Goals for this week:

• Lock IAC, EAC, and IT shots

What happened: 

• Continued to work on animating and locking stuff. I had to take EAC pretty much back to the drawing board, so that took an inordinate amount of time. I fell behind a little on some of my other stuff but Gabe was able to grab a couple of smaller shots to make sure that it all got done. That guy is a machine, I swear. IAC and IT got locked (needs to be officially checked one last time, but it’s pretty much there), and EAC is really close. Hoping that crits tomorrow will give me the feedback I need to lock EAC in a few hours.

Next Week: 

• Lock the rest of my shots

Total Hours: 53

Goals for this week:

• Finish the animation (first pass final, of course)

What happened: 

• Worked pretty much non-stop animating, almost got everything done. By Tuesday morning when we present our progress for approval to the senior show I will have my last few shots finalized. IA050 will get a final review tomorrow before being polished one last time and “locked” as a render-ready shot, and animation will never be touched again.

Next Week: 

• “Lock” all of my IAC, EAC, and IT shots

Total Hours: 58

Goals for this week:

• Continue to refine animation

What happened: 

• Finally got to dive into some lip-syncing, as Josh was able to lighten up the rigs for me a bit., as well as continue to refine animation. Nothing too exciting to report!

Next Week: 

• Finish all animation!

Total Hours: 17

Goals for this week:

• Continue to refine animation

What happened: 

• Not a lot of time to work this week between FJORG and some medical issues. Will have to hit the grind pretty hard next week. Kind of becoming a mantra, huh? That’s not good. My goal this upcoming week is focus on bringing individual shots to a state of polish. Bouncing around between shots to ensure everything is moving forward has made it hard for me to get into a groove with things, I think.

Next Week: 

• Continue to refine animation

Total Hours: 10

Goals for this week:

• Finish refinement of my sprint two shot
• Add the tentacle to the appropriate sprint one shots

What happened: 

• After spending a few hours Monday and Tuesday running in circles around the never open print center (we now know about the online print submission, heh) I unexpectedly had to spend my entire Wednesday at URBN scrambling to get our wall display up. It started at the meeting, redesigning the display to accommodate for renders that we didn’t think would be done on time. Josh came in and helped for a large portion of it, as did Val, Ethan, and Pat while they could in the morning. Eventually I got everything printed and hung, but losing the entire day caused a domino effect of delays for me. (11 hours total)
• I worked on cleaning up animation, with a particular emphasis on the trailer shots. I added the tentacle into IT310, and finished the animation for all of my cave shots. The trench shots are almost done, while my only airplane shot still needs some love. (14 hours)

Next Week: 

• Keep refining animation (both sprints)

Total Hours: 25

Goals for this week:

• Block in the shots for sprint three (all interior and exterior camp shots)
• Get any illustrations to Josh and Ethan that they need for the URBN displays
• Use any extra time to keep refining sprint two

What happened: 

• Spent a bunch of time working on blocking in the new tent scene. Not quite done but almost there, I think I can get done by our meeting on Wednesday. I keep having problems with the rigs making my machine chug, so I’ve had to revert to older versions of the rig (thankfully Gabe still had them lying around). Hopefully things will go a little smoother without fighting performance issues. (17 hours)
• I worked with Josh a bunch to prepare an illustration of the characters for our movie poster that will go up on the wall. I posed them in 3D, and then using that created a vector piece of the two of them to be composited on top of the rest of the poster. I haven’t used Illsutrator in a long time, so it took me far longer than i think it should have. Really happy with how the characters turned out, though, and I can’t wait to see how Josh and Ethan integrate them into the rest of the poster. I’ve also uploaded hi-res versions of some of our mood-boards and concept art, so we can print them in the morning. (6 hours)

• Ran short on time this week, so I didn’t end up getting any more refinement done one sprint two, but that’s alright since this week’s focus was the wall display and blocking sprint three. (0 hours)

Next Week: 

• Finish refinement of my sprint two shots
• Add the tentacle to the appropriate sprint one shots

Total Hours: 23

Goals for this week:

