Well, it is that time. We’ve wrapping up our finals presentation, Melody of Life is through the rendering process, and Agloe is fully boarded and conceptualized.

Agloe Locked

Our Agloe documentation is actually quite impressive, if we may say so. Over the past week, we finished modeling our models for Hans and Cassie, drew beat boards, and wrote up nearly 50 pages of documentation on story, style, and pipeline best practices.

There were definitely places where we had to scope: We thought we would have fully topologized models for next semester’s team to use, but realized that we had gotten a little carried away with the detail in the z-brush sculpt. As a result, the polygon count was astronomically high and re-topology would be a nightmare. Therefore, we pivoted to considering them 3D character designs, and put effort into creating a re-topology guide for the team, should they decide to work with the models we give them. We also had to accept that developing a mood board, asset list, and collection of links to purchase-able 3-D models would have to stand in place of detailed concept art.

In all honesty, we are not sure if what we are giving next team will be of value. Catharsis thought their package was valuable, but turned out to have been mostly useless because they presumed we would have teammates capable of using Unity. We presumed nothing, and created a baseline from which they could build in whatever direction is appropriate for their skill sets, but maybe next semester’s team will want more substance. In the end, we can’t predict what next semester will need, so all we can do is ask ourselves whether we would want to make what we have built, and the general consensus amongst the six of us is that yes, if we had another semester, we would definitely make Agloe.

Getting Melody of Life Spruced Up

As we considered the time we had left and how “on track” we were, compared to the quality of product, we decided to add an additional step to our pipeline: post-production ambient occlusion.

The reason behind this was that we had all of our frames out of the render farm by Wednesday, and they lacked a certain amount of “pop.”

So while we were rendering dropped frames and fixing some sections that had glitched in the farm, our team put together a Nuke pipeline in order to add some nuance to the lighting. Our first time running larger pass in Nuke (large being more than a few frames) was in putting the final animation into the scene. It was risky, but one frame tended to not take more than a five seconds, so how bad could a large batch be?

Turns out, really bad. On a single computer, the render in Nuke would take 2.5 DAYS! We split up the frames between five of our six computers, but that still wasn’t fast enough for our comfort. We only got the last of our frames through the Nuke pipeline on Sunday night, and we still have VFX and sound to add before we even have a single GoProVR version of our film ready. No matter what, though, Friday marks the end.

Once it is on youtube, we will have a version of it posted on the Melody of Life page on this site, but in the meantime…

Our Melody of Life premiere will be this coming Thursday at 4:00. We can’t wait!

Thanks for following us on this crazy journey!