Mikayla Fuehrer - The King and the Pawn

This week was a change of pace for me as a modeler. The layout team is hard at work and we have a flat shot that is not working in 3D quite the same way as we planned for with our animatic. What we want to achieve is getting two side doors in to the camera frame without have a super bunch of ceiling and floor space. It was easy to rotate the walls out to be more visible to the camera, but it ended up becoming very much like a panorama, where the environment had a lot going on horizontally but not vertically. I tried forcing the modeling and did get it to work for the camera, but it would affect animation, texturing, and lighting so much that we decided to not pursue it further. Our solution will be using sound and lighting cues so that the audience understands where the characters are coming from off screen.  This week I also helped with visual development of our chess world. We worked as a team and what we were taking a lot of inspiration from was the...

This week I worked on modeling some very special props for our film. Although we had a chess set, we modeled a base that would act as not only the chess board, but as a form of storage for the pieces so that they could be put away. I also modeled a Chess Book of Harold's creation. It's a handwritten note account of his learning process of chess that David uses to learn how to play from his dad's experiences. The book is modeled open as David will be interacting with it a lot in the film. The pages standing straight up are going to be simulated for the occasional page flip. The book is opened more towards the beginning so that it'll seem as though David started at the beginning of his dad's notes (as one does) and instead of modeling a second book, we can rotate the textures around so that if he holds the book 'upside down' it'll be like David has reached the end of his dad's note when he has won the game of chess. The police hat has bee...

I have continued to work on texturing the items in the environment. There are multiple images of certain things because I want to show my team the way in which the texture can be easily changed to suit the needs of the film. For example, I showed some options of what colors the soccer duffel bag could be, so that we can maybe have a team color scheme for David's soccer team. Stuff like that. They are still a work in progress, as we want to add written detail to the calendar and a logo for the duffel bag, but they are off to a start! 

This week was a lot of new things going on. My primary focus was to help get everything organized for Daybreak to jump onto the team. That aspect involved a lot of meeting and discussing. Although I’m not on Production Assisting for this term, I wanted to step up in some respects because I am familiar with where we left off last quarter whereas Natalie was still catching up with some things here and there. To help assist these changes, I helped Saba with the assets list so that Natalie could assist with layout and animation. I had to meet with Natalie as well over the layouts to get certain environments ready to handoff. We had an unexpected size difference between the character and environments that we didn’t want to affect layout, but as of now I have been told it is resolved. Ethan and I needed to meet about lighting and texturing because the feedback we got on the rendered frame was helpful and we needed to create a plan for textures going forward and how textures and lighting...