Task #1: Renderfarm Troubleshooting 

Summary: We ran into an unforseen problem this week with the render farm. At first I started by trying to get Josh’s symlinks running through the farm, but it quickly became apparent that nothing at all was rendering and that Maya was failing to even initiate on the farm machines. Apparently it hasn’t been working at all for the past few weeks (according to Ross and Ian of www.coffeebotonline.com/), so I emailed Jeremy and asked for his help. He’ll be looking into it, as this is something that is imperative to the success of our project. I will also be bringing these concerns up at our Tuesday meeting with Michael.

• Positive Stuff: Well, at least we found out the problem now…
• Problems / issues: Everything :(Hours: 3

Task #2: Mocap Reference Recording

Summary: I worked with Ethan and Connor today to record video reference of Ethan’s motion capture session. I was able to recreate the camera angles in our storyboards and get great reference for both facial and body expressions.

• Positive Stuff:  These shots will definitely help the animators lock into Connor’s performance. Ideally it would have been cool to use the virtual camera to record the mocap with the same camera angles, but the animators have expressed that they’d rather work with video anyway so this works well.
• Problems / issues: It took much longer than I had expected — I wanted to have my shot list done by today, but I got tied up with the recording Ethan. Luckily the shot list is well underway and I forsee no problems getting it done tomorrow during my lunch break at work.

Hours: 7

Task #3: Shot List

Summary: I began to set up a master shot list to match our storyboards

• Positive Stuff:  These shots will definitely help the animators lock into Connor’s performance. Ideally it would have been cool to use the virtual camera to record the mocap with the same camera angles, but the animators have expressed that they’d rather work with video anyway so this works well.
• Problems / issues: I didn’t have as much time to work on this than I thought I would, due to the mocap reference taking so long. It will be done tomorrow though! I need the finished animatic to finish populating the Shot Durations anyway, so this wasn’t too much of a setback.

Hours: 2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Hair (going over in Jeremy’s class!)
2. Get Renderfarm Working (?)
3. Texture Dave’s clothes!