Christopher Coombs CAGD 495 - Blog

      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 cleanu...

    Hello, again, and welcome back to my weekly blog! My name is Christopher Coombs, team leader of the Ape Adhesive. At the end of this week, our group has made significant progress in refining our animations. Judging by the work I have seen tonight, I can confirm we are around 90% complete with the entire animation process. Here is what work we have to show for our twelfth week:     Starting with Brooke's work, she refined shot 3 immensely. No longer do I need to increase the speed of the burglar looking around in Premiere, as it now matches the intended speed one-for-one. The burglar's turn toward the camera is very smooth, and she added a bit of a hold at the end, as requested by our instructor. We also have a longer hold for the chest and the reaction afterwards. If the holds need to be any longer, that is totally doable. We have a little more time to spare for that than we did in the previous week. If there was one thing I'd change, it's how the burglar's head...

      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, ...

      Hello again, and welcome back to my weekly blog! My name is Christopher Coombs, team leader of the Ape Adhesive project, and I have some new updates to share for our commercial. This is what we managed to create by the end of the tenth week:      The first significant change we made was reanimating the third shot, where the burglar is looking around the room. Initially, the movement was a touch too slow, and the reactions were too expressive. Brooke managed to tone down these poses quite a bit. Now, when the burglar looks up at the stairway, he doesn't do so with his whole body. The turn from the stairs towards the direction of the camera is also much faster now. Brooke was also working on rigging a rope for our scene. I managed to help her out with it quite a bit. She says it is nearly done now.  For Luis's scene, he got his animation into spline and began the refining process. We also now have a gold light that emanates from the chest for that ...

      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.  Lui...

    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...

      Welcome back to my blog, everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and I am the team leader for the Ape Adhesive commercial. Similar to the previous week, this one was rather hectic for our group. We managed to resolve all the issues we had with the vertical sync last week and submitted it on Tuesday night. Following that, our primary objective for the week was to prepare as much as possible for this coming Monday, when we will be recording our shots in the motion capture room. One of the most important steps we needed to take to achieve this goal was creating more reference material. To better establish the boundaries of our scene and the scale of our characters, proportional to the inside of the house, I had Gavin throw our models into our UE5 project. Now we have a relatively good idea of how much space we have to work with, and roughly how high the arms need to go to reach over the table where our treasure chest will be.          As you c...

     Hello again, and welcome back to my blog for Week 3! My name is Christopher Coombs, and I have many updates to share  regarding our team's progress on the Ape Adhesive commercial. As of today, Tyler, our group's After Effects specialist, has finished recreating that awesome glue effect from the previous week using a door handle this time. I encouraged her to match our shot in the storyboard and act as if her hand was actually stuck to the handle in one of those cartoonish rubberbandy ways. Here is the final result:       I think it turned out really well, and it will certainly be great reference footage when animating this shot in the future. Another detail I liked is how drippy she made the glue look on the handle of the door. As for the feedback I gave roughly an hour before making this post, I told her that for the final product, she could make the glue look a little more webby and increase the opacity a little bit so it's not too see-thro...

      Hello again, everyone! This is Christopher Coombs, and I have quite a few updates regarding my team's progress in our initial weeks of pre-production for the big Super Bowl commercial. Firstly, due to copyright reasons, our group needed to ditch the old Gorilla Glue name. As of right now, we've rebranded and are now calling our product Ape Adhesive. We are unsure if this will be a temporary placeholder name or our permanent title, but I do like it. As for a follow-up on the end of last week, Luis and I finished building the shotlist for our storyboard artists, Gavin, Brooke, and Tyler.  They managed to blast through their assigned tasks in less than two days. Not only that, but the storyboard panels look really good, too. I'm very proud of their work and feel quite lucky to be leading such a productive team. Following this on Tuesday, I compiled these shots into a short animatic for our Wednesday presentation. Of course, as ambitious as we were, we've just bare...

         Part 1 (Group Progress in Part 2)      Hello everyone! My name is Christopher Coombs, and welcome to my Advanced Production (CAGD 495) blog! Unfortunately, due to some complications, the Wednesday class was cancelled, and this coming Monday will be a school holiday. Due to these delays, the class hasn't moved beyond introductions so far. Hopefully, by Wednesday, we'll finally get introduced to our groups and learn which ideas have been picked for our big project. Of course, this does not mean I accomplished nothing during our first week of class. Most of my time this week was dedicated to completing our animation evaluation. For this assignment, we were required to recreate a small 5-6 second section of the iconic staircase dance scene from the Joker movie. Unfortunately, I haven't animated too much this summer, so getting started on this project was very difficult for me at first. I always find starting to be the hardest part whenever I ...