Progress Report Week 15

This week was definitely a change of pace. In addition to finishing up the modeling on the environments, I have tasks that involve making changes to the models depending on the feedback of our team of animators and layout artists alike. For example, we got rid of the center hallway of the environment to better achieve the reoccurring flat shot in our film. We also moved around decorative props to best suit the camera.

There was also some aspects brought to my attention, like I needed to raise up the door handles to better suit the height of our Harold model. Originally, David was shorter than what he is now, so I had the handles quite low for Harold so that David didn't need to reach too high. With the model height changes that happened a few weeks ago now, and the animators bringing this to my attention, we were able to make changes like this to make the environment more ready for the animators.

We've also been having our fair share of technical issues for the animators. I'm not sure any of us know the cause, so we've been looking for solutions. On my end, I haven't experienced any crashes with just the environment, but I was concerned maybe there were stray nodes or history from past edits that were adding extra weight to the processing. I optimized the scene so everything should be all clean now on that end. 

I made master files for the animators to reference in, and spent a lot of time updating the layout files to have these references in them so that we can double check the cameras still works because there were some shots were an older version of the environments were being used and we wanted to check for any weird tangents and that the layouts still worked.

For the chess world, we talked in class about instead of using black and white, we would use a very light eggshell off white color and a super deep purple so that the contrast wasn't so start and unfinished looking.

Lastly, I updated one of the environments with some more models to fill up the space. Since we only have a few shots of this environment, we are modeling them to camera.