Fall Week 5 PPJ | Victoria Loyo

The past couple of weeks I have been expanding on the character design. We have progressed a lot with our story so because of that we decided to expand and add as many different versions of the character as possible so that we, as a whole team, can choose what specific one gets closer to the version we want. There was a meeting and some decisions made, we decided on a specific animation style and I had to redraw the characters as their new style. I have also made orthographic images of both the child model and the adult model.

What made the Goats Scream 

There has been a significant improvement over the past weeks with our story and this has helped us get more of a realized concept that we want. The characters have changed a bit and I think for the better.

What made the Goats Cry 

I asked my group for animation style for the drawings and got just a couple of responses that didn’t actually answered the question so I went with an animation/drawing style that, when we met, they didn’t like. (-.-) I was very frustrated at the time because as I was showing it they just stared in silence (clearly hating it) and their comment was “it’s not the animation style I was picturing”. So I said, “I asked you guys a couple of days ago…”(trying not to kill them). We talked and resolved it, I made the corrections and we are fine but it was definitely something that could’ve been avoided.

There was also a confusion with our second pitch, we definitely didn’t explain the story as we should’ve.

Fall Week 5 | Team PPJ

It seems like just yesterday we were writing our Week 03 PPJ. Time is flying by super fast. Our Week 03 was composed of one-on-one meetings with 4 different faculty members. We did not want to touch the story until we got our  4 professors to give us their two cents. They gave a lot of helpful and insightful suggestions, and as a team, we chiseled down the ranging spectrum of advice, and we have sculpted what now is our final story. We were fairly confident going into the faculty pitch; a lot of concerns we had in previous versions were answered with our newest iteration. Unfortunately, our storyboards could not tell our story as well as we could in our heads. Even with last minute touch-ups to the storyboards, the shots just did not read to our audience. This is our biggest challenge. But we are confident we will get there.

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We have become a lot more organized over the past week. We started to use Basecamp and we find it very useful in keeping everything on track. Kathy sorted out our pipeline and file naming conventions, so our file storage is a lot cleaner and efficient. This organization helped us more easily recognize and prioritize our tasks, so our group branched off and got a lot done this week. Elif and Elly spent a few hours in the Mocap room, capturing data for our animatic. We made use of an existing character model we built for a previous class, so Sam has been working on touching up the topology for a base model that we can use to sculpt our characters with. Kathy and Victoria have been working on concept art and asset research. And Lawrence has blocked in our environments that we will use for our animatic. We can all agree that the term is moving quicker than we thought, but we are moving forward in all areas!

What Made the Goats Scream

We are getting a lot done! We cleaned up nice over the week with pipeline design and the use of Basecamp. Our milestone for the end of the term is to have a complete animatic, and we are definitely moving toward that direction at a decent pace. We also got our hands dirty with V-Ray this past week for our ANIM411 assignments, which makes rendering seem not so scary anymore.

What Made the Goats Cry

The faculty pitch made us cry. We have the story, but we just do not have the visual cues and tropes in place to present our story clearly. We do have a number of ideas for visual cues, but we need to implement them asap into something whole that we can show an audience for “play-testing”. Again, time is moving very quickly and it is pretty scary! We have a lot to get done before the end of Fall Term, so we really have to push through the next couple weeks and have some strong deliverables. More quality bonding time in the labs should help with that! 🙂

Fall Week 5 PPJ | Elly Nemtsov

So a good portion of Week 03 was spent meeting with 4 different faculty members, one-on-one. And those meetings pretty much determined where our story was headed going into the Week 04 Faculty Pitch. There were a lot of very insightful thoughts and suggestions from the professors, so we tried to pick out bits and pieces from each meeting and mold it into our story. And I’m happy where the story is! Now the challenge is to be able to visually tell our story and get an audience on board with it!

Our storyboards were well framed, but still very roughly drawn before the presentation. So the night before, I took over and tried my best to add emotion to the characters and add visual cues to make the story flow. And even though those little additions were recognized during the presentation, we still got crickets after letting our animatic run. Unfortunately the only time we visually show our story to an audience is at our faculty pitches, and each time, we’ve gotten a harsh wake-up call!

ANIM411 Assigment that might have prepared us for rendering issues in the future

Last week, Elif and I spent a few hours in the Mocap room capturing data for our animatic. I feel like we both have a good grasp on how the characters should act, so it was fun watching Elif bring the boys to life (especially since it was her first time in the suit)! I had to head home for Yom Kippur from Tuesday to Thursday, so I didn’t have a lot of time to work. And when I came back to Philly, I ended up spending the weekend troubleshooting 20min-60min/frame render times for my ANIM411 assignment.

