Compositing is gearing up.

Over the last week the artists have been sending Chen different assets to begin rough compositing. The team discovered discrepancies in perspective and general feel of the test shot, but we’ve started to compensate by beginning the discussion of perspective and tone at an earlier stage, keeping Chen (our compositor) in the loop at every stage so he knows what’s going into the shot.

We’re also just about done with the modeling. Dorothy ran into some problems with the 2D art not translating into a 3D model skeletal structure, so the model of our lead character, Ramesh, had to be adjusted to accomodate. Dorothy also worked hard on getting a basic animation rig for the Bird Boss to Sai so he could move to the next step in his process of animating the moment when the Bird Bosses join as one.

Julia and Cewon have been smoothing out their workflow but discussing at length the items Cewon needs modeled in a shot to give her a template to draw from. They are both working very hard to accomplish our two test shots, but as they are the most complicated composites in the short, is makes sense that they are finding bumps along the way.

   Joel has finished a model of the creature, Frost, along with an extra model of the head that will portray the animal with its mouth open and teeth bared. Next week he will start with rigging Frost for animation. Joel, Paul and the rest of the team spent time on Friday going over every shot of the film in which Frost and the other creatures appear and discussed just what movement is needed from the creature.

Sai continues to clean up the motion capture data, transferring it from Maya to Soft Image, but for now, he has retargeted the data to Ramesh’s skeleton. We had originally planned for the face to be hand animated, but after experiencing the sophistication of the Main Campus motion capture system, we have decided to capture facial expressions as well. The problem is that we’ll need a face that is more “rounded” like that of Ramesh and therefore our other motion capture actor, Himanshu, will not do because of his slim build. So the director, Paul, is stepping in to act as the face model, his face being a little more “fleshed out”.