Our main tasks on week 5:
- Start designing concepts for the character set and building it
- Add new features and refine the camera system
- Integrate the Mo-cap system and camera system to get footage from the Butch Cassidy scene
- And… Siggraph submission!!
CHARACTER DESIGN
This week, we started work on the design concepts for our characters. Our goal is to focus on key visual storytelling elements and design a set of characters that can embody a wide variety of roles and use what we call “Detail Elements” to differentiate these characters, so that the creation of character for each story can be both efficient and effective.
After discussions, our idea is to use a rig and single mesh, along with multiple blendshapes to fit 4 categories we’ve devised: Strong, normal, fat and short. We will also use blendshapes to make sure our mesh can work as both a male and female model. In addition to this, we’re working out how to implement the detail elements as part of the character customizer. Shera will work on the initial design and color schemes for the characters while Arnav works on sculpting the base mesh. Varun will work on setting up blendshapes after the design concepts are approved.
Reference: Animation Mentor 
Our first character experiment by Arnav
NEW FEATURES FOR CAMERA SYSTEM
To refine our camera system, we listed the camera movements in filmmaking that we might need:
- (Camera Position changes:)
- Dolly (Stable camera movement, only in tracks that’s already been set, horizontally)
- handheld (more instability and camera shake)
- Steadicam (Stable and flexible)
- crane (be able to vertically but stably)
- drone
- (Camera position doesn’t change:)
- Panning / tilting
- Zooming In / Out
- Focus racking
After prioritizing them, we decided to implement dollying feature since it is one of the most important approaches to convey a dynamic sense of space in filmmaking. Kevin quickly finished a prototype of dollying feature:
To help the user navigate freely to block out scenes from different elevations, we also implemented a new vertically navigating feature:
When trying to acquire footages with the Butch Cassidy assets we’ve already built, there are some design problems we need to solve:
- All the interactive features we have currently are not organized in a used-friendly way — we used too much different buttons for input and it could be confusing.
- Using touchpad for both dollying and focal length controlling can cause some unintended activation of one of the functions.
- When should the animation of the character be imported, and how?
- The vertical navigation can bring motion sickness.
- The dollying feature now is storing the parameters of starting frame and ending frame, and moving the camera linearly between them. Does the key-frame mode make better sense, or do we need a more natural interaction for filmmakers?
WHAT ELSE?
By Tuesday, we finished the abstract with a clear definition of our problems and solutions, created a presentation video for our project, and submitted to the Immersive Pavilion program in SIGGRAPH 2020!
The video is on the landing page of this website now. Feel free to have a watch and get know more about what we are doing! : )
Meanwhile, as a discovery project, we never stop reaching out to people in industry and discuss about their opinions. This Friday, we set up a meeting with a professional Japanese DP Kento Mochida (who currently works in China) and learned about what he focuses on and what’s useful to him in pre-production.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Next week, while keeping on developing our pipeline, we will start a new previz practice with another script chosed by advisors — Moonrise Kingdom!
Hi there, Wes Anderson!!