WEEK 9 - Production Progress

Its the end of Week 9 and we had our progress presentation. Although at the beginning we were ridiculed for the scope of our project being too massive and ambitious, we were able to prove that we are cable of completing this on time! Our presentation went well even though we received some constructive feedback on our work.

This is what we have been able to accomplish in 9 weeks of production.

I am impressed at the team’s effort for being able to pull through. Especially in this week, we pushed even harder as we aimed to show our progress up until scene 4 - the forest scene.

Quite a lot of feedback was received, some which made us reconsider our ideas for our project.

• Some of the falling down animations which were amended were’t shown in the presentation so the timing was commented on

• The immersive experience is the 3rd scene was lacking

• The forest scene was way too long

• Not enough assets were seen in the last environment which makes it look and feel too bland.

This was something we had to overcome ASAP and find a solution before rendering. We only have 4 more weeks until completion. We must use this time wisely. Also, due to the unexpectedness of the render servers, we stopped implementing a strict Gantt chart schedule as each day came with its own set of problems. At this point, we have made our own daily schedules to accomplish the work on time, while working around the problems that arise. It was a strategy that had to be implemented rather than following a structured path - which would have taken longer for me to sort out. Our team, at this point, have become very candid with each other.

Moreover, there were a lot of aspects we wouldn’t have thought of if we didn’t confront our lecturer about it. These were immediately addressed when possible issue came to mind. Issues such as the animation of the door opening inwards rather than outwards to save render time and transition smoothly into the next room. Other issues with adding the flames and fireplace fire had to be rendered separately. I took down notes on how to go about that as I would’ve made. A mistake of rendering it together.

I need to render the fire by deleting all the lights, adding a pitch black material to everything except the flames and disable GI in the render settings. I should also use self illumination in the render elements so that it can be blended in after effects. I tried this on my laptop as the renders went fast and it finished within 40 minutes. Because we didn’t have a full scene to test out the renders, I converted one file and overlaid it with the fire to test. It worked.

This has been our progress so far. Let's work harder in the upcoming weeks!