CAGD 545 Animated Short Week 7-12

CAGD 545 Animated Short 

Rough Llama
Mar 9-Apr 13

Week 7-8

These couple of weeks were all about setting up the official scenes.  Every group member was brought onto the same level of understanding, prepping to move forward altogether.  We learned about properly referencing and coordinating assets and scenes.  We also established shots and scenes for assignment to animators.  We got the layout of the story fully conceptualized and polished to a point where we were all happy with.  There is plenty of room for change all around, which is very comforting going forward.  The large discussion of dividing the story into shots was very helpful and made good progress on giving this project a good basis.

The following week was the first step towards animating the official scenes.  I personally worked on a couple of scenes throughout the overall film, testing my animation style from previous warm-ups against the newly modeled environments.  For the most part, all seems to fit together, and it has so far been a great start given the layout now.  I mainly blocked out the scenes, not going too in depth with the animation flow.  I tried to jump around to simply establish each scene, along with potential cameras for playblasts.  Later on, I can come back and tweak once everyone is on board with scene assignment and camera shot positioning.  As an initial setup, this was a good session.

Week 9-10

These couple of weeks were periods of no class.  In the meantime, my focus was primarily continuing blocking of scenes and animation.  Little by little, I picked out scenes I felt most comfortable taking on for the overall film.  I got more and more used to working with the figs and assets, and my visualization of how the end product may look got a little clearer.  Things are starting to near the end, so after this, we may need to pick up the speed in bringing everything together.

Week 11-12

With another class period to work, everyone is busy with blocking out as many scenes as possible and rendering to make a solid animatic.  In addition, the modelers are continuing work on assets, bringing the scenes closer and closer to their final form.  This will probably be the case for many weeks to come.  An animatic should be assembled soon, as the next step is critique and finalization.
An animatic was finally started, and strung together as many rendered shots as possible to convey our story.  So far, there were plenty of scenes blocked out and a lot of things to improve upon.  Luckily, the story still reads fairly well, and is very flexible and open to criticism and improvements all around.