This week I started placing our cameras according to the latest storyboards, and also worked on making an nCloth tent that can be used in Lake’s camp.

Camera Layout

• Summary: I started placing stand-in props and static cameras in our 3D scenes to match the latest storyboards, so that we can begin our pop-through animation.  Even though these cameras will all be replaced down the line, they serve as a guideline for where our actors need to be, roughly what will be in frame, etc.
• Positives: Recreating our storyboards in 3D helped iron out some weird framing issues and highlight where we may need another shot or two to convey what’s going on in a scene.
• Negatives: After all our script revisions our storyboards are scattered all over the place, and it’s unclear which are the most up-to-date.  Because of this, I was only able to work on cameras for two scenes.  Luckily, this will be a non-issue once we round up all the latest boards!
• Hours: 3

Tent Sim

• Summary: This tent is several cloth sims combined together, and could serve as the basis for the tents around Lake’s camp.  Because of the way it is set up, any part of the tent that doesn’t interact with our characters can be simmed and saved out ahead of time, so that only the flaps, for example, have to be re-simmed after animating.
• Positives: It’s a surprisingly stable and fast sim, considering all the interacting pieces of cloth.  It should be easy to continue adding on to.
• Negatives: It’s not fast enough to sim in real-time, so when animating with it we’ll have to make adjustments, bake the sim, and see how it looks.
• Hours: 5

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Complete camera layout, set up files on a shot-by-shot basis to begin animating

This week has mainly consisted with me working on the book. It needs to be nearly perfect, as it is the key prop seen in many shots. If I can’t get the master rig finished by next week, I’ll split it up into several simpler rigs that should help us achieve everything we need

Lake’s Journal

Summary:  The pages rig has been revisited, but all previous functionality is still there. The book now has a cover and the bulk area of pages finished, and can be open and closed. The page bundles maintain volume and deform properly. The pages have been the most challenging. I believe I almost have a fully working rig that will allow the page to bend and be pulled by the corners, but also sit on the surface, open when the book does, and not clip with each other.

Pro:  The book body is fully functional, and could most likely be used without the separate pages in many of the shots.

Con: The pages still need more work, as only one is mostly rigged, although it’s nearly finished.

Hours: 7

Filming Reference

Summary: Dave, Gabe, and I got together to film animation reference for several scenes, as we are going to start animating next week. We finished the cave intro scene, the tent interior, the plane flight to the city, and the walk through the shoggoth trench. These references should be good for body animations, but we will be recording the voice actors during their performance so we can capture their performance.

Pros: We filmed several scenes and are just about ready to start animating.

Cons: We still need to get the footage ready for animation, and there are several scenes left to film.

Hours: 4

Moving forward

1. Finish Lake’s journal with fully functional rig

2. Film the rest of the reference

3. Begin Animating

This week was very successful overall! We are officially in a place where we can begin animating this week. We went through our script line-by-line, ironed out all the problems, and finally came to a group consensus. We are very happy with our final script, and are almost done with the new storyboards!

This week we also finished up the rest of layout, created a milestones list of everything we wish to present at our end-of-fall presentation, and tested out nCloth simulation techniques for our characters’ clothing. We checked a few models off the asset list (Elder thing, Lake’s notebook, and Lake’s backpack). Finally, Anthony finished up the character rigs with proxy geometry, so the animators can begin blocking in shots for the popthrough. There is still a bit more work to be done before he moves onto facial rigging, but this will allow for us to move forward with full body functionality and reference in any updates.

Looking forward to next weeks post! We’re all excited to finally begin animation.

As others in my team have already posted, the major milestone of this week was settling on a story that we were all completely happy with. In addition to the “mother of all script meetings,” I worked on Project management-y things, shading and textures for our characters, and storyboard thumbnails.

Task #1: Project management-y things 

Summary: At our last meeting, Nick expressed an interest in some sort of updated milestone tracking system through the end of this term.This coupled with my observation that our Kanban cards weren’t being significantly utilized prompted me to update our Trello board. I have created cards for every milestone we want to finish by the end of this term, and lists for every week / deadline remaining until our end of Fall presentation. The free space around weeks 8 and 9 will serve as a buffer for everybody to complete their tasks. I also created a task list with our total milestones for this term.

