Week 4: Prop and Scene Check

 For this week's animation progress, we tested out a lot of the rig's capabilities and tried to troubleshoot the exporting process from Maya to Unreal.

We started by going over and testing some props and decor in Maya before loading them into Unreal. The ones that did work as intended were the rigged snowman, the tree, the box, and some decor. Currently, we are still looking to get some additional props that will be used during the fight like the skateboard and a cookie that match the aesthetic of the animation style. Once they are tested and approved, they will be added to the Christmas Scene Items sheet to be organized as seen below.

We also have collected a short list of royalty free music we plan to use and are currently using for our running edits. As we move forward with the animation, I plan to add more SFX and custom sound design as well. At the end, we'll have an accurate list to create the credit list for.

While working on the Spline animation for this week, we ran into issues with David's rig. The eyes would get a weird shape, his face would swell, the shaders wouldn't show in Unreal, or the animation wasn't exported correctly to play in Unreal. So we learned how to do an Alembic export for this process to get the animation working in Unreal. We got the animations to work in Unreal and were still missing the textures, which were fixed by applying the shaders in Unreal.

The upcoming week we'll be working on starting the animations for the project and finalizing the layout of the scene with the props we've tested out to work and have the correct textures applied to them.