Week 2

Visualizing a Myth

We kicked off our second week by looking at the character designs developed by Muhammad, our Character TD. We also shared the designs with our faculty advisors to get their opinion. Muhammad designed the characters keeping in mind the anatomy of the female body and how it will look when she’d transform into a mermaid. While designing, Muhammad also had to keep in mind hair simulation; should the hair should be open or braided? How would it look underwater? We doubt a real-world hairstylist would have to address many of these concerns.

Niharika worked on creating different materials in Maya, using the software’s Hypershade system. Thinking more about the transformation scene, she also got started researching how to use blendshapes to morph a cube into sphere.

Kristy, our TA and Co-Producer, worked on rendering a sequence using the Arnold renderer in Maya. Using the same reference for the bouncing ball animation, she rendered the entire sequence in Maya.

After learning about rendering, Kristy started researching on hair simulation in Maya. She started looking into creating a braid in Maya using features called nhair and xgen. Meanwhile, Kevin continued to work and research on creating different effects in Houdini. In particular, he was looking into how Houdini can be used to create different particle effects.

Then, we stepped into the Writer’s Room for an in-depth meeting with Chris Klug. We needed a veteran set of eyes to look through the existing script, figure out where to make necessary cuts, and how to center things around the transformation scene. The main takeaway was that we decided to add narration to help in telling Sirena’s story. At the end of the meeting, Chris presented us with several important questions:

• ” Who is the narrator?”
• “Is the tranformation beautiful/painful/happy and how does Sirena feel after it?”
• “Where is the story geographically based”?

By the end of this week, we’d dipped our feet into the animation pipeline and dove headfirst into researching and learning about techniques that would best allow us to bring the transformation to life.