In addition to Trello stuff, I also worked on researching asset management techniques. This will be a major topic to cover at this Wednesday’s weekly, since Animation will be beginning this week and layout is dependant on a solid file hierarchy. On one hand, having a large project will guarantee that every scene is referencing the same files, without needing to duplicate updates into separate sub-projects or break the local references by linking outside a project. I want to minimize the chances of human error, and this seems like the best way to ensure that everything is always consistent.

• Positive Stuff: I think this new Trello paradigm will allow for everybody to simultaneously get a clear view of what they need to work on (and how long they have left to do it), while still having the freedom to budget their time themselves. As for asset management, that remains to be determined on Wednesday.
• Problems / issues: I kind of wish I had integrated this earlier — at this point in the process, spending time on project management issues almost seems like a waste. I feel like this solution will be an effective one to settle on, though. Nick suggested another Gantt chart, but I honestly don’t like how long it takes me to update my existing one, and Trello’s ease of use is much more appealing.

  Hours: 4

Task #3: The Mother of All Script Meetings & Storyboard Thumbnailing

Summary: As others have already noted, this week we had a 3.5-hour meeting during which we went through our script line-by-line and came to a final agreement. Although we are still awaiting feedback from our screenwriting contact, I’d like to stress that FINAL agreement more or less means final at this point. We took all of his advice and revisited the areas that he had problems with, so unless he has some glaring issues with this new version we will be pushing forward with animation.

I also met with Gabe and Dave this week and helped a bit with storyboard thumbnailing. Or, well, I helped with acting out the shots and suggesting a few cinematography things. They actually did the thumbnailing part.

• Positive Stuff:  WE HAVE REACHED CONSENSUS!
• Problems / issues: Better late than never, right? 😀

  Hours: 5

Task #4: Shading & Texturing Characters

Summary: Continued working on Dyer and Danforth’s textures this week. They aren’t completely finished at this point, but because the deadlines for our weekly deliverables are on Wednesday I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it.

• Positive Stuff:  On track to finish this week!
• Problems / issues: This task has been a valuable exercise in personal scope management. I had originally intended on banging this out in a week, but three weeks later I’m still coming back to it and leaving it partially unfinished. These textures WILL be done by our weekly meeting this week, come hell or high water.

  Hours: 4

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:

1. Finish D&D’s textures and render out turntables
2. Help add value to storyboards
3. Set up project hierarchy and asset management system
4. Place cameras in scenes; label accordingly in preperation for animation

We did it! We finally nailed down the script after another large meeting. This is great news and it means that  I can finally dig my teeth into the animatic again, especially now that storyboards are rolling out This next week is going to be a busy one in terms of redoing the animatic and recording audio treatments with Gabe. I spent most of my time working on the script and talking to the actors. I’ve been going over the script revisions and motivation changes with the actors and with this next audio treatment I’ll be able to iron out the performance before we meet.

Script Revisions

• Summary- Worked with Val to write another draft of script, met with group to iron out dialogue and finalize lines.
• Pros- Script is locked down, now the real work can begin
• Cons- I‘m going to have to re-record the audio, which I’m actually looking forward to

Hours Spent – 5

Coordinating Actors

• Summary – Skyped and met with actors, discussed next round of revisions and character adjustments
• Pros- Actors understand new motivations and will have time to prepare new performances.
• Cons- I’m slightly worried that some actors may have trouble adjusting their performances, but at the same time they’re both capable performers and I’m comfortable in the director’s seat.

Hours Spent- 2

Total Hours Spent- 7

Next Week

• Discuss audio with Gabe, record treatment
• Recut Animatic
• Implement Audio
• Begin blocking in more detailed layout with cameras
• Finalize recording date

Note- I had an off week as I was hit with a nasty stomach bug on tuesday that ran throughout the week and knocked me out of combination. That in combination with my current primary focus (the animatic) suffering from the script chokehold has brought down my numbers this week. I plan on spending a great deal more time next week and will have a first rough cut of the animatic with as many storyboards are completed  by the end of the week and thumbnails of the rest including a rough audio treatment.

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 worked on *drumroll* laying out our city environments!

