We had our weekly collaboration group catch up on Friday this week. As we’d all been sharing our progress with one another via OneDrive and the school network, there wasn’t much that we had to go over, but a quick check-in is essential for everyone to stay on the same page.
The VFX team discussed with us their thoughts on particle simulation. They’d decided that the best way to go would be to create the work in Maya rather than Houdini, and probably rely on simulations more often than zoetropes. Below is a prototype of the sandstorm effect.
Gherardo has also been working on setting up Act 1 Shot 1, and I’m really impressed with how well it’s come out so far.
It looks great and only requires animation on the spaceship. We talked a little bit about different ways to hide lights on solid objects, specifically in this case, the planets.
As for the animation team, my plan over the weekend is to learn to put some motion capture on Jordan in Act 1 Shot 4. Once I’ve got the hang of motion capture, things will run a lot faster.
Kamil and I spent some time discussing how our spaceship was rigged. Because I’d found that the doors weren’t moving as I needed them to, I’d animated them separately with my own parent constraints in my shots, and I’d done it rather loosely, too, only for the purposes of what I needed in each scene. But what I didn’t realize was that when Kamil then went in to update the rig, it broke the work I’d done on my shot because it was referenced in. So we spent some time discussing the resolution of the issue, and our spaceship is now good to go.
This week will be challenging to make progress as we balance it with our performance animations. My biggest goal is to teach myself motion capture, and we’ll take it from there.