Aaron Sanden – Co Manager
This week was… iffy.
Starting off this week we, Saleesha, Alan, Vinson, and myself met with our adviser to go over dealing with our mo-cap problems. Since everything is ready save for integrating our finished motions, everything past this point is going to be primarily character animating (namely the faces).
Trevor and Vincent worked on cleaning up the motions while Alan and myself implemented them and refined any of the left over problemed areas i to the bulk of the scenes. Saleesha worked on coordinating our efforts as a lot of our process was on rapid firing our scene developments and the new numbering system we started using hadn’t been thought through just yet (translation, without her actively directing us we would have been lost as to what goes where. An error we seek to correct in the upcoming week) Michelle in particular handled VP_060 which required far more intensive motions that we were unable to focus on at the time. And for the most part our system went well.
Ethan worked on refining the poster based on last weeks critiques and it is coming along quite nicely.
Joe worked on crowds.
…ok, now for the negative; as I must once again restate that this show is going to be a shitshoot. Putting aside that our work schedules had the showcase slated for the following week instead of this one. The core problems of this week were two fold.
First would be that several motions were not defined properly during our first go around and could not be implemented; resulting in a loss of time as they had to be reworked.
The second would be that the bulk of our team were not made aware that our lead heroine’s simulations do not work properly if the scene does not start from frame one; resulting in a lot of our renders needing to be re-rendered to avoid having a show full of balding, half naked Ava. Additionally Ava hasn’t been optimized yet, so her mere presence still causes the scene to render at 15min per frame (and hardware isn’t much faster) So the render team never stood a chance.
( *editors note: Third, yet another goddamn server crash won’t let us grab our .mov files for the comp…. thank you so much Drexel -_-*)
I can already tell now this is going to be a trainwreck and this is a revelation that surprises absolutely no one. But rather than dwell on it, we’re just gonna take the hit and get back to work. The good news is despite whatever we end up pulling out, most of the scenes have been completed and only really require facial animation and some minor editing tweaks. Michelle is already getting to work on solving our Ava issue (she has personally scheduled a meeting with me to solve our sims issue) and we have a meeting slated with our adviser to discuss our render layers and various bug fixes.
I do still feel optimistic that we can pull this off, despite a general irritation that problems like these are still arising this late into the game; and I know much of the team shares my sentiment. The redshift renders we do have look fantastic and all our assets have come together rather nicely. The only true hurtles left would be animation and those goddamn render times; which we are working to amend.
End of Week Synopsis: ….Goddamn it Drexel… just…. goddamn it.
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