City Scenes Rough-in

• Summary: The city scenes are all layed out and ready for animation – that’s the temple, exterior ancient city, and mountain pass scenes – as well as the intro cave scene.  With our script finalized (finally!) and new storyboards pouring in we’re in great shape to start laying out our shots and begining our pop-through animation!
• Positives: See above; but really, everything’s starting to solidify and we’re about to really start moving forward on this thing.
• Negatives: Nada esta semana
• Hours: 4

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Do some cleanup and organization on environment files to make them easier to work with
2. Lay out cameras and recreate storyboards in 3D

This week I worked a lot with the team on our script (I know, I want to finish it too), storyboards, nCloth testing, and finishing the Elder Thing model.

Script

Summary:  We now have a ‘final’ draft!  We sat down as a team and went line by line until we compiled a script that everyone is happy with.  We had a lot of bouncing ideas off each other, making personal compromises in terms of certain dialogue choices, and overall creating the best version of our script to date.  At this point we can move forward onto storyboards, scene blocking, and getting started on blocking out our animation.  No more drastic changes will need to be made from here.

Pros: Our script is awesome and we are all super proud of it.

Cons: We need to re-record our voice actors

Hours: 3

Storyboards

Summary: Now that we have finally completed our ‘final’ draft of our script, Dave, val, and I sat down and blocked out all the changes we made to the story so we can update our storyboards.  Dave has taken the lead on inking in all the boards and as he has completed them I have gone through and added some simple value.

Pros: We didn’t end up having to redo as many boards as we thought

Cons: It is still time consuming, especially for Dave.

Hours: 5

Cloth Test

Summary: This was basically my first time ever messing with nCloth but we are all testing it to see if we want to use it for our characters clothing.  I am going to try a style of clothing that’s closer to our character’s actually clothing, this week.

Pros: I learned about how to better control the cloth

Cons: I had no idea what I was doing

Hours: 3

Modeling

Summary: I basically finished the Elder thing model (finally).  I just need to make any tweaks requested from the team and then UV it.

Pros: It came out looking really interesting

Cons: Lots of geo to work with.

Hours: 4

Upcoming Tasks:

1.) Finishing up the storyboards with Dave

2.)Starting to work on our pop through!

3.)Test more cloth.

4.) Anything else Val assigns me to do.

This week I have continued working on the shoggoth and the book, and have also worked on some other props. I wasn’t able to make as much progress as I would have liked, but I did get some work done.

Shoggoth

Summary:  Continued working on the shoggoth. I focused on the end of the tentacles, and now that the group has decided which one they want, I’m going to lay out the body using the eyes and mouths as centerpoints and bridging between them.

Pros: The arm variations are now set, and there are several tentacle base variations as well.

Cons: The group seems split on the best way to proceed with the shoggoth, so progress is being slowed because we don’t want to have to backtrack again.

Time: 3 hours

Lake’s Journal

Summary:  The journal now has a fully functional rig of 10 pages. The pages can be curled from the top and the bottom, and they flip and stack neatly.

Pro:  The pages are two sided, and the rig is finished and organized.

Con: The binding needs to be made and designed to work with the rig

Hours: 4

Lake’s Backpack

Summary: Lake’s backpack is found lying on the ground emptied out. This gives the protagonists a clue as to the location of their friend. I needed to make the backpack period accurate, which took a while to get the reference.

Pros: The backpack is mostly finished, with details like straps and clips modeled on.

Cons: The terrain the backpack is sitting on might change, which might change the shape of the cloth

Hours: 2

Moving forward

1. Finish Lake’s journal with cover and UVs

2. Assemble base mesh of the shoggoth

3. Keep making props

Click to view Google Sheets file

Story, story, story!!! This week was whirlwind of script-edits, with ideas flying this way and that. We came up with four new script versions this week, and we are meeting tomorrow (Monday) night to go through our lines one by one and finally nail down our dialogue. Our scenes make sense, we (mostly) agree on the character direction, and now it’s just a matter of running through it all with a fine-tooth comb and picking out the imperfections.

