We have been working on our pipeline to make our animation implementation as seamless as possible. If we can discover any setbacks or kinks in our process now, we can start troubleshooting any issues that may arise. We are working on how best to translate the emotions and character of Tom into our animatronic with as much fidelity, with the least amount of working hours.
Our current solution is to use animation generated in Maya to import into our show control and then adjust from there. We want to make as few adjustments to the generated key frames as possible to expedite our process. This especially become important in regards to the mouth and making Tom’s speech as life-like as possible to sell the illusion and therefore create a heightened immersive experience.
Once we know how long a timed amount of dialogue takes to animate and then program into the animatronic, we can start making educated estimates of how long the pipeline will take in the future. This becomes critical in determining our scope for how much story content we can realistically provide in scope.