CAGD 495 Week 3 - Christopher Coombs

    Hello again, and welcome back to my blog for Week 3! My name is Christopher Coombs, and I have many updates to share regarding our team's progress on the Ape Adhesive commercial. As of today, Tyler, our group's After Effects specialist, has finished recreating that awesome glue effect from the previous week using a door handle this time. I encouraged her to match our shot in the storyboard and act as if her hand was actually stuck to the handle in one of those cartoonish rubberbandy ways. Here is the final result:

  

  I think it turned out really well, and it will certainly be great reference footage when animating this shot in the future. Another detail I liked is how drippy she made the glue look on the handle of the door. As for the feedback I gave roughly an hour before making this post, I told her that for the final product, she could make the glue look a little more webby and increase the opacity a little bit so it's not too see-through. I'm grateful that our group has such a talented After Effects user on our team.

Brooke was in charge of creating and UV'ing our roof hatch from the very first three shots of our storyboard this week. I think it looks pretty good.

    

She then handed it off to Gavin for texturing, and here is the final result for our hatch:

    Considering that this prop will be in a generally dark scene outside, it's unlikely we'll be able to see it in its full beauty. Even so, I think it's cool that they went the extra mile and gave it some decent textures. There was one last asset we needed this week, and it was a crucial one. I managed to find a pretty good ape rig online, but we had yet to find a burglar rig. While a burglar sounds like a very common character that would have a plentiful selection of rigs to choose from, this was far from the case. It was actually shocking how few burglar rigs there were. These characters were incredibly expensive in the hundereds of dollars, yet they also had quite awful rigs. For the cheaper rigs, they were too cartoony and didn't fit well with the aesthetic of our commercial. In the end, I decided it was best to look for a rig we could easily transform into a burglar rather than one that already was a burglar. When I was looking for characters wearing dark winter clothing, I got very lucky and found this awesome rig here.

    The character was cheap, and he looked great. I could tell from the rig that this character's face is very expressive. Our plan is to remove the fur around the collar and find or model a beanie asset to throw over his head. The final thing our group worked on this week was the vertical sync. We've encountered a few issues along the way, primarily with our gorilla rig. 

    

     As you might be able to tell in this image of our model, it uses XGen fur to get that natural look. While it does look super cool, the XGen fur made animation a nightmare, and we were also having trouble porting it over. I troubleshooted this issue with Luis and his animation for a while, but no luck so far. Since Frank has offered us an extra two days to finish our vertical slice since our human rig came in a little late, I'll swing by and ask him about the XGen fur situation, since none of us are experienced with how to handle it. Fortunately, we haven't encountered any issues with the other model for the vertical slice, so we are half done with everything. If we have to, for the sake of processing power, we'll probably remove the fur, animate it, and throw it into UE5.

    That's all I've got for now! Thanks for checking in, and I'll see you for for next week's blog!

                                                                                                                             - Christopher Coombs