• Film reference for the re-worked camp scenes
• Block in the shots for sprint three (all interior and exterior camp shots)
• Get any illustrations to Josh and Ethan that they need for the URBN displays

What happened: 

• Gabe and I got the reference that we needed for the new camp scenes, filmed and curated. No issues came up, although we’re crossing our fingers that it all works well with the layout. (3 hours)
• I didn’t get to blocking in any shots for sprint three, as we were waiting for the layout to begin. That should be done any time now, though, so I’ll be able to move forward on that. Because we couldn’t work on the blocking, I spent some time refining sprint two’s shots. (7 hours)
• Didn’t get anything to Josh and Ethan yet, but I intend to take care of that tomorrow. Waiting to hear from them what they require and then I’ll crank out any pieces and gather any old concepts they need. (0 hours)

Next Week: 

• Block in the shots for sprint three (all interior and exterior camp shots)
• Get any illustrations to Josh and Ethan that they need for the URBN displays
• Use any extra time to keep refining sprint two

Hours: 10

Goals for this week:

Block in the animation for every shot of sprint two (IAC 30 – 50, IA 50, EAC 10 – 40, EAC 60).

What got done: 

• Finished the blocking for every shot! Some things will undoubtedly need to be refined and moved around within the shots as I receive feedback and move forward with the animation, but I’m on track! 😀

Next Week: 

• Film reference for the re-worked camp scenes
• Block in the shots for sprint three (all interior and exterior camp shots)
• Get any illustrations to Josh and Ethan that they need for the URBN displays

Hours: 16

Tasks for the week: Complete animation for the interior temple sprint.

What got done this week:

Animation for the interior temple sprint was finished (excluding the shoggoth, still waiting on the rig). It was mostly a matter of refining shots this week, thank goodness. The plan is to revisit these shots whenever we have time down the road, but they’re complete enough to render as is. Shots completed were IT050, IT130, IT140/150, IT310, and IT320.

• Positives: Everything go tdone adn uplaoding through VPN for rendering!
• Negatives: There will always be things that I need to polish, and things that I want to polish. Hopefully I can get back to these.
• Hours: 23

Next week:
1. Rough blocking of all of my sprint 2 shots

Another solid week of a lot of animating and not too much else. Everything is fairly smooth sailing.

Animation

• Summary: Spent a lot more time animating. A few more shots need just a little more polish before the end of the sprint, but we can do it. Gabe and Pat and I also spent a few hours together doing a deep critique of each others’ work. I wish we’d done it sooner, as we got great stuff and unfortunately some of it required some rather involved changes.
• Positives: Looks great, almost done!
• Negatives: Exhausted!
• Hours: 25

Clothing Meeting

• Summary: We all got together and went over our options with clothing. Anthony was able to demonstrate pretty much right in front of us the power of Marvelous Designer, and easily convinced us that was the route to take.
• Positives: Solid plan for clothes in place, using a fast and iterative system
• Negatives: Means going backwards before going forwards
• Hours: 1.5

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Finish interior tower shots
2. Help Anthony/Val finish up the costumes as needed
3. Begin Sprint 2 animation!

Good, solid week of animating. Was able to take some feedback from Nick and the team regarding some of the acting decisions in two of my shots, and they’re looking sweet! Also met with Ethan, Pat, and Val to hash out the minutiae of shot timing and some editing things.

Animation

• Summary: Animated a lot. Got two scenes through splining (the two most acting heavy) including one whole round of revisions, and got tight blocking on the other shots. I’m currently working on the facial animation.
• Positives: Everything’s going well and the new facial rigs are awesome!
• Negatives: OH MY GOSH TIME CRUNCH (but I’m confident we’re fine)
• Hours: 28

Editing Meeting

• Summary: Figured out some editing things with Ethan, Pat, and Val regarding the the timing of specific shots, so we now have our shot lengths locked down permanently! With this comes locked down audio tracks for lip-syncing, so yay! Also tweaked the storyboards to reflect some edits.
• Positives: Animatic looked nice and I think Nick liked everything!
• Negatives: Nah
• Hours: 1.5

Had a crazy productive week! Managed to work a lot, and I think with a little better time management I can get even more done this upcoming week! really excited by the progress we’re making.

