Semester 2 Blog Post 2 - Piling Up on Animation

Honestly, I'm kind of surprised at how well all of this is going for us at the moment. It makes me feel like I should be preparing for something really bad to happen in the future, even though, logically, I know that we're doing everything in such a way that nothing too terrible should occur no matter what happens. I'm wondering if I should make a backup of our X-Drive on a hard drive as well as on my Google Drive, as I already have it there. But we'll see I guess. For now, I think it's alright. Still kind of scared the other shoe is going to drop though.

We did end up having a major issue with our set scene actually, funnily enough. We had a whole standup meeting today to talk about it and what we should do to fix it. Honestly that standup was super duper helpful. I needed that, and I think the rest of our group did too. It got us all on the same page, and helped us all know exactly what each other is doing. It allowed me to finish building our schedule up until Halloween!!! So now we have another month or so down and prepped, and the asset and shot lists that I remade are working well too!! I'm so glad I did that. Not only is it easier to follow, but I am just so stupidly proud of them and the way they're set up. I want to show them off to everyone!!

Either way, back to the set. Lucy was very on top of it and super helpful for taking one for the team and figuring that out for us. I know she's been struggling lately with her mental health, and will be taking a day off on Tuesday next week, but she's just doing so well and I'm so proud of her and her effort. Same for everyone else too!! Everyone is doing amazing!! Lucy decided she's going to modularize our set, and then possibly lock the outliners of the references. We learned a big lesson to not mess with references in the outliner after importing them. Foster parents are scary. . .and I mean that in the animation sense. I'm sure most human foster parents are just fine. I am looking forward to seeing how the modular sets work out!!

Pretty much all of our 2D animation is done, finished, complete, etc. Isabel is putting together the last bits of text and effects for it!! So theoretically by next Tuesday we will have all of that completely finished!!! As for 3D animation, that is starting for "real" next week. I've got Isabel, Lila, and myself working on that stuff for now. I focused on shots that don't have the cat or lots of background characters in it. Because Bartholemew isn't rigged yet, and will take Rianne some time. Hopefully our scenes with the three main yarn balls will have lots of new animation by the next production pass!! I'm excited!! Also, through modularizing the set, everything will have color too!! Nothing will be gray and boring anymore!! The textures obviously aren't going to be anything fancy, just an AI standard on everything until Ash, Cal, and Lucy get around to doing more heavy duty texturing, but it will be colorful!! I'm looking forward to seeing color.

And speaking of textures, about half of everything has UVs now!! Yaayyyy!!! Celebration for that. Ash has been plowing through those. She's even going to try and finish up all the models involving rigs this weekend so that everything, and I mean everything, can be rigged!!! Then she's going to start working more on textures, though she'll still be doing some UVs. I want our UVs done by the end of the semester. I was hoping middle, but we'll see where we get to, honestly. We're very much on/ahead of schedule. I'm thinking that every shot will have at least some cursory animation on it by the end of the semester, and will be moving mostly well. And I think we'll have a fair amount of our textures too.

I'm really looking forward to doing some animation. I love scheduling and keeping track of everything, but at this point I really just wanna get my hands on the yarn balls and animate some cute scenes!!! Of course I'll still be keeping track of the schedule and sheets. That's never going to change. I believe in us!! We're going to do great!!