CAGD 495 Week 13 - Christopher Coombs

     Hello and welcome back to my weekly blog! My name is Christopher Coombs, team leader for the Ape Adhesive project. By the time I write this blog, the animation cut-off will have long since passed. Fortunately, we managed to complete all of our animations in time. A very small number of them still needed a bit more refinement, like our final shot. Otherwise, I think the team did fantastic, especially considering the limited scope of time we had to catch up with the other groups, when the motion capture wasn't working out for us. As for the current progress of our final product, here is how far we've gotten:

    For Brooke's animation, it was mainly just some small touch-ups here and there. I asked her to extend the smile part of her reaction animation just a bit longer and see how natural she could keep the static pose, and I think she did a great job. Brooke also spent time splining out our gorilla for the final shot, which was then passed to me for cleanup. We didn't have much time before the Wednesday cut-off, so it's definitely one of our rougher-looking shots. The rest of her work this week was dedicated to getting started on the poster. I also had the opportunity to work on the poster and help push it in the right direction. We estimate it will be completed around the end of Monday. Luis's work was dedicated to making the face come to life for the chest animation. He added blinking to the burglar, gave them more of an evil expression when looking into the chest, dilated the pupils, and refined the panicked expression for when the burglar is closing the chest. After this, Luis assisted me in working on the audio design. From what I've put together, I'd say that we're about 80% done with the audio design now. Just a few more missing pieces and it'll sound perfect. I added a list of credits at the very end of the video as well. Tyler made some minor tweaks to her animation with the door struggle, and she got to work on a much shorter outro. Gavin spent a significant amount of time working on the project this week. You can immediately tell by watching the video how much the lighting has improved for every shot. Every scene is now fully textured, and the resolution has been brought up to 2560x1440p. Unfortunately, for a shot or two, we were unsuccessful in getting rid of that ghosting issue, but at least we can say that we've tried absolutely everything. As for his animations, all of his work already looked very refined, so there wasn't all too much to change. However, I did feel like we could touch up on the gorilla's smirk as they hold up the glue bottle. Since I wanted Gavin to focus mainly on the renders, I was the one to refine the smirk into a toothy grin before the Wednesday animation cut-off. By far, this has been the most hands-on I've been of all the weeks so far. It's been quite fun, if not an absolute mentally taxing marathon. I'm very proud of my team's hard work. As we approach the fourteenth week, all we really have left to do now is more audio work, the poster, and the special effects for the glue. After that, we will have finally finished our project in its entirety. 

    That's all for now! Thank you for reading, as always! Assuming that this isn't our final blog week, I will be sure to keep you updated on how the final product turns out by the end of next week.

                                                                                                                         - Christopher Coombs