This week was in large dedicated to our halves presentation.
We had an awful lot to cover as our six-person team has taken on multiple roles in order to produce our animation. Some members have as many as four separate tasks assigned to them. We could talk for hours about all the things we’ve learned over the past couple of months. So, what to leave out?
One of the things we decided to forgo was sound. The soundscape was largely done during the first semester of our project so there seemed little reason to give it time in the presentation. We also didn’t want to show the complete 4 minute film because that would also take up too much time. We ended up using two video clips that illustrated our process, then each member of the team explained a part of the process to our faculty/student audience.
We covered things like 3D layout, art, animation, motion capture, modeling, and lighting. This is a long list of things in which we could dive very deep, but we kept it simple and maybe even sped up a little too much to make sure we came under the 15 minute deadline.
We eventually received an A- for presentation and a B+ for our project grade. That’s not bad. The faculty gave feedback and it was mostly positive, but there was some confusion about our iterative process and they were concerned as to whether or not we would be finished with the animation by the end of the term. Technically, because we’re working in iterative passes, it’s already done, just not polished.
Our progression this week consisted of Joel turning in his rough animation, our discussion on the merits of ambient lighting were settled in favor of using it even though it greatly increases render time, Sai has finished the rough bird animation, Paul has recorded a classical Indian singer to add to the soundtrack, Dorothy has a rough pass of facial animation and Cewon is off to Korea.
We’re a little behind on the animation, but, the team had a big discussion about timeline and we think we can very comfortably push our deadlines back a week.