Week 8 Animation Progress and Unreal VFX

 This week for Advance Production, our team has started fully animating each shot and testing for VFX in Unreal is underway. Most of our shots are in the final blocking stages heading into spline and pose refinement. Some shots need heavy reference to be successful and I will be checking in with the animators with those specific shots to see if they need any additional resources or help that will make animating easier.

Lesly, our layout artist, took on the task to look for and learn VFX in Unreal to add onto shot 17. After some feedback and refinement, shot 17 has been slightly modified to include the monster that was punched in shot 16, to be flying in the background of shot 17 for the final pose. Still aiming to follow the cartoon-style of the animation, we looked for explosions that had that type of visual. Once the VFX was selected, Lesly went ahead and tested the asset in the scene and will be working on testing out the possibility of keying the VFX animation.

Scenes that have the three rigs in one shot have had chances made in terms of scale. The Dude and Spiderman rig have been scaled down significantly as a work-around for the scaling trouble we were facing for the monster. In scaling down the two bipeds, we were able to make the monster appear relatively large.

Shot 13 (as seen below), is still in the works. While setting up the shot, I attempted to follow the layout of the storyboard. I also wanted to continue the pattern of keeping the 'hero' on the left side and positioning the 'evil monster' on the right. While the position is following both rules, I'll be adjusting this scene a bit more to make the monster appear larger to the camera rather than keeping the 'logcial' position in scene.

Continuing on Shot 13, two more monsters are missing that were apparent in the original storyboard. I've made attempts to duplicated the rig and import duplicates but I face repeated maya lags when doing so. I'll be working on fixing this issue this week. 

There's still a lot of work to do overall, and plenty of polishing for the poses. Overall, we will continue working on our shots and unreal effects using feedback and critiques.