Week 11: Updates before Unreal

 This past week for Advance Production, my team and I focused on refining shots, getting feedback, and testing some troubleshooting solutions in Unreal and Maya for the Monster rig. I also worked on testing the assets for the commercial graphic at the end of the commercial, using green screen keying in Premiere.

In class, we had time to test out a solution for the scaling issue present in the Monster rig. Brian, one of our animators, brought up a possible solution for the issue which involved animating the geo and curves separately, While the export worked in Unreal, the issue this solution presented was that it was time consuming to execute and to make adjustments to the animation itself. 

As we are nearing the end of the semester soon and still need to render the shots in Unreal, I decided to not use this method as it would take too much time for each of our animators to recreate in each shot. As of this moment in time, we'll continue with our previous solution in exporting the animations for the monster separately to scale up in Unreal.

As I was working on adjusting my shots, I had a separate scene prepared for the animations of the monster in Shot 14. There were 3 duplicates of the monster rig in that scene, I was just about ready to wrap up the animations for the monsters. Unfortunately, the scene (and previously incremented saves) have been failing to load in the scenes that have more than 1 monster present. I'll be troubleshooting this issue, assuming its a RAM issue, to recover the file. If not, I'll just start another scene to recreate the animations.

Shot 3A and 3B have now been split between two animators, Vicky and Faris, as a result of the shot reassignment changes that occurred last week. This change was made to address the underdeveloped animation for the background chase that happens in this shot between spiderman and the monsters. This change will be reflected in the next running edit as well while Faris continued working on this shot.

This week we'll continue working on shots that need additional work. Additionally, we'll be starting on importing approved scenes into Unreal, first importing shots that are the most polished and don't need the monster rig in shot. By the end of this week, we'll have some shots rendered in Unreal for our next running edit.