For class Friday we had to update our animatic for our midterm. I compiled all of the current assets and backgrounds with the animations in Maya. This required a lot of creating planes and putting the layout texture on them and adjusting some of the shader's properties to make sure the image was showing how the painters intended. Then I playblasted out every single shot again and compiled the animation with the previs for shots that haven't been touched yet. Overall, I'm really happy with what I'm seeing! It's crazy to see things starting to fit together!! The biggest problems I see are the discrepancies between the paintings and 3D assets and the lack of animations. Compiling all of this together has helped me really realize where the gaps are and what needs to be worked on next.
These last two weeks have been incredibly busy with this thesis and internship stuff. The whole semester I have been working on school 40 - 50 hours a week and it still doesn't feel like it's enough time. This project has been an amazing learning experience but I would never recommend that someone do a 3D short by themselves haha.
Production:
- I asked my producer to email more animators to hopefully help out with my project. Hopefully I can get a few more.
- All of the layouts have now officially gone through at least one pass!
- Next I am going to ask Darlene to do a turn around of Ahmi's clothes so that my modeler can texture it.
- The staff has been finished!
- Russell gave me a first pass on Ahmi's hair and I did a drawover critique of it.
- I don't know if I mentioned it in an earlier post, but I have been doing biweekly critiques of my animator's work for about a month now. I usually spend about 20 minutes per critique so maybe 2.5 hours a week on critique.
- 3 shots have been completely finalized! and 4 other shots are very close to being finished!
- I had been working on the monster run cycle for a while now but I think I may have to start over from scratch. On two separate occasions two different industry professionals commented that it is the weakest thing on my reel so I need to rework it. One commented specifically that the timing felt too even. Then on top of it, I brought the monster and it's cycle into a scene for the thesis and it's feet were sliding way too much so I will need it's feet to move even faster.