CAGD 495 Week 6 - Christopher Coombs

 

    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 3) to free up some time. It also resolved the inconsistency of the burglar attempting to break in from a sloped roof, which did not align with our storyboards. This was also great because time was of the essence, and we needed to catch up to the other groups. I assigned each group member a portion of the animation overall. 

- Brooke: Shots 1, 4, 5 (2 and 3 cut)

- Luis: Shots 6-9

- Tyler: Shots 10-13

- Gavin: Shots 14-17

We also have an 18th shot, which, as of right now, is merely a static title card. Yet, I've come up with a few pretty cool ideas tonight on how we can make that final shot more interesting. I'll be sharing these ideas tomorrow with my group. As for what we have right now, I've compiled all of our current animations into a single video:

The shots in order are: Shot 1, Shot 6, Shot 10, and Shot 14. These shots were thrown into Unreal thanks to Gavin, our layout artist. Fortunately for him, he doesn't have to do much layout work right now, and he's been wanting to do some animation for quite a few weeks. His shot in the video is the last one, and it looks really good. The rest of the shots are some basic blockouts, which, to me, look pretty decent for our first week of keyframe animating. I managed to help out two members with their animations this week. However, most of my critiques will be this coming Monday morning, as most of them just finished today. After reviewing their clips tonight, I'll need to remind them tomorrow that we have to be a little more consistent in animating with reference to our storyboard. As cool as some of these look, we have to keep in mind that we've already established some of our best camera angles through the storyboard, and we need to make sure that the flow remains consistent throughout.

   

    That's all I have on our group's progress for now! As always, I'll try to keep you posted on our progress by the end of the week.

                                                                                                                        - Christopher Coombs