Progress Report Week 16

This week I juggled a lot between modeling, texturing, and visual development of the chess world.

For modeling, I focused on addressing the notes given to me in class and outside class, as well as making tweaks and changes that will help our environments look more refined. 

Some of the tweaks that I did were adjusting the proportions of things like the doors for example to better suit the height of our characters. I also worked with the layouts that we have to refine the composition of our environments so they aren't so symmetrical. 

I also got some texturing done. I wanted to look for areas where we could add some color into things that were otherwise neutral in color. The vase and the office books were smaller areas that I thought it would be nice to have an actual color on rather than just keeping it all neutral. I tried some options for the phone to have color on it instead of being neutral toned, but they really weren't working well. After looking up references, it's not something that occurs often anyways so even though we want to add more color, there will still have to be some exceptions that don't get as much color applied to them. 

I also did some visual development for the chessworld. I just pulled an approved layout file without animation but with some movement just so that we could see how the plugin looks in motion. I didn't spend a ton of time on making the final colors, so that part is rough. What I focused on was the manipulation of the pluggin's controls. I went into everything there was to see what aspects we could manipulate, as well as how they reacted to different things in maya. For example, The hatching can change depending on the lights in the scene, as well as the hatching attribute editor. There are some issues coming up in this test that we have solutions for, but there are also some that don't have a solution yet. More tests need to be done. 

Oh also I made master files for the chess world when it is chaotic and falling apart. Because the environment is a different setup for each shot, with lots of camera cheats there is a file for each major shot change. Our shots are still being edited and rearranged and cut, but I'm estimating that we will absolutely have between 10 and 15 master files for the fourth sequence. This sounds crazy, but because it is a chess world, there are only two environment textures (perhaps a third or fourth if we want to add certain details) the textures will be easy to add in even though they will need to be added several times for each file. Also thanks to our awesome riggers or created a script, all files were rigged within a day so it wasn't too much of a burden there either! So now the animators will have total freedom in their poses and timing for character animation and they will be able to animate the world around their character as well.