Today the team had a serious team meeting in the morning to discuss the progress of the films. Whilst we are all working hard we agreed that we need to worker harder, faster, and longer if we intend to complete everything for the degree show. Unfortunately the dissertation has become a hinderance to all of us and caused the production to fall way behind schedule. With so many days off for essay writing it is hard to pick up the momentum from where we left off.
Thankfully Splay has enjoyed recent success with test renders looking amazing, textures almost complete and rigging well underway. However P.O has taken a turn for the worse with blendshapes dragging, the light setup causing ridiculous render times, and textures taking longer than expected. As well as all this the rigging is lying firmly in Daves hands, who, at present is rigging Splay. With no new visuals to inspire I must admit I've been a bit disheartened with progress. We simply must start animating midway through the term, but to do that Ed needs to be textured and rigged with facial controls attached - something that is proving to be very time consuming.
As a result I have set immediate deadlines:
Dave must complete a fully functional torso rig by next friday.
Simon must texture the bed by next friday.
Alec must model and rig the oxygen tube and mask, aswell as sort out lighting and help with animation by next friday.
Grigsby must finish all of Jeds textures by this friday, aswell as test skin and wall textures for Ed and Jed by next friday.
Spence must have Ed, the sink and the radiator Uv'd by this friday.
Phil has kindly agreed to chip in with any spare texture/s
I must have all of Ed's blendshapes and test facial controls complete by this Thursday.
I dont want to be a nasty director, I love my team, but reality has kicked in and I know now that if we keep shrugging off these deadlines and messing about all day we will never achieve the film we all want so badly.
On a more positive note Alec, Grigsby and I stayed behind late tonight in an attempt to render out a decent shot of Ed in mid terror. I really wanted to check that the model looked nice coloured and lit, and more importantly that the blendshapes looked good. Test animations proved difficult due to limited controls and unfinished blends however we managed to get him waking up with a fright - until Maya crashed. Therefore I cant post the little test but we concluded all was fine as long as a decent facial setup is attached and the model is smoothed properly.
We did however manage to render out a nice still of Ed in action. Alec set up a few lights, then we applied a coloured blinn with a subtle fractual texture. The first test was AWFUL....
But after a smooth, an occlusion pass, and light and texture changes we stumbled across something half decent....
Maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel....
This looks awesome, especially considering it has no texture. I'd keep the skin texture really SIMPLE Grigs.
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