Storyboards

• Summary: Created storyboards for the reworked exterior of Lake’s camp, and additionally adjusted the interior tent scene. Gabe helped brainstorm how to make everything work without increasing our animation load and together we worked out ways to actually SAVE on time and animation.
• Positives: Turned out really well, and the whole team is on board with essentially no disagreements!
• Negatives: Was frustrating to put a hold on animation for a while and felt like we were going backwards, but it’ll serve the piece much better now.
• Hours: 7

Animation

• Summary: Worked more on the tower shots, was able to get a lot of blocking done. I’m hoping to finalize blocking on most of the shots in the next few days and begin splining.
• Positives: Everything’s looking great!
• Negatives: Wish I had been more on my game before, I’d love to be splining by now, but I think I can be there in a day or two.
• Hours: 23

Reference Work

• Summary: We had to compile all of our reference for Ethan to put together in a live-action cut of our short, so that required sorting through lots of footage and filming some additional footage as well. I spliced together all of my reference for each shot (sometimes I used different parts of multiple takes) and synced them up with my pop-throughs for easy reference. Spent one hour filming new stuff, about 3 hours editing it all and matching it with audio.
• Positives: My references are much more organized!
• Negatives: Took time away from animating
• Hours: 4

Miscellaneous

• Summary: Had a meeting to discuss the storyboards and other issues that have come up in production. Agreed on boards, some changes to be made.
• Positives: Cleared up some issues and are moving ahead together more organized than before
• Negatives: None
• Hours: 2

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Animate interior tower shots
2. Work with Val/Anthony/Whoever on costumes

Break Summary: Didn’t spend nearly as much time as anticipated on the project over break, but I was able to continue blocking in some more animation. Not much to report on, really. I also worked on grabbing the audio and working into the animation that I had, but ran into some difficulties there that Ethan has since helped me sort out.

Clothing Models

• Summary: Finished the boots for the characters, which meant more research, design-work, modeling and UV-ing. Unfortunately, this was one of those things that we hadn’t thought through, figuring “boots are boots.” Turns out, boots form the period are quite different than snow boots today, and required quite a bit more design than sticking the characters in UGGs and calling it done. After this was all done, the pants needed to be modified to fit the boots and each individual character.
• Positives: Really like how the meshes turned out, and they should make for some easy sims
• Negatives: Took far longer than anticipated, and some of the UV work is a little distorted. Hopefully Val can make it work with her texture wizardry
• Hours: 8

Animation

• Summary: Worked on bringing the interior tower shots to a more polished stage. We’re hoping to have this entire scene done in a few weeks (animation-wise) so we’re really cranking hard on it. Because of the unexpected time spent on the clothing and the general lack of productivity due to being back from break this week, I wasn’t able to get much done but I fully expect that to change this upcoming week.
• Positives: It’s moving along nicely
• Negatives: Didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted to, also spent too much time moving files to my desktop computer (from my laptop that I was using over break)
• Hours: 5

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Animate interior tower shots
2. Storyboard Lake’s Camp Scene
3. Design hieroglyphics

Not a whole lot to report this week, just continuing to pump out some more shots that need to be blocked.

Animating

• Summary: Got some more shots blocked
• Positive Stuff: Continuing to move forward
• Problems / issues: Not nearly as much work got done over break as I would have liked, but I managed to crank another 5 shots
• Hours: 8.5

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Continue blocking, hopefully will have every shot done by the end of the week

Did some more animating and finalized the clothes. I’m no longer worried about the rigs, as Anthony and Gabe appear to have solved every problem.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary:Finished modeling and UVing the clothes, including the sim meshes
• Positive Stuff: Everything went smoothly
• Problems / issues: Nada
• Hours: 6

Animating

• Summary: Got two more shots blocked in
• Positive Stuff: Stuff is going pretty quickly, so I think I can get ahead of the game over break
• Problems / issues: Wasn’t able to spend too much time on things this week with three papers due for other classes, so I’m a little behind.
• Hours: 6

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Animation
2. Animation
3. Animation

Finally animating whooooooooooo! Also finished up some clothes stuff.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary: Finished Danforth’s jacket and pants, just need to UV them and get them off to Val.
• Positive Stuff: Should still be easy to Dyer, got the jacket and pants modeled
• Problems / issues: The jacket is accurate and should sim well, but I’ms till not quite sold on the design. Want to pitch another option to the team next time we meet.
• Hours: 9

Animating (Whoooooooo!)

