Week 02 Gantt Chart. Red indicates work done this week, yellow indicates work for next week. Click to view spreadsheet!

After a successful first week and draft pitch, we determined that our project pitch required some finesse. The main beats needed to be communicated to the faculty, and thus needed to be hammered out as a team. Because of this, one of our key topics this week was Story. Gabe brought up some concerns with the script last week, and this week the team met twice to adjust the pacing, tweak the script, and edit the animatic.

Look dev was also fleshed out this week, and Dave was assigned mood boards to convey our color scheme and style. Josh worked on roughing in the city layout and developing shaders. Anthony continued rigging Dyer and Danforth, and we worked with DIGM alumn Evan Boucher (currently at Dreamworks) to research methods of rigging the Shoggoth’s tentacles. Evan even provided us with a sample rig to break down.

Pat and Gabe worked on modeling assets and clothing, and Pat refined and retopologized the Shoggoth. Val painted textures for Dyer and Danforth, created a skin shader, and tested hair generation and styling with Xgen.

Overall, a pretty productive week! We now have lots of polished assets to populate our presentation, and we’ve refined our story based on feedback. We are now in the process of reformatting our presentation to put a better focus on the narrative structure of our project and demonstrate what we’ve done so far. Next week we will continue on these projects while the shot list is developed.