Christopher Coombs CAGD 495 - Blog

    Hello, and welcome back to my blog! I am Christopher Coombs, team leader of the Ape Adhesive group. On Wednesday of this week, we received some insightful feedback from our teacher on our progress after our completion of the blockout. Here is what we have now:       As you can tell, there were some edits made, mostly small cuts and speed adjustments. There were a lot of shots that overstayed their welcome or happened way too fast. I'm hoping that my group can look at the revised shot compilation this coming week and get a better scope of time for each of their shots. As for the changes made to the shots themselves, we managed to resolve one of the most critical issues with our posing this week, specifically the shot where the criminal is making their escape. It still went by absurdly fast, so I had to slow down some parts by over 450%, like where the hand gets stuck. However, Tyler managed to repose the robber in a way where we can see what they are doing no...

 Welcome back to the seventh iteration of our team's progress! This is Christopher Coombs, the team leader of the Ape Adhesive group. By the end of Sunday, my team managed to complete the blockout for all the remaining shots. Here was the end result:     As you can tell, the video is eight seconds shorter than anticipated.  In fact, there's quite a funny story behind that. During this blockout phase, I told the group to keep the time consistent with our storyboard shots if possible. The only thing I was worried about, which I had made clear to them at the time, was that our overall time would flow over the 30-second mark. Yet, by the end of the week, when I received their files, it was completely the opposite situation. I suppose they were just as worried about that as I was when they started creating their blockout. On this coming Wednesday of the eighth week of production, I will be getting together with my group and giving some feedback on which shots we could ext...

       Hello again! This is Christopher Coombs, the team leader for the Ape Adhesive commercial. Our team is now into our sixth week of production. As an overall assessment of how our week went, I'd like to describe it as our rebound from the problems we've been facing in the previous week. Despite our desire to do motion capture and the significant time it'd save, clearly, it was never in the books for us. We've tried every possible solution, even retargeting and sending motion capture data to Maya, all to no avail. Our rigs were far too stubborn, and our time was slipping through our fingers. On Tuesday afternoon, I made the ultimate decision to end our ventures into motion capture and dive into some good ol' keyframe animation. Of course, that was not the only major decision we had to make. On the previous day, during our SyncSketch review, we received some valuable input from the class and decided it'd be best to cut our extra two outdoor shots (shots 2 and ...

Hello everyone! I'm Christopher Coombs, the project director, and I have many updates on the progress our group has made this week, along with a few setbacks. Our layout artist, Gavin, has made significant progress on the outdoor environment for our scene. Here's the progress that he's made this week: We now have a road, driveways, and a few other houses as well. It's starting to feel like an actual neighborhood now. One thing I should probably note in these renders is how there's no lighting from the inside of these houses, as seen with the windows. I can't recall which of us brought it up, but one member pitched an idea for the interior of the house to be pitch black. I've played around with the idea for a bit and imagined the burglar holding a flashlight as our primary light source for every shot in the interior. It sounds pretty cool, but the problem is that by the time the burglar reaches the door to make his escape, he'll already have his hands ful...