• Summary: Actually started animating! Got two shots blocked in and am working on two more.
• Positive Stuff: Actually moving forward with things, and we’ve got a plan to get everything blocked by break
• Problems / issues: Some slight rigging issues as we move from the proxy rig to the smooth-bind rig, but Anthony and Gabe are hard at work sorting them out.
• Hours: 8.5

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. UV clothing
2. Block more animation
3. Hair sculpts?

Real excited to start animating, but unfortunately did not get to it this week as planned. 😦 Other classes and life continue to get in the way of actually moving forward, but we’re inching our way there.

Modeling Clothing

• Summary: Blocked in Danforth’s clothes and have started getting more details in.
• Positive Stuff: Blocked in pretty well, should be easy to adapt for Dyer when I’m finished.
• Problems / issues: Some difficulties getting the proportions/edge-flow right to communicate the seams, but I think I worked it out. Am worried the clothes are going to look to baggy and undesigned, but we can adjust later if needed.
• Hours: 3

Shooting Reference

• Summary: Met up with Gabe and Pat at the URBN center to film preliminary reference for our shots… again.
• Positive Stuff: Worked out some more problems we didn’t know about, ready to use it to animate! Also had a friend there who was able to act WAY better than we all were!
• Problems / issues: Same as last week: some unexpected issues with converting the boards to 3D, again some pretty awful acting.
• Hours: 4.5 (Despite what Pat apparently thinks)

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Finish clothing
2. Finish hair
3. Block the animation

Not nearly as busy this week. I finished up the new storyboards, ran some more nCloth tests, and started shooting reference with Gabe and Pat.

Storyboards

• Summary: Thumbnailed the final scenes and finished drawing out the boards!
• Positive Stuff: Hopefully done, definitely enough to move forward with.
• Problems / issues: Had some difficulties reworking some of the old scenes that I’d grown attached to, but that’s how you know you’re making the right decisions, right?
• Hours: 5

Additional nCloth Tests

• Summary: This week I revisited the walk cycle with a couple more tests. First, I actually modeled pants with a pocket to see how they’d work using a wrap deformer on the simmed cloth. I also bound the input mesh to the leg rig and spent more time working with the material settings.
• Positive Stuff: Got a cloth that seems like a nice, thick leather/insulated snow-pant type material, the pocket moved and deformed with the mesh perfectly, and binding the input mesh to the leg solved whole worlds of problems I was having last week.
• Problems / issues: Binding the leg to the mesh was a slightly difficult process, which is kind of dependent on the rig. It’s always possible, but might be more complex from rig to rig. Additionally,   geometry and poly-flow might become much more important.
• Hours: 4

Shooting Reference

• Summary: Met up with Gabe and Pat at the URBN center to start filming preliminary reference for our shots.
• Positive Stuff: Got a much better sense of timing for most of the scenes, solved some space issues that weren’t apparent in the storyboards.
• Problems / issues: Some of the storyboards are great 2D compositions but didn’t quite allow for all; the movement we needed in 3D. Additionally, the three of us are not great actors, so there’s some pretty cheesy performances.
• Hours: 4

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Sculpt hair
2. Model clothing
3. Block the animation

This has been one heck of a week! We locked down our script, made tremendous headway on our storyboards, and the plan is to be animating by Wednesday! I spent a total of 25 hours this week, a lot of it in meetings but the majority of it spent on storyboards. Next week will be focused on beginning the animation and finishing a couple of assets.

