to give him a tired feel. Animating this scene anew took a good while, due to asking for help which delayed my progress. With what I thought to be a finished scene, I moved onto to animation of Happy Norman being at the top of the staircase and greeting somebody he knew, to animate this I had to make sure that his hands didn't go through walls. Afterwards we were shown how to lip sync and how to put the sound into Maya, furthermore we were shown a neat trick of turning Norman without him looking like a robot which was called 'Redirect'. At this point we have had 3 weeks until the deadline, on the same day I have asked for guidance on how smooth and realistic the animation I made were. After receiving feedback and talking to other teacher I have decided to start the stair walk again and this time using the redirect instead of slowly turning Norman which took too many key frames, which in result looked weird as he turned and it would take too much render in rendering therefore I started to reanimate the stair walk and as I've reached the staircase landing I animated a quick walk cycle and decided to use the redirect. I made sure to check my notes when I started, and at first I couldn't get the redirect to work, therefore I went to the studio the next day and asked for help which cleared my confusion and I was able to use redirect. With the redirect used I continued to animate the rest of the walk up another set of stairs. Afterwards I started to animate the evil Norman scenes, the first animation was the first scene that evil Norman appears. When the scene was completed I wanted more of a zoom on the hand but it didn't seem to work too well. Therefore I chose to create another file with the same scene but with just the zoom. Then I went onto working on the lip sync since it's quite long. It didn't take that much time as I thought it would, I was really happy with the overall outcome of the lip sync. For the last week I have been finishing the smaller scenes. Throughout that process I have set up cameras in the places that i wanted to. After few changes I have started to render the still images for editing work in Adobe Premiere.

Sound Design Final Task *Updated*