Week 6: Blocking and New Graphics

 This week for Advance Production, we continued working on assigned shots, Maya scenes, and redesigning the product. Our team animators continued working on their assigned shots, making changes in timing and camera angle where necessary based on the feedback they received from critique.

As we are now moving on to blocking out the second half of the storyboard, I was working on creating a base scene in Maya for placement reference using the assets from our Unreal scene. As I tried importing the assets from Unreal to Maya, some issues came up with the textures and render that caused various issues and drastically slowed down the scene, making it difficult to navigate the scene with the camera alone.

This is a task I'll be tackling the upcoming week so that our animators have something to reference before leaving for break.

For my shots, I worked on splining and polishing the poses. For shot 12 after I splined the animation, I added some basic facial animation and readjusted the timing. Looking at it now through the playblast and in the weekly video, I'll be adding a hold on the final pose to follow through to Shot 12B, this would mean that the animation would roughly be 2 seconds long. My stretching this clip out a bit more, I'll be able to slow down the camera movement which would allow for the animation to be more readable.

Just as for shot 12, I worked on splining, timing, and adjusting the curves for shot 14. After reworking this from the blocking from the week prior, I made changes to the COG and most notably on the last pose to keep a feeling of continuous momentum when hitting the opponent. To complete this scene, I'll be integrating the monster rig and animating the monster's impact after being hit.

I decided to remake the product label design after creating the ad graphic last week. In the spirit of following our overarching superhero theme, I decided to make a superhero themed energy drink label. Most of it was a change of font, color, and changing the background design to resemble a comic book vibe.

After completing the first draft, I imported the image into substance to test out the shade of blue on the can. The design stands out which is what I was going for. But I do feel that it still needs some improvement. This upcoming week, I'll continue modifying this design, retexturing, and continue keeping track of our animation process while providing feedback on current shots.