Week 7: Gotta Catch 'Em All... Billy Goats!

It's a (very) stormy day in dundee, but we've braved the elements (kind of) to regroup and talk next steps.

We're in heavy testing mode right now, making sure all our rigs do what we need them to do and eliminating what we don't want them to do! Bimpe has finished the Mariachi's rig and blendshapes and they're going through their second round of testing by Ritchie and Yannis. Kaitlin and Amit have almost finished up with the goats and Cristina will be testing these. Once Sushma's troll is ready Natasha and Bimpe will be using and abusing it.

We've also still got our heads in the animation phase and after some of the changes we made last week we thought it would be a good idea to reassess who would be animating what.

As we now have chief animators for each character we decided to pimp out our scenes like they were Pokemon cards.

Chief Character Animators:

Little Goat - Cristina

Middle Goat - Kaitlin

Big Goat - Natasha

Mariachi's - Yannis

Troll (dived up) - Sushma / Bimpe

Once all the rig tests have been done we can pretty much crack on with blovking our scenes and assessing any issues or changes we need to make. We've already anticipated a few camera angle wise, and after a chat with Barry he also suggested we may need to increase and diversify our assets so our scene doesn't look too bare in certain shots like the below.

We've got quite a few things like rocks etc that Natasha has modelled quite differently, and we could probably make a few modifications to Kaitlin's trees just so they were a bit different if we were to need an extra bank of images.

We'll only really be able to access this once we're in the blocking process.

Barry also mentioned colours - we're currently working to the matte painting that Cristina produced and so far we're really happy with this. Again once we start dressing the set and marching our character through it we'll be able to fully access what made need to be changes, be it the landscapes textures of the characters.

We've been doing some quick (and Maya crashing) renders to get a look at our textured models together - Natasha will also be using this for the colour script. 

Ritchie's done an awesome job with getting the goats paper texture to where we needed it. We still have a few bump mapping and colour tweaks to make with the goat so they all look like they belong to the same universe, but Yannis will be continuing to work in this.

Goat bump map