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Over the break, we were moderately successful — we were able to get a decent amount of work done, but not to the extent that we predicted. That being said, we’re still on track to finish on time, even leaving room to re-render! We agreed on a new schedule for this term that breaks our 3 acts into 4-week animation sprints. By the end of Sprint 1 (Week 04 of this term), we will have completed all polished animation of the Interior Tower sequence (31 shots), sans shoggoth. We plan to have a finished animation by the first week of next quarter!
The first thing we we did over break was go through all the faculty feedback, then determine what we needed to revisit in our story, We tweaked the script and storyboards, addressed emotional points of the story that required more screen time, and re-edited our animatic.
Dave was able to model the clothes for Dyer and Danforth, and Val began painting their textures. Anthony nearly completed the face rigging for Danforth, which the animators approved of. Dyer’s face weights didn’t mirror correctly and caused several errors, so that’s going to take a bit longer. Anthony also attached VRayFur eyebrows to both characters, and they respond fluidly with the rigs.
Most of the shots were blocked in by the animators, and we are now switching to a 3D animatic. This will be updated weekly by Ethan to show constant animation and edit progress throughout the term. Pat worked on the Shoggoth model, and Josh optimized the city scatter in XGen (now it scatters different buildings of varying sizes, instead of just scaling cubes). Josh also talked to Jay and coordinated mounting digm_anfx on the render farm, finally solving most of our render issues (hopefully!!!).
Through Ethan’s connections, we also recruited an illustrator named Isaias, who will be helping with the intro motion graphics segment, ancient symbols, building designs, and various illustrations for this project. Ethan will be meeting with him on Monday to determine the scope of his involvement.
For more information on our schedule and tasks for this quarter, please refer to our Trello board!
AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS 