Week 10 - Finally in line with the Production Schedule

Despite things taking a downturn a couple of weeks in the past, I finally feel I'm back on track with my progress. Not just me, but so is Amos in line with his tasks. Overall, this week has uplifted my hopes a little and here's how that happened.

Advisor Meeting

A lot of tasks were cleared in our meeting this week such as keeping the character textures on hold while working on the environment assets in order to get the 3D polished animatic done on time. From the list of tasks I had mentioned in my previous blog, I wasn't able to work on some of them because it was necessary and the remaining didn't work out too well. below are the reasons for this.

1. Take the body to Zbrush and project high poly onto low poly mesh - didn't work out because zbrush had some issues and were triangulating the quads. I tried various methods to work on them but it just wouldn’t get solved.

2. Unwrap the body in Zbrush - quick and efficient - didn't work on it because textures were put on hold

3. Rig the character using CAT rigs - done

4. Skinning the character - done

5. Texturing the clothes either in 3Ds Max or in Substance Painter - put on hold

6. Texture the base mesh in Zbrush - just added material to mesh in 3Ds max

7. Facial morphs for the characters expressions - didn't work on it because only basic rigs were required for the animatic

Apart from this, were were advised to follow the steps below to ensure we work effectively towards completing the deliverable.

1. Model to the camera

2. Use dummy characters for incomplete character models - blocking

3. Environmental modeling based on whats going to be seen on camera

4. Get the important assets done

Speaking of important assets, I had made a list of all the assets we will be needing to model and shared it with Amos in Week 6. Below is a screenshot of the delegation of tasks, after adding some tasks for Fahed (one of the collaborators) to work on.

Colours with the legend below in order to highlight the importance and priority of the assets.

Organisation of all project management charts for Animation specifically on the drive

For the week I had to work on the Police Car and the Omelas House. Here are my progress updates for them.

POLICE CAR

Screenshots of the car I modeled in the scenes in the 3D animatic. Everything out of frame has been deleted for optimization.

OMELAS HOUSE

Above are screenshots as well as the reference image for the Omelas house. The Omelas house has a story behind it which was explained in prior weeks, that draws parallels to the story The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas written by Le Guin. It adds more value to the story as we are taken into the 3rd act - a very symbolic act. Here is where we plan to add an extra shot that would be a foreshadow into the locked in music video. For this, I will need to model some extra assets. These will be done in the upcoming week.

Upcoming week tasks

Amos and I had a thorough meeting where we planned our tasks according to our progress and workload. For the upcoming week we will be restructuring the whole scene with the houses he modeled, will send it over for me to work on the cameras and blocking animations, while he works on the sketch animations for the Locked In music video. This way, we can get two things done at once - the last iteration for Locked In and the 3D animatic. If we continue to work at this pace, we should be done on time. Cross fingers.

References

Le Guin, U. K. (1973). The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas [e-book]. Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92625.The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas