CAGD 495 Week 1 - Christopher Coombs

        Part 1 (Group Progress in Part 2)

    Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and welcome to my Advanced Production (CAGD 495) blog! Unfortunately, due to some complications, the Wednesday class was cancelled, and this coming Monday will be a school holiday. Due to these delays, the class hasn't moved beyond introductions so far. Hopefully, by Wednesday, we'll finally get introduced to our groups and learn which ideas have been picked for our big project. Of course, this does not mean I accomplished nothing during our first week of class. Most of my time this week was dedicated to completing our animation evaluation. For this assignment, we were required to recreate a small 5-6 second section of the iconic staircase dance scene from the Joker movie. Unfortunately, I haven't animated too much this summer, so getting started on this project was very difficult for me at first. I always find starting to be the hardest part whenever I animate. In time, however, I was able to shake off most of the rust from my relaxed break and managed to put something decent together. 

Here is what I managed to create by the end of our short deadline:

Due to Gru's lanky arms, legs, and heavy torso, I thought his odd proportions would be quite fun to animate, and they certainly were. At first, he came off a little too bouncy, but I managed to mitigate that just enough to make it not look too silly. Another challenge I had was trying to telegraph the kicks and make them snappy at the start and floaty as the leg falls. Not only did I accomplish that goal, but I tilted Gru just a bit more to the side to improve his silhouette. By the end, I had one fluid animation. As for converting the animation to an Alembic cache for Unreal Engine 5, try as I might, there were too many issues with the model I was using to successfully port it over. Instead, I decided to maximize the quality of the playblast by adding a gradient background, a three-point lighting system, ambient occlusion, and some anti-aliasing. I also set up some cameras in the scene to match the angles our reference had. Overall, my animation turned out quite well for how limited our time was.

Here's what my setup looked like for the Playblast:

        Part 2 (9/6/2025)

Hello again! This is a follow-up on the previous Week 1 post. It came to the teacher's attention that he had accidentally shifted Week 1's due date a week earlier than expected, which he corrected in the following week. Because of this, I've decided to update the Week 1 post, now that we've been assigned to our groups and learned of our roles. My name is Christopher Coombs, and I am the director of the Home Security Gorilla Glue ad. While my primary responsibility is to facilitate and ensure we reach our deadlines, I also want to assist in any way I can to make their jobs go smoothly, whether that be bug testing, setting up the mocap software, animation clean up, retargeting characters, or helping search for assets to improve our scene layout. Luis Resendiz, Brooke Morrison, and Tyler Camacho are our three animator/motion capture specialists for this project. Finally, we have Gavin Gayfield, who is our layout artist for this term. We threw some ideas together this Wednesday and managed to make a pretty funny story idea for our Gorilla Glue commercial. Before we left for the week, I assigned each member a task. Luis was to create a shotlist and run it by me for review and approval so that it could be ready for the Storyboard artists the next day. I've assigned Gavin, Tyler, and Brooke, our storyboard artists, each a third of the total shots to draw. The cut-off date for them to get these images in will be Monday, September 8th, at 11:59pm. I've seen some of their panels already, and I like the direction that it is going so far. As for me, I have been searching for a handful of compatible gorilla rigs on the internet to test for next week. This gorilla rig by Truong CG Arist has been my favorite model so far, but I will continue to look around just in case.

    That's all for now, but I will be sure to keep you up to date on our team's progress for next week. Here is a link to our SyncSketch project below.

                                                                                                                             - Christopher Coombs

Sync-Sketch Link:

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/nWMU5wkWr4mZ/#/37253054/38814951