Post-Production: "& Son" Last Minute Shot Fixes

Hello Everyone,

This is probably one of the final posts for the blog, we will probably be knackered after getting our Art of and Technical documents up on here so were just going to let them speak for themselves. We have my show reels for Benjamin and Barnabas rendering away so with any luck It should all go on as one BIG BANG. Anyway this post is about last minute fixes which were found to be in the animation... Ones we could fix anyway.
The images above show Benjamin's head with a Black Hole mask which Sammy asked Stitch to render out as Benjamin's eyes were cutting through his blink cycle. The problem with doing this is it impacts the eyebrows which sadly is a fault in the facial Blend-shapes of the Benjamin rig. We will probably look into this before New Designers to possibly make a sad facial emote that doesn't impact anything but the eyes.

The image above shows the eye blink issue which cuts through his eye lids as the shape of the eyes are different when the "sad eyes" emote of the facial control is active. We dialed this back but then we ran into the issue with the characters eyebrows moving with the eye blink. Again this is just a fault with the Blend-shape controls and will mostly be addressed very soon for these shots particularly.
Next Sammy asked if we could add Barnabas to Shot 57 as the prior Shot 56 has Barnabas stood right next to Benjamin. In our original 57 Benjamin is alone ready to do the dance. Suffice to say this was a continuity flaw going across 2 shots. The only thing we felt might cause an issue was the following Shot 58 not having any trace of Barnabas but Sammy said it didn't read like he was missing in that shot.
In the image above Benjamin is still until the camera follows him to the candlestick which is why the Barnabas image above moves... that is the camera moving with Benjamin towards the candle sticks. After the shot had Barnabas completely missing we stopped the render of course having rendered him in the "Black Hole" settings of a lambert texture node. It now flows much more so it was a good play.
Last of all was a hopping frog fix, the ambient color of our stationary frog had no color punching up the brightness of the texture. This was only in a couple of frames but we found it was simply treating the stationary frog as a separate entity to the animated frog. Once we went in and found the plane with our stationary frog in and pumped up the ambient color all was well... It was just a re-render of the frog on his own. Well we hope you have enjoyed this little journey.

Over & Out,
xXStItChXx