We are just about ready to do our first render of the entire short film. This will not by any means be a polished product, but it is the first in several iterations that will lead up towards an animation we can show to the public.
We decided over this week that there is a lot of work for this team to accomplish in a short amount of time, and it was suggested to us that we may want to make plans on things we can cut if we absolutely have to. But, as the last semester team discovered, the shots and timing that comprise our current animatic are the bare minimum needed to tell this story, so we are unable to simply cut things out that don’t get finished. Rather, we will make complete renderings of the whole piece, working in stages. By approaching our project in this way, we will ensure that the audience will always be able to enjoy the story in its entirety even if our assets aren’t as polished as we would like.
Our art pipeline is moving along nicely with most models complete or near completion due to the work of our two talented modelers, Joel and Dorothy. Most of the models have also been textured by Cewon and Chen is moving forward with putting these elements together.
Sai has made the call to recapture some of our mocap data on the Vicon system on the main campus. There was a problem translating the 2012 version data from organic motion to Maya. Sai could go over the data and smooth it out, but that would take longer than simply going to the main campus system and recapturing the motion data. We’ve already done the facial capture on the Vicon system as well as a few hard-to-get shots for full body so we are confident that pipeline will work for us. Below is video clip from our motion capture session on main campus.
Julia completed her 3D mockup of the world and so She, Paul and Chen set to locking down the camera angles this week. Now Cewon has something to use as an art reference and our animators, Sai and Joel, will be able to see just what needs animating in the shot. Chen will also be using Julia’s screen captures of the world to help place art assets withing each shot.
Next week will see our first rendering of the project which will also give us a better understanding of how to go about our six iterations.