Script aside, we stayed fairly close to schedule this week, with a few minor set-backs. I was unable to finish the character textures, though I will before our lab meeting on Wednesday. I finished up the website, however, and set up a new task management paradigm that we will be switching to at our Wednesday meeting.  Anthony needs only a little longer to finish the character rigs, which are working beautifully so far. The last of our layout scenes have been finished up and are now waiting for review. Anthony met with Dave Mauriello and gleaned some valuable insights about Shoggoth modeling, so Pat has begun work on Shoggy2.0. Gabe’s finishing up the Elder Thing, and I have high hopes that we will be animating by next week.

This week my focus was on story, branding, and production management. I wrote a new version of our script, updated and redesigned our website, and implemented a new project management paradigm into our workflow.  

Task #1: Trello / Kanban Board setup 

• Summary: On Wednesday night I had a WONDERFUL conversation with Britt Gilbert as we were standing out in the rain waiting to meet up with people. We swapped project management tips and tricks — I told her about Slack (which has been a lifesaver on this project), and she gave me a quick rundown on Agile. We chatted for a bit about how Agile can transfer over to an animation pipeline (which is very different than gaming or dev work), and she suggested I look into a Kanban board to track my teams’ daily progress. I love it already.
• Positive Stuff: Trello integrates my boards in directly with Slack, so whenever I assign tasks or move boards everybody in my team gets a notification. This was annoying today, since I created like 20 tasks at once, but it will likely prove useful in the future. I loooove automated “bother my team” functions!
• Problems / issues: Still need to get everybody on board and using it!

Hours: 3

Task #2: Website Update

so meta

• Summary: Our website is updated and it looks pretty! This site will mostly function as a home for our PPJs, but it will also inform anybody stumbling along via Google about our rationale, research, and overarching themes.
• Positive Stuff:  Everyone seems to like it!
• Problems / issues: None so far.

Hours: 5

Task #3: Story 

Slapdash adherence to naming conventions aside, this is a pretty good overview of where we’re at

• Summary: This week was a flurry of script re-writing. Gabe wrote a script, then Ethan edited it, then Dave edited it, and then I edited it. We’re meeting tomorrow to go through the story line by line and solidify something by the end of the night. We’re close.
• Positive Stuff: I honestly felt like our script got stronger and stronger as everybody continued editing and patching things up. I tried my best to fill the plot holes I noticed (there were a few), and we’ll go over everything else at the meeting.
• Problems / issues: We’re having a difficult time striking a balance with our Characters. They need to speak naturally, but they need to come off as educated scientists. They need to react emotionally to what they find, but they need to stay calm enough to advance the plot.

Hours: 6

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS:
(but for real this time! hopefully the story will stand still now…) 

1. Refine Danforth’s shaders; shade and texture Dyer
2. Research Xgen styling techniques; style characters’ hair
3. Create composites of X-gen hair renders and bust renders

 
For this week more rigging.

Summary.

For this week i finished the main base rigs for both of the characters. I added an ik fk switch to the the arms. I added a clavicle controls. I added in the ribbon rigs for the forearms and the shoulders, including twist. I added a stretch controller for the elbow.

Negatives.

The ik arm rig was resulting in horrible deformation/twists. Therefore I went back and fixed it.

Positives

Base rigs are finished.

Hours

14

I also met with Dave Mauriello to go over various rigging topics.

Summary.

We talked about rigging tentacles, rigging the shoggoth, locomotion of the shoggoth, and potential ways for me to contiunre rigging while dave, gabe, and pat are animating.

Positive

It was a great meeting, that helped break down the shoggoth into different parts.

Negative.

After talking the current shoggoth model will need to be scrapped.

Hours

2.5

 
For next week.

Continue rigging (add in finer controls, hands, try to break the rig)

Test clothing simulations.

Relay all the information from my meeting with Dave to the rest of my team.

This week I went back to working on layout for our city environments, mainly finishing the Temple rough-in.

City Scenes Rough-in

• Summary: I’ve almost finished the rough Temple environment, with only a few key details left to be worked out.  With our final script taking shape, I’ve also begun work on the other city scenes.  Our goal is to have a first draft of all environments roughed in by Wednesday, and I think we’re on track for that.  Lake’s camp and the Temple are the most complicated environments by far, and they’ve been worked on for the longest (by Ethan and myself, respectively).
• Positives: v01 of the Temple is nearly ready for animation; the floor just needs some more polys and one key detail needs to be worked out.  The other city environments have been started, and should move along much faster than the Temple environment.
• Negatives: Not much this week, now that the script is nearing finality we can lock down the remaining environments pretty quickly.
• Hours: 4

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Finish rough city environments
2. Discuss layouts with team (Wednesday)
3. Refine layouts and start placing cameras according to storyboards (pending script finalization)

This week I got the news that we will most likely be scrapping our current shoggoth model for a new one after receiving feedback from one of the professors. This meant that I needed to go back to the drawing board and start making pieces for the shoggoth with good topology. I also spent some time on some more important props.

