Week 10

All Together Now

This week we were finally back as a whole team! This meant that we could finally reconvene and get on the same page for production moving forward. On the other hand, this meant crunch time has officially started, and so we had to create firm deadlines and take them seriously.

We began the week by printing out each shot of our 3D animatic and pasting them to the wall.

Into the Deep

Now that everyone had their individual goals set, we could get hard at work on nailing the individual scenes. It took some time to get a good flow going, but with some guidance from our faculty instructors, we were able to garner a firm understanding of how to get things done without completely working in silos.

Kristy finished the bun that Sirena will have her hair in for the above-water sequence. She also added a flower, something the whole team really liked upon seeing it in action. We felt it added more authenticity and detail to the character, and helps the scenes visually later on.

Muhammad finished the rig for Sirena in her human form, and began work on the mermaid version. He determined the best way to get it to work would be to take what he created for the human rig, and map the tail to a single leg.

Niharika got a feel for how to best work with the new rig, as well as the medallion Sirena wears around her neck, which is important to the story.

After gathering feedback, Yikai refined the calm wave animations to give it a more relaxing, natural look:

Wiki-Mania

Another area we have ventured into is adding content to the ETC Wiki. One of the things we realized this semester was that, since there is an ETC animation team every year, it would be extremely useful to have a resource where teams can pass down what they learned to future students on their animation projects. While blog posts like these are a valuable way to regularly update what we’re learning, it’s not the most accessible resource for ETC students to page through. Having something more streamlined, we feel, could add value in a different way.

Of course, something like this will take many people to build out, but creating a foundation is something we think will be helpful moving forward.

If you are reading this and just so happen to be one of those future teams, we’d love it if you could contribute anything here!

That’s all for next week, look forward to more exciting development and iteration with you next time!