Week 5: New Shots, Blocking, and Graphics

 In this last week for Advance Production, we focused on animating assigned shots and addressing some rig issues.

This week, I worked on polishing my blocking poses for shot 15 using reference. I used a YouTube reel as a reference that was essentially a tutorial on throwing a left hook punch. In spline, I am aiming to hold the first pose a bit longer before closing in the middle two poses  closer together for the punch. To establish a rough estimate of where the monster will be, I used a sphere with some basic movement that the monster will also follow.

The reason as to why the sphere is being used as a placeholder for the moment is that the monster rig has no world scaling control. The rig is not able to scale in unison for the X, Y, and Z directions to match the proportion of the dude rig. So our team will be taking some time to see if we can resolve the issue in Maya by making some changes to the rig. If not possible, the animation will be done to the scale it is in Maya and then scaled up in Unreal, not ideal but it would be our back-up.

As our animators worked on their respective shots, I handed off the task of rendering out Shot 1 in Unreal to Lesly as she is working on our Unreal Scene. She is also taking on the task to figuring our the NPC animations and car animations to our Unreal scene.

I was able to test out some designs for our shot 18 that ends our animation by advertising our product: the energy drink. I decided to lean into the superhero theme of our animation and went with bold colors and a comic book style for the visuals. I do feel that the design is a bit too warm for my liking so I'll be doing some changes to the background color to a light blue granite for more contrast in the image and to allow the words to stand out more.

The animations on the graphic still need some fine tuning on the timing but I'll likely keep the pop effect on it. In addition, the graphic for the energy drink can still needs to be rendered out so that it can be inserted to the shot. I'll be working on making these changes and getting the rendered image for the next running edit.

This week, our team will continue working on their assigned tasks, make changes to their shots using the critique they receive, and we will continue troubleshooting the scaling issue on monster rig for our animation.