Shoggoth

Summary:  I went back to looking at reference for the shoggoth, with my primary focus on studying octopus and squid tentacles.

Pros: Some progress has been made, and there is now a new eye mesh, two mouth types, and several arm variations.

Cons: This took longer than expected, and I’m still finalizing arm options.

Time: 4 hours

Lake’s Journal

Summary:  One prop that is seen constantly on screen is Lake’s journal. I have been working on a rig that will allow the characters to turn the pages while making sure that the pages can be textured on both sides. In now has controls and sdks set up for the page flip and upper or lower page curling.

Pro:  All the needed functionality is there, and the rig is able to be duplicated.

Con: The pages need to be duplicated and placed into the book without breaking the rig.

Hours: ~3

Moving forward

1. Finish Lake’s journal with rig and UVs

2. Assemble base mesh of the shoggoth

3.Model several other needed props

This week was another round of script revision and scheduling with some layout in between. We’re so close to locking down our script again, we have one last meeting that should finally do it scheduled for tomorrow. Dave, Gabe and I have been bouncing script versions back and forth this week and tomorrow should be the end of it. At that point I can move forward on re-recording the audio and redoing the animatic.

Script

Summary- Met several times during the week to discuss changes and the new direction. Wrote two iterations of script during idea bouncing sessions with Dave and Gabe.
Positive- Coming to cohesion, stronger direction, stronger character conflict

Negative- Still not locked down and we have to get this thing wrapped up as it’s causing a choke hold in production.
Hours: 6

Layout

Summary- Laid out exterior of Lake’s Tent, meeting with Josh tomorrow to integrate Mountain model into scene for scaling

Positive- Good sense of space, clearly defined destination

Negative- Integrating mountains tomorrow

Hours: 2

Upcoming Tasks- 

-Schedule V.A. session

-Skype with actors to discuss changes

-Start Re-editing Animatic

-Record audio treatment for Animatic

-Finish Lake’s Tent Exterior

I still put our script as priority #1.  We are meeting as a group tomorrow to finalize our script so we should finally be able to move forward. Anyways, I started the week by writing a new version of our script after meeting with the group and discussing all the changes we wanted to make.  That has led us to our meeting tomorrow to hopefully finalize our script.  Other than that I continued to work on modeling the Elder Thing.

Script

Summary:  I spent a few hours going through the old script and restructuring our scenes.  We spent a lot of time talking about the problems with our script as a group so I took all our decisions and typed up the new draft.  I then spent time talking with Ethan, Val, and Dave about the state of the new script and where we want it to be as we create the final draft.

Pros: I’ve never been happier with the state of our script, I’m finally really proud of it.

Cons: We had a couple disconnects on some things and we need to finalize this now.

Time: ~5-6 hours

Modeling

Summary:  I just kept working on the model of the Elder Thing.  I’ve gotten the mesh just about finished and I’ve started to use joints to pose the creature.  I plan to have this model done by next week at the latest.

Pro:  I think it’s coming alone great.

Con: It’s taking more time to finish because of all the script stuff we’ve been doing.

hours: ~3-4

Moving forward

1. Finalize the script, knock out the storyboards with Dave, and get cracking on the animatic.

2.Finish Elder Thing Model

3.Start animating if the above get finished and if the character base rigs are done.

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

Click to view Google Sheets file

Once again, Story was the primary focus of this week. Gabe and Ethan met with a member of the Screenwriting faculty to talk over our script, and he raised several great points about how to fully flesh out our characters’ motivations. This was a problem we had struggled with since the beginning, so we took his advice and overhauled several of our scenes.

