As the title suggests, here is some more animation. These shots are not exactly in order as I decided to get all the exterior scenes done first.
So, a breakdown:
1. Shot 006: p53 destruction. Texture emission of nParticles converted into polygons, as previously outlined.
2. Shot 010: p14 leaving the nucleus. Camera animated along a motion path (with a cluster attached to the curve to slowly swing it round at the end), instanced Maya particles, again as shown in a previous post.
3. Shot 011: p14 binding to HDM2, p53 entering the nucleus. This one was a pain. I had to be very precise in how the motion paths were laid out. I had to delete the jiggle deformer as it was going mental.
4. Shot 015: mRNA leaving the nucleus. This was a big “whoops” moment when I realised that my scale was all out. The mRNA was scaled correctly for the interior scenes, but in the exterior it was tiny. It was originally meant to be creeping out of the nuclear pore, but it wasn’t even the size of one of the arms on the pore. I didn’t much fancy redoing the rig, so I used the old compositor’s trick of “LET’S PUT IT RIGHT NEXT TO THE CAMERA SO IT LOOKS REALLY BIG!” I was pleased with the swim cycle in the end though, which was inspired by the swimming sperm from Inside the Human Body.
5. In Shot 016: mRNA translation by the ribosome, the mRNA was again far too small and would have been swallowed up by the ribosome, so I did away with the rig entirely, bent it into a curve using a wire deformer and scaled it up 8x. This has probably messed up the shaders so I’ll need to look into that tomorrow, but fixing those is far easier than fixing the rig.
6. Shot 017: creation of tumour suppressor protein. Out of all these shots, this is the only one Angus wasn’t so sure about, because of its lack of clarity. I think this is a silhouette issue – the protein is sitting in front of the ribosome rather than to the side so it kind of blends in. So I’ll move it to the side and perhaps make the chain a little longer, too. Angus wanted me to do some crazy stuff with slowmo and a zoom, but… I’m afraid I’ll have to tell him that it’s probably beyond my capabilities at the moment. Although Maya Time Warps are something I’ve always wanted to learn about, their absence in this piece so far would make adding one right now look a little incongruous.
Three more exterior shots to go and then I am on to the nine DREADED PROXY SCENES which I am absolutely terrified about because the proxies will probably magically disappear as they have a habit of doing. I’m hoping that the months of R&D I did on this issue will guide me through any problems. As for the renders, I am now on 628 out of 2569 frames, with another 243 (fingers crossed) ready by morning. Until all the rendering is done I will present this figure thus at the end of every blog post (more for my benefit than anyone else’s):
628/2569 (243)
Cell Shading 