Tuesday, September 27, 2011

This Past Summer

Spring Semester ended on a good note, yet almost everyone was leaving for summer vacation and we still had lots to do. Mainly, we needed our character mods done so that we could move into animation in the fall. I accepted this challenge and started work on our character mods. For those of you who don't know what a "mod" is, its short for a modified rig, where you take a pre-existing rig and modify the mesh and controls to meet your needs. We chose to use "Morpheus", or "Morphy", created by Josh Burton, because of the rigs versatility. We started by using Morphy's standard controls to get each character to look as close to our character turn arounds as possible. Then I started sculpting the face and body to get them even closer to the turn arounds. This process took some time, with myself making progress, showing it to the director, getting feedback, then making necessary adjustments. After the characters where finalized, it was time to start attaching the face and body meshes back onto the rigs. I started running into many different problems during my months of work on this task, yet with lots of creative problem solving and collaboration between our team members and our amazing lab techs, we finished the character mods just before the start of our fall semester! I'm currently in animation on "Just Looking" but once that winds down, I will discuss this modding process in more detail to help others who are modding Morpheus characters of their own.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Start of the Fall Semester

The semester has started and we managed to get a lot done between the summer and fall semesters. Modeling is done, mods have been finalized, and we prepped for animation. Props are nearly all textured and we're working on texturing our characters. I'm happy to say we have started animation this last week. We also are starting lighting tests. Unfortunately, a lot of the crew has been hit with a nasty cold and that limited production this past week, but we're all working to make quick recoveries. This semester we are in full fledge production, with animation and lighting to be the primary focus. We will be posting on here regularly, giving updates on the progress of the film, as well as posting about some of the things we have already gone through during the making of "Just Looking". Hopefully, this blog will be a decent read and helpful to someone.