Part of the challenge this week was organizing our next iteration. As the week started, we had new assets in the latest render, but not all the assets that had been created. It’s a matter of the staggered way in which our team produces these pieces of art and animation. Chen begins to render at the end of the previous week and some assets make it in, some have to wait for the next iteration. So we are in talks about how to list assets that have been delivered but not composited into the whole piece.

We also had to make a decision about what to concentrate on for Softs. Softs is the time when the faculty visits project rooms and expects to see near-finished products. We want to show them a “watchable” version of our short animation, which means we don’t want anything that pops out as unfinished that will take the viewer out of the story. So, we’re having to shelve some of our plans to make certain shots perfect in order to concentrate on making every shot on par with every other, favoring consistency over perfection. This means that some lighting elements won’t be finished for softs, some animations may need slight tweaking, and some backgrounds may not have as much detail as we’d like. But, the average viewer will hopefully not be distracted by these elements, but rather get swept up in the story.

Animation will be at a place this week in which the cloth and hair can now be rendered onto the main character, Ramesh. The last of the 2D and 3D art assets are being worked on, and a new audio track has been rendered which includes new vocals, new drum sounds, and equalization and compression to help the track sound great on a variety of sound systems.

We’ll be in a heavy crunch for the next couple of weeks.