The Pigeon is now fixed

I finally fixed the pigeon and this animation second time round looks better than the first one all I have to do now is finished the texturing and render it out. The animation isn't perfect but the way I've angled the camera you can't really see the flaws.

Disaster With the pigeon

I did something very stupid with the pigeon animation. In 3Ds Max you have layers, so a edit poly layer (for the model) a skin layer and a rigg layer. You ususally collapse the editable layers to make the file size smaller. I collapsed the rigged layer, saved the file and then shut down my computer when I reopened it the animation for the skeleton was still there but the skeleton was no longer attached to the pigeon. I bascially deleted the rigg layer, what makes it even worse is that 3Ds Max comes up with a box to say are you sure you want to do this it could delete everything, but because I was in a rush I just ignored the warnings signs and did it anyway.

To fix this problem I would have to re-rigg the skeleton to the model. Luckily I saved my project as a separate file before I rigged my model so now all I have to do is rigg it again and animate it. To make sure the pigeon is finished on time I'm going have to work extra hard.

Presentation Results

The presentation results went well but colin and Darren did mention that the reason why we might be struggling a bit with our group is because we have too many chief's and not enough indians, too many roosters and not enough chickens.

Rachael and I thought it might be good if we meet up with the other roosters to see who's going turn into a chicken.

I thought it might be a little bit of a tence meeting because everyones been very stressed lately so I decided to draw a funny drawing to lift everyone spirits.

I'm more than happy to be a chicken I just need to be told what to do or I get confused and turn into a rooster.

The problem didn't seem to get completely resolved, after the meeting it seemed like no one wanted to push to much because they didn't want to create more tension. This all happened the last day of filming so when we were discussing what should happen at the end of the film no one seemed to have a clear idea of what they wanted to do with the pigeon. Someone suggested why don't we just get rid of it altogether or just have a still of it. I was really confused of where this came from because I thought everyone liked the pigeon idea. I asked everyone two weeks into the project whether they liked the pigeon idea and I was happy to drop it as I hadn't spent that much time on it at that point, but they said they all liked it and wanted to carry on with the idea. I said I wasn't happy with us dropping the idea as I had already spent so much time modelling and texturing the pigeon.

Last of the Filming Woooo

Last day of filming. Last night we had try to film again but there was some confusion about who was getting out the camera and we ended up not having one. That was an annoying disaster which could have easily been avoided.

Again we had hardly any zombies, even less than last time, there was some talk about putting off filming again but I definitely didn't want to do that. I thought we'd just have to accept that were not going to have the amount of zombies we'd want and we'd just have to make do with what we've got.

Everyone seemed a bit distracted while filming today we ended up filming a strange crazy man dancing on the path for a while. It was funny a first but then I realised that our volunteer zombies were starting to get bored and wanted to get home. It was difficult to try and re-focus everyone especially since the police then turned up to try and move on the crazy dancing man.

We then moved on to film at city hall we filmed the footage with the volunteer zombies first so they could get off home. We did a scene where I would be drooling fake blood that was quite gross, it didn't taste very nice and I couldn't help but giggle part the way through.

We didn't finish filming as early as I would have like, it means we've got less time to edit.

I'm glad I don't have to put that gross fake blood on anymore.

Filming

First things first the zombie make up. Rachael came up with this awesome concoction of ribena, coffee and corn flower which really looked like blood. She used PVA as a base coat and then covered us in face paint and the fake blood. It looked horrible and didn't smell very nice but it did the job really well. I swear when Rachael was putting it on me she was delibrately aiming for my nose and mouth. She would just get a massive handful of this smelly stuff and then just smear it all over our faces it was quite funny to watch, thats if you weren't the person getting attacked by Rachael. I don't think me skin really like being smothered by all of this stuff, it started to burn up to start off with but it seem to calm down once we'd got out in the cold. We didn't have that many zombies anyway I didn't really want to pull out as well.


The first day of filming was quite funny. We got all zombied up went down to the train station and couldn't figure out how to work the sound on the camera. It was freezing cold and we were standing around for about an hour. We were in the middle of fiddling around with the camera and the train station lights went out after that we decided to call it a night and we'd figure out how to work the camera tomorrow. As soon as we left the lights mysteriously came back on again so we were wondering whether they had turned the lights off just to get rid of us.

It was quite frustrating that we couldn't film that first night because I felt like we let down the people who did come out to be zombies.

When I washed off the paint my face didn't look too red so I sue it'll be fine to be a zombie again.

The second day of filming went a lot smoother. There was a lot of struggle to get people out to be zombies. In the end I had to tempt people with brownies, that got a couple of people out but no where near the number we needed.

We figured out why the camera sound wasn't working properly it was quite funny. It was because there was so much sound that the camera just cut the sound out. This was due to us being quite close to the fountain. Luckily this time the fountain had been turned off. We thought we should work quickly just incase the lights decided to turn off again.

We got the camera all working fine the only problem was getting Jorden to get his lines right. It was a freezing cold night again and in one scene I had to be lying on the floor. Luckily Jorden managed to get that scene done quite quickly. The scene that took the longest was the scene by the work station. We ended up with about 30mins about of footage of Jorden saying his line and then swearing because he messed up, it was quite amuzing to look back at.

Because we didn't have that many zombies we decided to only do the sections where we didn't really need them, and it was freezing so we didn't want to be out too long.

Complete computer generated pigeon

The pigeons coming along but theres still a lot that needs adjusting. It looks quite lumpy at the moment.







I adjusted all the lumpy section but realised that I didn't consider how the pigeon would look top down at the moment it still looks quite box like.









After adjusting the shape of the body, I made the curves curved and also added a smooth modifier to make it smoother. I still need to adjust the beak, wings, legs and make the face more curved.








I made the wings look less like aeroplane wings. I added a little feathered edge to it to give them more shape, I also did this for the tail. I decided not to model separate feathers like I did with my plastecine model, this would take way too long and wouldn't make my pigeon look very realistic. I realised half way through modeling my pigeon how to use the symmetry modifier. I should have used this at the start of modeling my pigeon it would have saved so much work.









I showed this pigeon to a couple of my friends to see what they thought of it and they suggested that I should make the neck of the pigeon longer and the head slightly smaller. I did this and it looked so much better.


The final Pigeon model

This is my final model and I'm really pleased with it, it took a lot longer than I expected it to and I'm sure theres a better way to model something, but for what I'm using it for I think its a pretty good simple model.
I showed the pigeon to may group and I think they liked it.