This was a successful week! We’ve officially rolled over into the animation stage, have worked out the kinks with camera layout and scene setup, and are on track with our characters, animatic and animation-necessary assets.

We met this week to go over layout concerns in person, tweaking our environments and designs to make everything ready for animation. We set up our file hierarchy and are populating our shots, referencing in environments and testing connections. We ran into some unforseen problems with the render farm this week — according to the farm, Maya (linux) is failing to load in both 2014 and 2015. I emailed Jeremy about this issue and hopefully we’ll get some feedback soon. The farm is going to be our biggest hurdle for completing this project on schedule, so at least it’s good that we figured out the problems this early.

This coming week, we will be in full animation mode. Our intended deliverables for next week include pop-through animation, a new animatic cut (with the new storyboards and placeholder audio), painted rig weights, hair and clothing tests, and some solution for the farm.