Midsummer Update

Allison, Ryan, and I have continued working this summer, starting with our technical problems.

Texture pathing: Our textures were pathing all the way back to the server instead of remaining in the project folder that we were working in. After talking with Jeremy Brown, one of our instructors, we found out that when using udim tiles in Arnold, the files will always reference back to the farthest server. He also showed us how to quickly repath files if we ever had to move our project folder.

Referencing: We did an initial pipeline test, but for some reason the rig was breaking on our object, both when we used it in its original file and when we referenced it into the scene layout. After doing several more tests with different modeled objects, we determined that the first model was corrupted somehow, and that the rig itself was not applied correctly. It seems our pipeline works now! But we will be doing more tests in the future.

Special Effects: One of our special effects that we still haven't quite figured out is a moment when a street cracks open and fire shoots out. The cracking ground has been giving us trouble since we don't have a lot of experience in Houdini, the program we would like to use, and there doesn't seem to be recent tutorials that produce the look we want. Both Allison and I have researched several different ways to accomplish this, but we haven't found a solution yet.

Another effect that we needed was for a balloon to pop. Allison found some interesting ways we can do so in Houdini but ran into trouble keeping the balloon inflated at the same size before the popping. We fixed the problem in 2 ways: the balloon would start as Maya geometry and then swap out with the Houdini popped geometry, and I altered the animatic so that we don't see the balloon the moment it pops.

Ryan has finished modeling the basemesh for our first character, one of the background humans. He has begun rigging it with the clothing that Allison created in Marvelous Designer, since our cloth will be rigged instead of simmed.

Allison is working on the character designs as well as their coloring. She is also going to start test modeling and texturing some trees.

I am making some changes to the storyboard animatic as well as re-creating some of the scenes. An updated animatic will be put up soon!