But even though this wasn’t a task for Senior Project, I was forced to dive deeper into V-Ray, which I had never done. So I could have some solutions for rendering issues that our group might run into in the future!

What Made the Goats Scream

I am really happy that I was forced to delve into V-Ray. I know a lot of past projects have had rendering issues too late in the game, so hopefully this nightmare of a weekend will have prepared us for future issues.  I’m also happy that we have a good amount of motion capture data; we might need that animatic boost ASAP to help visualize our story.

What Made the Goats Cry

The crickets after running our animatic at the pitch was pretty bad. I want to just spend all my time fixing up the storyboard and creating a clearer visual representation of our story, but I know time is of the essence and my time is more valuable elsewhere (rigging).

Fall Week 5 PPJ | Lawrence Lighty

So this week I worked on the environments for our scenes. I began with creating the basic exterior for the motel.  Also, I started work on developing the lay out for the well scene.  For the last location for this week, I worked on the garage parking lot location. All of these are very rough, but it’s good to tackle this has soon as possible. We’ll be able to use these rough locations, just to see how our characters will move in these spaces.

What made the goats scream

While working on the environment, I felt like I got a better glimpse of what our final project could look like.

What made the goats scream

While creating the locations, I constantly kept thinking about the large amount of assets we will need in our scenes.  It seems overwhelming, but I realize that you just got to take it day by day, model by model.

Fall Week 5 PPJ | Kathy Fu

The past two weeks have been extremely productive in terms of story development! With feedback from all the professors, we finally settled our story! I spent most of my time creating the rough storyboards, concept art, and pipeline design/file organization. I also started the asset list which included all the models needed.

Reading Letters

 

What Made The Goats Scream

For me the best thing in the past two weeks is that we have became a lot more organized. Our files have been very messy and unorganized on the google drive. But since I worked on the pipeline and set up folders on the server and started using Basecamp, things have became more organized and clear!

What Made The Goats Cry

Because the storyboards were so rough, a lot of the story was not clear through the animatic which we did not explain. During the presentation, a lot of the questions brought up by the faculty were actually answered in the one scene showing the letter from the mother. I think I might have focused too much on how the shot was framed instead of making sure that the audience could understand the story.

 

Fall Week 5 PPJ | Sam Ortiz

This week I spent time fixing the topology for a base model. While this model won’t be used in our final product, we will use it as a reference point for our character rigs. I have started to create rough character models in Zbrush as well. I have also done asset research which is pretty much looking at assets we will have in our animation and looking for good references on size design that would work in the world we are building.

What made the goats scream

I am happy with the story and all that is left to do is make the scenes fit together. I am also quite confident in my Zbrush skills as well

What made the goats cry

The amount of work left for us to do and with the time left is a bit worrying. Time is passing us by so quick and it feels like we have so much left to do. As long as we keep our schedule we should be fine.

Fall Week 5 PPJ | Elif Yargic

Since we changed our story, I had to do mocap again. Last week I acted out and Elly helped me capture. This time it took longer to capture because we have more shots. This was my first time wearing the suit and although the suit was very smelly, it was fun to act. We didn’t have any trouble capturing the data. The only difficulty I had was acting out Billy when he falls backwards into the well. We tried to use the big ladder in the studio but it was shiny and reflected as markers. I climbed on a very small ladder and as I was acting out, I almost actually fell. I got so scared! Later on I cleaned up all the data in Blade. I was very happy to see that they were initially pretty clean. If there was a prop in the scene or when I am sitting down, I had to clean up the blocked markers. I never had this problem before, but when I exported the data as .fbx and brought into MotionBuilder, I had no data whatsoever. Some of the shots had 3 markers (no skeleton!). I figured they might have been corrupted somehow when I exported them so I went back to my cleaned up data and exported all the shots again. It worked! I am currently working in MotionBuilder characterizing all the shots and editing them in story mode. I hope to have the animatic done by our meeting with Nick on Wednesday.

What made the goats scream

We finally have a refined story that we like. Now that we figured out the story we should move on to creating the models and rigs so that we can start to animate in Winter.

What made the goats cry

I feel like the time is passing by so fast and it scares me. I hope we can deliver everything on time as we promised. As a team we should definitely work harder to achieve more.

First time in suit!

Mocap Fun

Cleaned up data in Blade