Ripieno

Animation Studio

It’s official, we are fully in production mode…. just in time for the Game Developers Conference!

And Then There Were Four

It’s quite hilarious, really. The room is quieter with only four people, and the absence of the two teammates associated with character creation has motivated us to rapidly assemble production pipeline management procedure, environment, and mo-cap data as possible

Since one of the people who went to the conference is responsible for animation, motion capture integration, and tech art, our priority 1 has been to make sure he has work waiting for him when he gets back. In turn, while we are in the co-cap studio, we keep getting real time commentary from the Moscone Center on how we should address choreographing around the axes, scaling our models, and transferring data.

Victoria is suited up and ready to work (thanks, Pitt Nrityamala!)

But all of this is great. Every new suggestion improves our mo-cap pipeline tremendously.

As a result, we now have successfully captured Indian dance and are moving on to Brazilian. Last weekend, our sound designer brought five musicians into the studio to record a 50-second Capoeira piece. We were wowed by how great it sounded in the virtual space. When asked whether five is the magic number of instruments necessary to feel immersed in spatial sound, our sound designer responded: “I think 40 is the secret number, but 5 is as close as we’re going to get.” Next week, the man who played the berimbau, Jean-Baptiste Meunier, will be putting on the motion capture suit to improvise to what we recorded.

JB, the guy on the berimbau (the circle and stick instrument in the middle), brought his friends together to record for us in the studio on main campus

We set a deadline for when we wanted all of our motion capture data in. This aspirational deadline, as it turns out, is before we can get our Ghanaian troupe through the studio, so we’re moving a little backwards. Typically, we would record all the cultural dance troupes, and then bring in our main dancer, Javi, to work off of their material. Instead, since we are limited by the timeline, we are asking Javi to come in this week to do some initial poses, walk cycles, and emotional expressions. This kills two birds with one stone, because we can use the data for playtesting and, once our environment is built, splice it into the scene for filler animation.

Pipeline Time!

We’ve talked at great length about having a pipeline, but with story and boards not completely locked in, it’s been impossible to send anything through it. This week was the beginning of putting this to the test.

To start, we established that by the end of spring break, we will want a full playtestable environment with at least one cultural transition. This meant we needed an organizational system for asset production and scene creation. After reviewing various systems and websites like Kanban for Agile and Shotgun software, we came up with a relatively simple paper system.

Once the environment is ready, we have created a slightly-reformatted scene pipeline. Because we are working in 360º, transitions are coming before lighting to account for impact on the space and — most notably — sound is at the END of the process. Why? Because our sound requires multiple applications working in tandem that, if sent back into premier or maya, will destroy the spatialized quality. Technology hasn’t quite caught up to what we’re trying to do, so our pipeline must adapt.

But that process cannot begin until we have an environment, and for that, we have an asset pipeline!

Our asset pipeline board

At the moment, our concept and environment artists are working rapidly in tandem to get everything on our to-do list deployed by the time our teammates return. Having a cartoonish style is to our advantage, because it means that no one has to make anything too complex, and we can therefore work faster.

Indian cultural object designs

As of right now, the starting environment has been entirely modeled, India entirely designed, and we are well on our way to having a fully deployed set of environments by Monday.

Modeling in progress

See You Next Week!

mschoell | mschoell@andrew.cmu.edu

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