Script Meeting

• Summary: Met with the entire team (except Anthony) and went through the script line by line until we all agreed on the best way to tackle everything, and decided that this was the final script (discounting some possible cosmetic changes).
• Positive Stuff: The script is done! This means that we can roll on storyboards and begin principle animation by Wednesday!
• Problems / issues: NOTHING! LIFE IS PERFECT!
• Hours: 3

Storyboard Meeting

• Summary: Met with Val and Gabe, and together we thumbnailed the entire script’s storyboards and solved all sorts of cinematic problems. Gabe and Val agreed to add value to the boards for me, allowing me to crank them out faster.
• Positive Stuff: We had a pretty unified vision, so we seem to all be on the same page moving forward, have a clear outline for how the shots should look
• Problems / issues: Not many other than the amount of work that was still to be done after the meeting.
• Hours: 2

nCloth Tests

• Summary: Anthony asked everyone who was taking Adv. Animation to use the nCloth assignment as a test for clothing, so I animated a pair of legs walking and simmed nCloth pants.
• Positive Stuff: nCloth certainly seems fairly powerful and straightforward to use, I was able to get it fairly operational
• Problems / issues: It’s going to take some practice to accurately sim the proper material, I need to figure out how to have more control over the sim (Jeremy had some great feedback to that end). I’m going to be doing another one this week trying some new things to deal with these issues.
• Hours: 4

Storyboards

• Summary: Started cranking out linework for the storyboards and then passing them on to Gabe for a value treatment
• Positive Stuff: Got a LOT done, some are of pretty good quality, those that aren’t are at least very clear
• Problems / issues: Still more to do. Gonna be a busy week.
• Hours: 16

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Finish storyboards
2. nCloth tests
3. Begin blocking the animation
4. Sculpt hair

This week, I didn’t have a whole lot of time on things so I didn’t accomplish a whole lot. I hoped to get the hair sculpts finished up to toss over to Val, but those will have to get done this upcoming week. Additionally, once we can lock down this script (meeting on Monday, cross your fingers!), I’m going to be living on the Cintiq in the lab to get the entire thing re-boarded.

Hair Sculpts

• Summary: Worked on sculpting hair for the characters to use as guides for tube grooming our planned X-Gen hair.
• Positive Stuff: Very quickly got comfortable with ZBrush, general sculpting is going smoothly.
• Problems / issues: As quickly as I got off the ground, still was too much of a learning curve. Not finished (but going smoothly).
• Hours: 5

Script Revision

• Summary: I wasn’t able to make it to our group meeting on the scripts, but I wasn’t terribly pleased with the revisions so I made my own treatment.
• Positive Stuff: I’m very pleased with the new treatment (pretty obviously). Think it balances some of the good things that came out of the meeting I missed while maintaining the brevity and intentions of the prior version.
• Problems / issues: We need to lock this down and we need to do it now.
• Hours: 4

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Finish sculpting characters’ hair
2. Rework storyboards

This week, my focus was on helping fix the story problems Gabe identified last week and on painting mood boards to take an initial look at the colors and atmospheres of our shots. Didn’t get to the storyboard revisions yet, although Gabe will be helping me finish those up so we can get them done quickly.

Mood Boards

• Summary: Painted key shots and scenes from the story to better illustrate atmosphere and communicate our story beats for our upcoming pitch
• Positive Stuff: Worked out some problems previously unknown involving the initial cave scene, and overall got a better sense of what we’ll need to do color-wise.
• Problems / issues: I’m concerned that there’s too much grey and white, so that will require revisiting (likely with Josh) to see what we can do to introduce some more color into the Antarctic wasteland.
• Hours: ~8

Script Revision

• Summary: Met with Gabe, Ethan, and Pat to go over our proposed changes in the script. After talking about the value of the narration and deciding to cut it, we discussed ways to make the ending work without it, ways to shorten the dialogue throughout the film, and ways to clarify problem areas of the script.
• Positive Stuff: Was a very efficient meeting, trimmed a lot of fat from the script and problem solved a lot of issues.
• Problems / issues: Still haven’t finalized our script, I believe we have two different versions we will be showing to some film faculty (could be wrong about this). I think we really need to lock down what we are doing for now (no script survives contact with the faculty, I know).
• Hours: 2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Revise shot list w/Ethan and Gabe
2. Storyboard Revisions
3. Hair Sculpting