Most notably, we’ve changed the character Lake to be Dyer’s nephew, adding a layer of emotional value to his motivation. This also changed the primary character conflict — Dyer no longer believes that Lake killed his own men, and instead is determined to search for him in the mountains to find his nephew and learn about what happened in his camp. He is driven by guilt that he wasn’t there to protect his family, and a genuine concern for his well being. Danforth continuously repeats that they shouldn’t be going after him, and should be fleeing in the opposite direction as quickly as possible. This results in an ironic twist when Danforth goes insane, since it was ultimately Dyer’s fault for pushing him to venture into the mountains with him.

Reworking the script does mean that we need to backtrack on a few levels (bringing the voice actors back in, for example), but we believe it was worth it to address our story concerns early. We will be pausing progress on the shot list, storyboards and animatic while we refine our story further. That being said, several of our scenes were left untouched, and since layout has been completed we will be pushing forward with production in the meantime. We still intend to start animating as soon as the rigs are complete.

Apart from the story changes, we worked on our presentation, continued modeling assets, completed our first round of layout, continued with look development, and continued rigging. We hope to be animating within the next two weeks, pending faculty approval.

Rigging

• Summary: Got pretty far this week in rigging. I was able to add stretch in the ik and fk joints. The joints still switch fluently between the two chains. The fk chains have independent stretch inputs for the thigh and knee control. I also added the flexiplanes in both legs. This required me to add twist functionality for the thigh flexiplane and shin flexiplan. Finally I added a control to stretch the leg from the knee.

• Negative Stuff: I ran into an annoying issue in the beginning of the week with the Ik legs orientation. As well, I am not too sure why but maya 2015 was crashing constantly. I am still not sure what is wrong but I am still trying to figure out the issue. I am behind in where I want to be in the rig.

• Positive Stuff: I was able to set up the legs for both the characters. The animators seemed to really like what I did with the rig.

Hours 15-16 Meeting

• Summary: I met to talk with my group. We went over our presentation and the script revision.
•  Positive stuff: I am not involved as much in the script but I loved the changes in the story
•  Problems: Nothing right now, I felt that the meeting went really well.

Hours 3-4

FOR NEXT WEEK : 

• Rig the arms

This week I spent most of my time and energy polishing our Presentation and migrating our website over to a more flexible CMS. I had originally intended on finishing our characters’ textures and hair tests by now, but the presentation took much longer than I had anticipated so I will be finishing that early next week. There were also quite a few story meetings scheduled for this week (5 total; I went to 3 of them), and participating in them took up a lot of time, too. Thankfully, our direction is now strong and our story makes much more sense.

Task #1: Presentation 

PDF Link:
SrProjectProposal_Team1_Final

• Summary: I cleaned up the presentation based on feedback from our Senior Project class and Nick. The slides now go into greater detail about the major beats of our story, contain animated transitions, and are much cleaner overall.
• Positive Stuff: It looks great! I’m very happy with how our presentation turned out. Here’s to hoping everything goes smoothly on Tuesday!
• Problems / issues: Not so much an issue, but we decided to take out the opening scene of our animatic and instead add a slide better introducing ourselves.

Hours: 8

Task #2: Website Migration

• Summary: Frustrated with the aesthetic limitations of wordpress.com blogs, I spent a few hours this week migrating our content over to a wordpress.org site. Before our Tuesday pitch, the site will be finished.
• Positive Stuff: All of our posts transferred without a problem! WordPress.org is the open-source alternative to WordPress.com, and offers a much greater degree of flexibility with themes, plugins, and CSS editing. Now that the site is located on a database in my name, I’ll be able to clean everything up and establish some uniform branding for this project.
• Problems / issues: For the time being, the wordpress.org site is located at valfx.net/mountainsofmadness. As you can see, it doesn’t look so good at the moment – it’s using the default theme, a few of our images broke, and it’s overall very amateur looking. I will be addressing all of these issues before our Tuesday pitch so we have an attractive website to direct the faculty to afterwards.

