Update

The rendering of our animation is taking forever. I think the quality settings are way too high because it takes like half a class period to render a single frame. Our animation is a LOT of frames, so I'm worried about how long it's going to take to actually get every scene rendered. 

Update 5/6/16

Our animation was supposed to be due today, but since neither group is done we have another week. Basically everything has broken in our animation. The rigs have gone totally wonky because of some issue with a bend deformer, and probably a bunch of other reasons. None of us really have any clue what happened but we basically have to redo all of the animation, which is super annoying and irritating, mostly because I suck at character animation. Also, the quality settings on our scenes is so high that it's taken like three days to render 200 frames of a shot. From what I've gathered, we can't lower the quality any more or it will all look like garbage. We've tried to spread out the batch renders on as many computers, but we don't exactly have an infinite supply of desktops to render from. I am very worried as to how we're going to animate, render, and composite all of this by next Friday. 

Update 4/28/16

We're finishing up the character lighting in most of the scenes and are actually beginning to render some of the shots out. I spent the last two or three days meticulously copying a variety of lights into a ton of scenes so that our restaurant would have consistent lighting. I think it looks pretty darn good. Major props to Eileen. Right now there doesn't seem to be much left to do with our animation. I think Tyler is polishing his rig up finally. I don't know if we're actually going to use the new rig he built or if he's revising the old one. Regardless, I hope that he gets it straightened up. Other than that, we're just waiting to render so I can start compositing. 

Surfacing

This is some of the surfacing for objects in our animation. Most of my help with surfacing was limited to UV mapping basically every object with a file texture, but I did make some of the really basic materials. I also found all of the paintings that are in the picture frames. 

Playblasted 3D Animatic

This is the tentative version of our playblasted animation without any character meshes or surfaces. I did all of the camera animation. Most of it is pretty basic for now, but once we go in and smooth out the character motion I'll make the camera animation much better. Eileen, Tyler, and Noah did most of the character animation. While they were doing that, I was basically acting as the pipeline manager because I had to flesh out my naming conventions and referencing system. Neither of the characters have the meshes applied because we think something with the references broke. Also, the elbow rig on the guy is not working properly, so some of the animation that requires the guy to lean on his elbow does not look quite right. Tyler promised that he would fix that. Considering everything, I think we made pretty good progress on most of the primary animation. Once we apply the meshes and surfaces to everything, I think we'll be in good shape. 

Update 4/6/16

This week I was supposed to start the camera animation. So far I've set up as many cameras as I can without working in the same scene as someone else. I'm really hesitant to start actually animating any camera motion because the actual character animations have not been done, and my camera animation sort of depends on that. Also, there seems to be some confusion on how many scene files in each environment need to exist and how to name those files. I tried to be as specific as possible when delineating how to name files and when describing which shots on the storyboard need to exist in the same file. Sometimes it's hard for me to get across to my team mates that I need these naming system to be exactly the way I described it or else the referencing will break and I won't know which scenes to animate my camera in. Really most of the work that I'm doing right now is just figuring out how I want the scenes and frames organized. I think I finally understand why being a pipeline manager is considered a whole job within itself. This stuff is ridiculously hard to coordinate within a team of five people. 

Update 3/21/16

Today I started UV mapping the top part of our guy character. I started off with the head. The only parts of the face that were extruded out from the face were the nose and the mouth, so luckily it wasn't too hard to map. Tomorrow I'll probably have the hair UV mapped. Do I actually have to UV map the hair? I'll figure that out.