Welcome to the Pinata apocalypse

And another chapter of our glorious 3D animation saga begins!

This next week is gonna be a really key week for us, to make sure that we're not rushing rendering / compositing  (and basically finish everything), all animation needs to be completed and finalised by the end of next week.

No pressure there. We've got this.

All texturing for the assets and landscape is finished (no more tweaking!! We hope) and the same goes for the Troll rig despite Sushma and Bimpe's best efforts to keep perfecting him. He has the most complicated scenes so he really needs to be handed over to the animators now so they can start work and so we can all sleep easy.

Kaitlin was having a couple of hiccups with the UV maps and textures for the plants, but she's managed to sort this all out with some really good results.

She and Natasha have been dressing the scene ready for Amit to add some lighting and Gamma correction (woo Gamma!)

Now... this has had some very fun (apocalypse-esque) results.

Prepare your eyes for the GAMMA GLORY!!

Glorious.

In terms of sound design, Yannis is in possession of a glorious guitar and will be working on the music over the next week - he's already played us a little demo of what he's thinking and we're all really happy with it! So it's allll coming together.

One of the key things this week was figuring out a way of copying an animation sequence from one scene to another without re-keying everything. We'll really need this for scenes like when the goats walk past the troll - it means we can just copy the walk cycle from the chief animators and key frame the extra character in the scene around it.

After a bit of searching, confusion and general hunger, Yannis came up with a great way to do this. He's also tested this quite thoroughly which means it should work with the animations we're attempting.

Huzzah.

Rigging heaven.

We can finally almost say that all rigging has been DONE - once we start animating we may see a few things that need to be tweaked in the master file, but we've been testing our rigs and so far we've make all necessary changes.

Bimpe's been working on the blendshapes for goats. They brought up a couple of rigging issues due to the blends being added after the bind, but after some detaching and a bit of repainting these have now been sorted out - which means a bit more testing.

Natasha and Kaitlin have been setting up cameras in the scenes to assess whether we may need extra assets to fill the scene, there have been a couple so far, but we've been able to re-use and tweak some of the assets we already have - like the rocks (especially because Natasha had previously made them in a range of shapes!)

This also alerted us to a couple of changes that needed to be made to the matte painting - Cristina has increased the width and filled the skyline with a few more shapes.

We're also making the final tweaks to the textures by placing our models together and looking at them under lighting. For the Troll Yannis has softened the bump map and tweaked the tone of the diffuse map so now it fits in a lot better with the rest of the characters.

Ending the day with a bit of Mariachi turnaround eye candy courtesy of Amit

"It looks like he's going to a party, but he's not, his brother is going to die..."

Our Yannis quote of the week.

As we've pretty much reached the end of the modelling process we had quite an important status meeting to start planning our next steps!

Kaitlin has taken another look at the shots and made some final tweaks and colour coded them to show which shots include music, dialogue and sound effects. Her and Amit will also be setting up the master files which will be key to making sure that our workflow is streamlined and that we're not scrambling around at the end.

Ritchie and Amit have almost completed the texturing for the mariachis and the goats. Ritchie mentioned that he ran into  bit of trouble with the aligning some of the textures / patterns on the goat. So far he's working on drawing them in on Photoshop and Mudbox - with much better results via Photoshop.

Amit has suggested that he work in both platform together. So by using Mudbox as a rough guide to sketch were the patterns need to go so they are aligned, these can be exported into Photoshop, tidied up and updated in Mudbox. Simples (we hope).

We're all a massive fan of Amit's process so he'll be pulling together a short style guide for us all. This will make sure that we're all on the same page and that all the assets and characters look like that belong together in the same scene.

We look our first look at all the models together again to make sure they were all the same stylistically.

We have decided that they look awesome.

Assets, assets, assets

Sushma, Kaitlin and Bimpe will also start rigging will also start this week, and Yannis will be working on the blend-shapes for the troll. As the troll has quite a bit of dialogue we've decided that this will need someone to focus their attention on it. Natasha has also kindly offered to pull together a lip sync sheet for this

LAST BUT NOT LEAST, it'll allll be kicking off next week... we're heading in to rough animation territory! As Sushma has had the most experience she'll be leading this and attempting to impart her wisdom!

We'll be working in teams of 2 on a scene to support each other, Kaitlin had a good idea of pairing the 2D animators with the animation virgins so that each subgroup has some level of experience.

The look of love.

Model Students and Pre-Visuals

Alas we have entered the modelling stage! Behold the glorious whats done/whats not board and full schedule.

Ritchie, Amit and Yannis are taking on the goats, mariachi's and the troll/ogre, while the rest of us will be modelling the rest of the assets (Ritchie pulled together a complete list of assets)

Kaitlin, Natasha, Bimpe and Cristina (the environment team as they shall be known) have been thinking a lot about the intricate designs that we think will really help our animation stand out from other low poly pieces. There's been some research into some of the designs we want to achieve on some of the assets like the rocks.

Natasha's also pulled together a moodboard for inspiration of style and textures from the sweets in the piñata.

Bimpe's done a bit of research into the bridge for design and modelling purposes.

Follow Bimpe's board Bridges on Pinterest.

Sushma's been working on pulling together our sound-list - we know this is very important to the theme and atmosphere of our story so we're keen to make sure that this doesn't get left till the end

But most importantly... Amit's worked on the pre-vis! The tweaks we made to the storyboard/animatic have really made a difference we think!