Week 7: Animation Progress

This past week for Advance Production consisted of blocking and animating the rest of the storyboard with the aim of animating shots for feedback and critique for the Monday after Spring Break. Since some poses in the storyboard felt flat and too boring, I encouraged my team to find reference and to add on to the shots a bit to bring some life into it. Following this, each team member worked on their assigned shots individually during this week and partially into the break.

I continued working on the shots I had already blocked out and splined the week prior, adding some touch-ups, adjusting holds, and timing. I had run into some issues that my team was facing when importing the monster rig in Maya. It seemed that in whatever scene the monster rig was imported into, it would affect the playback speed in the time editor when scrubbing through.

This issue seemed to only affect the time editor as it played the shot within the viewport as of it were still in blocked. When playblasted, the issued seemed to resolve itself. I'll be doing some testing of some shots that have this issue by exporting the scene using the alembic cache into Unreal. 

Continuing with my blocking and spline process for my other shots. I decided to add on to the action happening in shot 15. When blocking out shot 15 originally, the action of hitting the monster with both fists was significantly less than half a second in length that was needed for this shot in particular. So I added some additional keys that built up to the action and emphasized the boost in power the man exudes after using the advertised product.

Following the same line of thought, I focused on showcasing the product the most in shot 17. This shot uses this scene to promote the product after defeating the monsters and posing with the can alongside Spiderman. This shot is still a work-in-progress as the can model still needs to be imported. Spiderman also needs to be imported, which involves installing certain plug-ins to use the rig.

After updating the can design, I also worked on updating the ad graphic to better match the color scheme. The texture for the can is ready to go, I just need to do a turntable-type of animation with a greenscreen to add the can to the graphic for the next running edit. This will be done and rendered in Unreal to test the texture export as well.