CAGD 495 Week 11 - Christopher Coombs

     Hello and welcome back to my weekly blog! My name is Christopher Coombs, team leader of the Ape Adhesive commercial, and this is the eleventh iteration of my group's weekly progress on this project. Here is what we managed to improve by the very end of this week:

    The first thing you might notice upon watching the new video is how we managed to get our fully functional rope into the scene. Brooke spent most of this week trying to make it mesh with the burglar together as smoothly as possible. I think it turned out pretty well. We also pulled the shot back a little bit as it helped hide the issue with the skin showing through the clothing, and it establishes a little more of the room he will enter. After reviewing that shot with my group today, we decided that we'll be deleting the table for the next showcase, as the chest would technically be there, and we don't want to reveal it so early. For the shot of the burglar looking around after climbing down, Brooke managed to touch up on the speed, and all she needs to do now is smooth out those turns so that they are less jittery. I feel as if having some longer holds at the end of this shot, the zoom on the treasure chest, and the reaction would make a huge difference in the quality animation as well. Everything goes by pretty fast, yet we are on the thirty-second mark exactly. The outro takes up a considerable amount of time, lasting around five seconds. Perhaps if we cut a large fragment of time off from this outro, we'd have much more time to play around with. I can have Tyler create a shorter and simpler version once all of our animations are done. 

    Luis's animation of the burglar opening the chest has made decent progress. He's moved on to splining his animation and adjusting the head of the character's body. By the time I got the animation late Sunday night, I noticed that the head went from being too low in the frame to being way too high. The other issue that needed refining was the sudden holds between poses, which made it feel more like a blockout. These are issues that Luis will need to iron out near the end of this coming week, so that he can put his full focus on animating the gorilla dragging away the person. We are approaching Thanksgiving break, and after that, the animation deadline hits, so we gotta get this done very soon. Tyler's work for this week primarily consisted of splining out her animation of the burglar getting dragged away and the shot of the burglar struggling with the door. The dragging part looked pretty good, and she says that she's going to put all her time into the struggle with the door now. Hopefully, it turns out well by the end of the twelfth week. 

    Gavin did some touch-ups on his animations, and I think they've turned out all very well. The shot that needs the most refining is the moment the burglar gets pulled away from the door, so I've instructed him to invest most of his time into that. As for the issues we've been encountering in Unreal Engine 5, we've still had no luck in fixing that ghosting issue. Gavin has a few ideas to try for week twelve. However, he did manage to remove the bloom from a few shots and tone down the lighting a bit as well. The camera position advice I suggested to him seemed to have worked out very well, as most of the shots look more consistent with their previous iterations now. 

That's all for this week! Thank you for checking in on our progress. As always, I will keep you updated on our progress week to week. 

                                                                                                                       - Christopher Coombs