Week 9: Refining Shots and Work-Arounds

 This past week for Advance Production, we continued working on refining shots, touching up the Unreal scene, and finding another work-around for the monster scaling issue.

With the critique we received in class, I took down notes of the suggestions made to which shots and allocated them to their assigned animator. This included adding holds, prop adjustments, and providing reference videos for certain shots. Below is one of the reference videos I sent one of our animators, Vicky, for Shot 16, who did an amazing job of identifying and blocking out the poses for.

Additionally, we worked to find a solution to the scaling issue with the monster rig. We tried exporting a scaled up version of the rig from Unreal as an FBX and OBJ, but neither worked in Maya. Thanks to the efforts of Lesly, we got a functioning reference rig through an alembic cache export from Unreal. The export itself does present some texture issues but works well for the purpose of size reference.

I used this monster reference model within my own shots. With the new model, I was able to made the adjustments needed for Shot 13, with the appropriate scale. As well as make any adjustments needed in relation to poses to match the scale for the monster. 

After including the new model, the movements in Shot 14 is missing some more impact and follow through which I'll be changes to this week,

In the running edit for this week, I uploaded two versions as suggested. The first version includes all the shots planned in the original storyboard which has a runtime of roughly 29 seconds exactly. The second version, excludes shot 8 and 9 (the falling and landing shot). The runtime of this new version is 27 seconds, which provides wiggle room for the more action packed shots. 

I feel that including shot 9 at minimum could help smooth out the readability of story as it transitions from the rooftop to the ground. Additionally, I would reduce the shot time to half a second at max as the animation doesn't need that much time to play out.

I'll be asking for input on this during the next class and discuss this with my team as well.