Hours: 2

Task #3: Story Meetings 

• Summary: After Gabe and Ethan met with a screenwriting professor to dish out problems with our script, we met several times throughout the week to figure out exactly what we were doing. As a group, we decided to make a few minor character changes to establish a more concrete motivation for Dyer. For example, we changed the character of Lake to be Dyer’s nephew, solving the question of why Dyer and Danforth would risk their lives to go looking for him when he goes missing. Dyer no longer believes that Lake murdered his crew, and his motivation is now to bring him back and find answers.
• Positive Stuff: Our characters and story make much more sense, and thankfully these edits are minor enough that we’ll be able to keep most of our storyboards. A few of our scenes have stayed completely static, too, and since we have completed Layout we will proceed forward with animation while rewriting the scenes that need to be revised.
• Problems / issues: By backtracking like this, we’ve set ourselves back on a few fronts. We will have to bring our voice actors back in to re-record our audio, redo the animatic, and redraw several storyboards. However, script rewrites have always been part of the plan, and our schedule is flexible enough to accomodate these setbacks without too much trouble.

Hours: 6

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS: 

1. Update website before pitch
2. Refine Danforth’s shaders; shade and texture Dyer
3. Research Xgen styling techniques; style characters’ hair
4. Create composites of X-gen hair renders and bust renders

This week I spent most of my time working on the script as my main focus at the moment (the animatic) is on hold permanent hold until the script is in a semi-finalized state. Gabe and I met with one of the script writing faculty members and discussed possible script revisions. With this in mind I also spent a great deal of time working with Valentina on our presentation and laying out the airplane interior.

Script Writing

• Met with faculty members to discuss different solutions to motivation and overall theming (1-2 hours)
• Met with group at various points in the week to tackle latest rounds of script revisions (3 hours)
• Pros- New solutions found to motivating our characters and to the overall flow of our story
• Cons- Still a lot of rewriting that needs to be done
• Total time spent – 4-5 hours

Scene Layout

• Modeled basic plane interior, comped in mood boards.
• Pros- Solid start, with this sense of space we can start testing out camera angles.
• Cons- Very basic geometry, needs to be filled in.
• Total Time Spent- 3 hours

Presentation 

• Rewrote several segments of presentation, assisted in layout of slides
• Total Time Spent- 1 hour

TOTAL TIME SPENT- 9-10 hours

FOR NEXT WEEK- Script rewrites, model scenes, schedule VA session.

This week I did a lot of work on the script and I spent a while working on one of the creature models for our animation.

Script:

Ethan and I met with a film professor to discuss problems with our story.  He had a lot of useful critiques and it has led us to completely changing our script yet again.  We lacked not only character conflict but character motivation, two very important story telling elements.  After two meetings with the entire group we discussed ways to solve all our problems and we now have an outline for the new version of the script.

Pros:  Our story is really coming together and I think with just a bit more push it will be great!

Cons: Gonna be some more work fixing up the script but it needs to be done.

Time: ~4-5 hours

Modeling:

I worked on the model of the Elder thing.  I’ve just about got the base mesh finished and once that is done I will be throwing in some quick and dirty joint chains to pose the model as if it is trapped in the ice.  Once this model is done, posed, and UV’d I will be moving onto helping Pat with other models from our master asset list.

Time: ~7-8 hours

Next week:

1. Writing a new draft of the script and editing it with the team

2.Finishing the Elder thing model and posing it

3.Any other models I can help with

This week I was supposed to finish roughing out our city scenes, but I caught a nasty cold and was out of commission most of the week and didn’t make any progress on that front.  I was able to to make it to our script revision meetings, though, and we made some great progress there.

Script Revision

• Summary: We met twice this week to discuss our story, focussing on what’s motivating our characters.  With the help of a screenwriting professor here at Drexel, we were able to find and fix a number of plot holes and flesh out our characters and their relationships with one another.  A lot got changed, but the length and core story remain the same.
• Positives: Our characters are much stronger now than they were in previous drafts, and we’ve replaced a lot of expository dialogue with reactions, visuals, etc.  The story now has a consistent conflict throughout, which it was lacking before.
• Negatives: Dave will need to re-draw most of the storyboards now, and the animatic will also have to be re-cut.  A small price to pay for the huge improvements we made, but it will set us back a little bit.
• Hours: 3

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Rough out city scenes
2. Possibly rough out Lake’s Camp if there’s time

My focus on this week was continuing working on my previous tasks and to troubleshoot any new errors.

Timeline

Summary: Went through the updated asset list and gave everything a timeline

Positive Stuff: The timeline seems manageable and lines up with the asset list

Problems / issues: Some environments are not included, such as the city, as this is not traditionally modeled and won’t fit cleanly into the timeline.

