As the final week before Spring Break and GDC, this week was filled with preparations for halves presentations. Also, after some discussion, decided to restructure our schedule to make sure we were better prepared to hit our deadlines and have a finished piece at the end of the semester.

The week was spent with our technical artists chipping away at their respective tasks. Emily worked on lighting scene two while Luo worked on creating the transition.

After a few days of experimenting with Houdini, Luo decided it was better for the sake of time to attempt the look of our transition in Maya since it is a much more familiar piece of software.

Emily spent the week placing lights in Scene 2 and rendering our the necessary angles. However, we began falling behind on renders. After meeting with our mentor, John, we decide to consolidate our direction and restructure our schedule.

Rather than going scene-by-scene, we decided to complete the entire animation roughly and then continue in passes. While we had structured this way originally, due to missed deadlines for motion capture we moved forward without completing Scene 4. Thus, Emily took up the mantle to begin putting Scene 4 together based on our storyboard.

Brian also decided to assist with Scene 4 by completing a rough pass on the motion capture data. Brian considered this to be a truly great learning experience and really enjoyed getting to be hands on with the mocap data.

Brian, Catherine and Wenyu continued refining the Sea of Stories pre-production and have developed rough outlines for the experience.

Catherine continued her work on the music for Lovers Meet, creating more concepts and creating a chart to visualize the emotion and tempo of the score as the piece progresses.

The team is diverging over the next two weeks… The first for Spring Break, and the second for GDC. Luo will remain in Pittsburgh working on the transition. When we return, we will have plenty of updates!