CAGD 495 Week 9 - Christopher Coombs

     Hello, and welcome back to my weekly blog for the Ape Adhesive project! My name is Christopher Coombs, team leader of the project, and I have a few updates to share regarding our animated commercial.  Firstly, here is the progress that we've made by the end of this week:

  
  Our teacher, Frank, had several ideas that he wanted us to demo this week, and I believe we've covered all of them. Firstly, we managed to fix the consistency issue where the moment the robber lands, he's already turned around facing toward the room. Frank also wanted us to add a part where our robber looks up the stairs, then turns to the left and notices the chest on the table. I left this one to Brooke. Upon completion, the animation ran pretty slow, so I had to speed it up. I was hoping that in doing this, we could get a longer hold on the chest. However, with the other clips I'll be mentioning shortly, we were far too constrained on time to achieve this.  Luis's shot also had to change quite a bit. He was responsible for the scene where the burglar interacts with the chest. The teacher instructed us to cut the last third of the animation and have the whole thing going on from the perspective of the treasure chest. It was timed pretty well, but I think the hold when the burglar turns around to see what's behind them should last just a touch longer. Instead of him turning to run away, I thought it'd be a cool idea for the whole shot to fade to black and cut the moment the burglar grabbed the item in a panic, so I had him animate that. Speaking of panic, Frank also wanted us to add a scene of the gorilla applying glue to the door, in which the sound would startle the burglar and cause him to run away. I felt this one could go a lot quicker, so I touched up the speed in Premiere. For the part where the burglar gets stuck to the door, it went by extremely fast originally. Tyler managed to slow it down considerably. Of all the shots in the entire animation, if we managed to spare a few seconds, I'd invest them in that shot of the arm pulling back on the glue. That's the only part I think is going by too fast. The final change made in our animation compilation was done by Gavin, who repositioned the hand of the gorilla so that it was holding up the glue closer to its chest with the bottle in clear view. Overall, I think my group did solid work, but I'll need to go over the timing of their clips one more time tomorrow so that by the end of next week, these animations are sped up big time. With the edits I made in Premiere, I was just barely able to get it under 30 seconds. Before I wrap this update up, I should probably note the progress on our rope asset. I asked Brooke if she wanted to work with a UE5 simulated rope or have a rope rigged in Maya. She preferred the latter, so she's been working on rigging a rope this week that she modeled in the previous. From what she told me earlier in the week, she's having trouble rigging it in FK. Assuming nothing has changed by Monday, I'll probably take a look at it and see if I can rig the rope myself. 

That's all for now! Thanks for checking in, and see you in next week's update!

                                                                                                           - Christopher Coombs

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