Hours Spent: 1

Shoggoth Retopology Continued

Summary: Trying to make it so the topology lines up better with the existing folds and features

Positive Stuff: Getting closer. Now I know how I’m going to be laying out the wireframe and how to create multiple accurate subdivisions for a displacement map.

Problems / issues: The topology doesn’t end up exactly where I want it. This might be simply due to there not being enough geometry, so I will be trying to upscale the amount of polygons without going overboard.

Hours Spent: 3

Asset Modeling

Summary: Made some more assets, including pots and pans

Positive Stuff: The assets are still on schedule

Problems / issues: These assets still need to be unwrapped

Hours Spent: 2

Group Meetings

Summary: Got together as a group to go over script and story changes. I was unable to make the first of the 2 meetings as I needed to go home for the weekend.

Positive Stuff: The characters now have must stronger motivations, and the loss of sanity has more leading up to the breaking point

Problems / issues: We might have added more time to our animation, which is dangerous. We won’t know for sure until the script is updated.

Hours Spent: 2

LIST OF UPCOMING TASKS

1. Finish shoggoth topology

2. Contact group members over large environment timelines

3. Continue modeling and beginning to unwrap assets

For this week I continued to rig.

• Summary: This week I started off by finishing the neck. I added space matching to the neck, then I started to work on the legs. I first made the bind joints, then the IK and FK joints. I then created an IK FK switch for both legs. When the legs are switched into one mode, the visibility for the controllers in the other mode is switched off. I also added a lot of controls for both the feet.
• Problems / issues: Nothing too major this week that made me completely restart. Only issues were typical things that happen when rigging. The ik handle was not orienting correctly, some of the constraints I tried to make were not working, and a mistake on my part I left a .001 rotation in a joint.
• Positive: I fixed all my issues! ( I hope) Now I can start rigging the fun stuff.

Hours : 15

UPCOMING TASKS

• Add advanced controls for the   legs
• Start the arms
• Hopefully break down Evans rig

This week I worked on roughing in environments so we can begin placing our cameras, props, etc.  I focused on the temple at the city’s center, developing a scale and style for it.  I also had to re-aclimate myself to Maya, after using 3ds Max almost exclusively for the past 9mo.

Temple Rough-in

Temple Interior

• Summary: I began roughing in the Temple environment, imagining its original purpose and how it might have been constructed and connected to the rest of the city.
• Positive Stuff: As rough and barren as it is, working on this has helped me get closer to nailing down both a scale and style for our city buildings that will be uncomfortably alien yet still traversable by our characters.  (for reference, the small green rectangle by the pit is human-sized).
• Problems / Issues: It was difficult to get going on this environment, but I think now that there’s a strong base to work off of the rest of this scene and the other city environments will come together much more easily.
• Hours: ~4

Temple Approach

UPCOMING TASKS

1. Finish rough environments with Ethan

Week 02 Gantt Chart. Red indicates work done this week, yellow indicates work for next week. Click to view spreadsheet!

After a successful first week and draft pitch, we determined that our project pitch required some finesse. The main beats needed to be communicated to the faculty, and thus needed to be hammered out as a team. Because of this, one of our key topics this week was Story. Gabe brought up some concerns with the script last week, and this week the team met twice to adjust the pacing, tweak the script, and edit the animatic.

Look dev was also fleshed out this week, and Dave was assigned mood boards to convey our color scheme and style. Josh worked on roughing in the city layout and developing shaders. Anthony continued rigging Dyer and Danforth, and we worked with DIGM alumn Evan Boucher (currently at Dreamworks) to research methods of rigging the Shoggoth’s tentacles. Evan even provided us with a sample rig to break down.

Pat and Gabe worked on modeling assets and clothing, and Pat refined and retopologized the Shoggoth. Val painted textures for Dyer and Danforth, created a skin shader, and tested hair generation and styling with Xgen.

Overall, a pretty productive week! We now have lots of polished assets to populate our presentation, and we’ve refined our story based on feedback. We are now in the process of reformatting our presentation to put a better focus on the narrative structure of our project and demonstrate what we’ve done so far. Next week we will continue on these projects while the shot list is developed.