Team Journal Week 01

Chris Cerrone

This week we all got back from Spring Break (though a few never left) and met to discuss moving forward with the project. The lack of clarity and resulting anxiety on what “Beta” was carried over from last quarter, but was soon resolved by deciding to focus on moving forward with the schedule we have instead of backwards at what a Beta is or might be. We know what we need to get done to have a good animation by the time senior show rolls around in June, and now we’re going to get down to doing that. Our largest obstacles remain animation, rendering, and the Visual Effects needed to tell the story effectively (Which may sound like the entire project, but with the efficiencies we’ve developed from the end of last quarter much of this has been streamlined.)

There are a few ancillary effects that are slated to be added over shots as a layer of polish after the prime animation of the shots are complete, however these are slated to be worked on after the bulk of the animation is locked down so there are more team members available to work. Animation has become the sole tasks for Juan and Alexis, with Chris and Zack taking shots as needed. All effects related animation is due to be done by this Friday, and all animation is due to be done by the end of April. This is planned knowing that some shots will take longer than others, and some shorter than others. After the end of this month the changes to animation will be small adjustments to secondary motions, and less timing related. Zack has done a second and third pass on three of our heavier effect shots, using a new plugin we found for the electricity that works better than the default AfterEffects setup. In the next 2 weeks he’ll be the primary person responsible for all the main effect shots having a second and third pass. Avery has finished the floor textures, and is at work to create the materials we need to get final renders in the environment by week 4. After we’ll continue to work on texturing, but with the bulk of it behind us.

The requirement of having “1st pass shading and lighting” last quarter meant spending all our time putting materials on objects, but none actually refining something that we could get feedback on. We’ve since set up a meeting with Jeremy to go over what we have as a final render and see what we can do in post and out of the render. The next few weeks are going to be fairly similar, with Alexis and Juan animating, Chris and Zack doing a combination of that and VFX/Rendering, and Avery refining textures for the base. But all of you reading this will have to wait until next week to hear about any new and exciting developments! 🙂 🙂

 

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