Ok so yesterday saw team pedro take a big step in the production process. Not only did we skip the huge task of painting waits but for the first time we gained an idea of how the CG would look composited with our background footage. To be honest we didnt know what to expect, whether it would look blatently CG and if it would fit in with the set. Well were all suprised at discover how good it came out., for a first test anyway.

The morning started with myself and Ally painting weights and touching up our rigs. We had the kind help of Mr Ross. After a while experimenting and skinning I concluded there was absolutely no point painting weights for my model as when skinned it worked almost perfectly with hardly and deformations - lucky i know! Dave assures me this is very unusual, especially for fingers to work fine without tugging on the skin of nearby fingers, but I wasn't complaining! I think alot of it comes down to the way I modelled Cornelius, as I concentrated on keeping neat edge flow and edge loops surrounding all my joints, no triangles etc. Plus the fact that he is made up of very basic primitive shapes. I was over the moon that I could just get on with animating. Alecs Gorilla was almost perfect after the skeleton was skinned, he just needed to paint weights on a few pinkys.

So first step was to import the particular background shot needed for Cornelius' first scene as a targa seq using premier. Then set it as image plane for a new camera. I then created a simple sphere to act as the pebble and allow shadows and occlusion to be created underneath Cornelius. I set its material to "use background cololur" meaning it wouldn't be rendered. I then placed Cornelius in his establishing sitting pose. I wanted him to be hunched over and sat like a real gorilla but the rig didn't allow it which sucked. So I had to settle for sitting him like a human on the edge of the pebble, which I guess you could say is more intelligent anyway?!

Alec then helped me re create the lighting within our live action footage. twas hard. We ended up having to simple ambient lights casting no shadows. One slightly pale grey/pink for the sky sort of colour, and one slightly brown for the subtle glow of the leaves kicking up from beneath him.

I then kncoked up a quick model of the Zoo magazine Cornelius is holding. Needs more work though - I would like it to be slightly reflective and more shiny.

Lastly I attempted a qucik piece of animation and lip sync for a composting test. I just made him take a sigh and look from page to page while humming. Looks OK - will come back to it later, it was only for test purposes. I struggled to animate in a stop motion way as it involves animating frame by frame badly - whereas I like smooth CG lol. As Alec said its like learning new animation principles all over again if we want to achieve a convincing stop mo look.

Yeah then rendered a batch, imoprted both occulsion and master layer into after FX.....