Progress Report Week 11

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 go very hand-in-hand. Lastly, Ethan and I had a meeting with Olive to show her where we were at in terms of textures, lighting plans, and rendering plans. I helped her get familiar with the assets that we have, and we came up with a method of organization that will be more effective going forward. We updated her on the types of feedback we’ve gotten, to see what direction we want to pursue going forward, and she discussed with us a lot of her own knowledge that we can utilize. She is very knowledgeable in her fields and Ethan and I would like to include her inputs and creativity.

Although there was a lot of time spent in meetings this week, I believe it was a very good thing. Obviously there has been a change in plans but I believe we are doing everything we can to make these changes benefit the film’s creation.

I am still gathering models that have been created and putting them into the scene. I believe I have received almost all the models created in the last term. I also made some edits to the models I have received based on class feedback. So, for example, I made the back of the office chair wider.

I started creating the essential furniture for the second living room and office to help layout as much as possible. I was able to develop that model of the u couch more from where it was at previously. The models for inside the office are in a more blocked stage as I was hoping to get feedback on their designs before taking the geometry into a further state of completion.  The last thing that I was able to get to for this week was the chess book. We had a book with decent geometry from last quarter, however it was modeled closed. Ethan knows how to simulate the pages as planes which will also help texturing go better as well, so the book needs to be modeled in a different way than it originally was when we were going to rig it. Because it is simulated with effects I’m not familiar with I thought it best that it’s in its own maya file and will be imported into the scene.