When Life hands you lemons... throw them at pinata's

SO we are currently in cross phases at the moment - we've had to go make and make some final tweaks to the goats to fix a few issues that Kaitlin and Natasha picked up on when blocking in the animations.

We're also working to re-finalised the textures for the Troll - basing this primarily on the textures of the Mariachi's, although we have considered going a bit more stylised like the pinata's - but this will need testing.

After a few more changes, the Trolls rigs and Blendshapes (Yanni's handy work) are finally done and are ready for some proper testing and block animation courtesy of Bimpe and Sushma.

We're very aware of the time we now have left (6 weeks) and we're really kicking it up another few gears to make sure everything gets finished i'm time - we ran into a few more issues than we'd hoped but we're still being awesome and positive. Definitely lots of learnings to take with us into our next projects.

"Imagine a goat with a Dracula coat": Sounds and sassy behaviour

We are LIVE from DJCADs sound studio getting our narrator recorded!

Yannis is flashing is music software tech skills - he'll be using either Protools or Audacity (as hes more familar with the software). We're hoping to get all the sound nailed today so we can overlay it with our previs.

Some of us will also be flexing our vocal chords and adding a bit of extra sound for the goats and the mariachis.

As we push ahead with animation we really want to make sure that the sound design doesn't fall to the wayside - especially as it's quite key to some of the mariachi's animation movements.

Week 8: That time when we dreamt about Maya

After a meeting with Axis and a revisitation of our timeline - we're aware that were running a couple of weeks behind due to the issues we've had with rigging, so this has held up our animations a little bit. But were refocusing our energies slighly to nailing a couple of key tasks to get ourselves back on track.

1. Animation Targets
We've set a target of 4 seconds of animation per week per person - the most seconds a person has (yay Sushma) is 13.5 seconds so that means we could potentially have all animation blocked in 3 weeks with a week or so for polishing.

2. Cameras
We've already started making adjustments to our cameras with a few extremeish angles - like dutch ones, but well also be making sure we're being creative - but not to complicated with the moving cameras. We dont want to just add something in for the sake of it, its movement will need to be relevant to the scene and the character.

3. Unification
We're continuing to work on the textures of our characters - the Mariachi's are the most complete and we'll be making little tweaks to the troll in particular to make sure the styles are all unified to them. All the eyes will be the same shape and we'll be making sure that there is consistency and similarities between the animation and gestures of the characters - Sushma will be overseeing all the chief  character animators so we can ensure that there's 1 person looking at all of these and making sure they all fit together.

4. Environments
We're still working on these but we want to make sure we don't get caught up on it. We know there's still a way to go in terms of making sure it fits into the same universe as the characters - well be making sure we do this through our texturing (using similar ones to the characters) and making our scenes look a bit more complex.

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In other news the chief animators will be working on some test walk cycles - again this will help us to start unifying the characters further.

Natasha's already started some work on this for the biggest goat, and has been blocking in the first and last poses and a bit more character for it.

We also been taking a closer look again at the textures, and Amit has been Gamma correcting them - as a result some of the tones have changed slightly so we'll be sitting down as a group to make a decision on what tones we'll be tweaking so everything looks like a set.

Pre-Gamma Correction

Post-Gamma Correction

Sushma's troll rig is almost complete and Bimpe's been testing it - Yannis has worked on the blendshape so Bimpe will also be adding all the attributes and driven keys.