Welcome back to my blog, everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and I am the team leader for the Ape Adhesive commercial. Similar to the previous week, this one was rather hectic for our group. We managed to resolve all the issues we had with the vertical sync last week and submitted it on Tuesday night. Following that, our primary objective for the week was to prepare as much as possible for this coming Monday, when we will be recording our shots in the motion capture room. One of the most important steps we needed to take to achieve this goal was creating more reference material. To better establish the boundaries of our scene and the scale of our characters, proportional to the inside of the house, I had Gavin throw our models into our UE5 project. Now we have a relatively good idea of how much space we have to work with, and roughly how high the arms need to go to reach over the table where our treasure chest will be.
As you can tell from the images, I've also assigned Gavin, our layout artist, to redesign our kitchen so that it looks different from the original design. Luis thought it'd be a funny idea to make the walls hot pink, but after toning the color down a touch, it actually didn't look so bad, so we stuck with the idea. We brightened up the floor textures so that there was minimal contrast with the new wall color. One significant issue Gavin managed to fix was removing all the text projected on the walls. As it turns out, the unbaked lighting was causing the issue, along with some other errors that can be read in the image above. He managed to fix those issues, but it was quite a pain to do. Overall, our layout is turning out pretty good. Gavin also had a great idea that day, which was to trim out unnecessary parts of the house.
While our first few shots take place outside, the majority of the advertisement is indoors. Therefore, many portions of the house that we aren't planning on using can be deleted. By doing this, it will require significantly less processing power to render the final product as seen below:
Brooke's responsibility this week was to create a beanie for our burglar character. This was the final result, which was then given to Luis for texturing:
She also volunteered to be our motion capture actor, so our group has been working to provide her with as much reference as possible. Since I'm a peer mentor in Nathan Pool's Motion Capture classroom, I'm able to set up the room early and ensure we get the right suit for her. Tyler has been experimenting more with really cool plugins in After Effects this week. She now has the ability to add dynamic lighting to our scene in post-processing and cast it onto character faces with some pretty impressive realism. This will be fantastic for the scene where the burglar opens up the box and the scene glows. Personally, I'm most excited to see it in the introductory shots. We plan to cast a large moon in the background of the second shot for our final product. That way, the silhouette stands out even more, and we have some beautiful rays of light bouncing off the moon. Here is a small test Tyler made for the moonlight:
She also updated our animatic with a few new sound effects and some cool moon rays for the first few shots.
As for me, I've just started retargeting our characters in Motion Builder for next week. Currently, we're experiencing issues porting the gorilla over, as the asset was created in centimeters. I'm trying to find ways to work around that problem. Hopefully, I will manage to accomplish that by tomorrow. The worst-case scenario is that we won't be able to get it working in Mobu. That shouldn't be a problem, though, since our gorilla appears at the very end of the commercial, and all of us are experienced animators.
That's all for now! Thanks for checking in on our progress. Stay tuned, as the next update will be covering our first week of recording.
- Christopher Coombs
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