11-17-PPJ Valentina Feldman

Task #1: Shot list

Click to view full spreadsheet!

I spent most of my time early this week focusing on our shot list, and it is now finished! We have a total of 75 shots in our animation, 65 of which require character animation. This is a fairly huge task, of course, but I’m confident that we’ll be able to get it done. Gabe, Dave and Pat (our 3 character animators) divided the shots up between them, and we intend to be finished with blocking by the end of the term.

The spreadsheet I created is color-coded by scene location and contains fields for shot ID, shot type, storyboard thumbnail, camera movement, description, dialogue, shot owner, priority, notes, lip sync, character animation, and duration. The duration field will be updated with each new iteration of the animatic to ensure that we stay on-target and to inform shot priority.

Positive Stuff: Having the state of our production down in one place will make it much, much easier to prioritize and assign tasks in the future.
Problems / issues: I still need a time-tracking solution and a way to track progress on each shot. For now, Gabe is having the animators write out a schedule for themselves to ensure that the blocking is done this quarter, but we’ll probably need a more robust solution down the line.

Hours: 10

Task #2: Hair Workflow Testing

Summary: I spent a few hours playing around with hair this week after Jeremy Fernsler covered his process in class on Thursday. Although my hair tests were very ugly (hence no screenshots), I loooove this workflow.

Positive Stuff: We now know how we’re doing hair! This week I’ll be working on the hair for both Dyer and Danforth. I’m going to sculpt the hair in xgen, export the curves as a .mel file, use them to drive nHair, and render the hair in V-Ray.
Problems / issues: Render times are going to spike with the hair included, but I’m very happy that we found a way to use xgen’s grooming tools with vray so I’m okay with the hit.

Hours: 3

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: