The concept art for the ship went through a series of changes throughout the week to make sure it is similar to the physical ship in the park. Since the animation is intended to be shown on the ship’s sails, we have to ensure our stylized ship is the most similar to the park’s representations in order to establish the connection between the animation and the park. There were challenges in maintaining the ship’s size and layout while fitting it into our story and its production needs.
The team has been working on the character models this week as well. Buttons is finished and is in the process of being rigged. A preliminary blocking of the animations for Buttons will shortly follow once the rigging is finished. Miss Merry and Clayton are still being modeled and are expected to be completed by the start of the following week.
We also did a series of tests on the renderfarm, preparing it for the production stage. Although we ran into some issues in file permissions at the start of the week, everything is now in working order. While the pipeline for Maya is completely functional, we are waiting for an approval to update the Nuke licenses for our compositing pipeline.
One of the major feedback from the faculty was about the scope. In order to address that issue, the story is currently being rewritten in hope for a shorter and more engaging story.
We will start working on a new version of the animatic once the story is locked down.