Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 3 Delivery

At the beginning of this sprint, the other leads and I met to discuss down-scoping our project. Originally, our environment was five islands of varying colors all matching a stage of grief. With the time constraints we have, we realized that this setup was going to create a lot of problems for different departments, and decided to switch to one island. 

This took some work off of a lot of people, however, Kate had to redo all of our cameras. So at the beginning of this sprint I worked with her to reformat the shot list and figure out where the characters would be when dancing across the new island. 

Then it was on to mocap cleanup. Finally the proxy rigs were working with the mocap data and we could begin the clean up process. The long, tedious process...

To do this, I've been watching the feet contact with the floor, making sure they are actually interacting with the floor. I also have been fixing any interactions between the characters. Things like when the Star character lifts the Black Hole at any point, when the characters hold hands or collapse together, etc. 

After doing a first pass of the clean up, I imported the fbx file in to the engine so we had an updated animation to play. I then update the rigs that are in engine. The Star character imported fine, but i was having a lot of trouble with the Black Hole. For some reason the neck joint would import in by the wrist joint. Eventually i figured it out with the help of Elijah. Once they worked, I mapped the semi cleaned mocap footage to the rigs. 

Perforce:

Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint 2 Delivery

This sprint was the sprint of problems for me.

 For this sprint, I worked with Kate, Emily, Jules, and Cheryl in the mocap stage to try and get live link working so we could capture real time data for the camera movements. We ran into a lot of trouble with figuring out how it works and setting up, but eventually we got a take for one of the shots where the camera moves. See the video below for proof of our progress:

Next I added the mocap skeletons from our take to perforce and wrote up some documentation for our rigging artists to follow. They needed to place the mocap skeleton from our two actors into the proxy meshes that Kase created last sprint. They had to move the joints in a very specific way to ensure our custom character rigs would map onto the mocap data properly. 

Once I had the skeletons from the riggers, I tested them in Motion Builder. I encountered some issues where the skeleton would almost map to the mocap's root bone but would only snap to the side of the character. Eventually we figured out that the ankles were put in the wrong place when being rigged, which was throwing off the scale of the initial mocap skeleton. 

After that problem was solved, I added the new characterized rigs to the unreal project. 

Soliloquy of Stars: Sprint #1 Delivery

 For this sprint, I started by creating sprint plans for this first week with the other leads, as well as the following sprints for the rest of the semester. In this meeting, we finalized the 3D and VFX asset list, and decided who on the team would be working on each asset. 

 

I then imported the skeletons and skeletal meshes for Quinn and Manny to prepare for when Emily imported the characterized mocap data.  

 

From there, I assisted Kate with setting up a first pass of the cinematic cameras in Unreal. To do this, we set up a root level sequence with 23 sub-sequences for each shot. Then, using the video animatic, we set up rough compositions/movements for each camera. Kate mostly handled this part, so while she was doing that, Emily and I cut up the mocap footage to create a proxy animation for each shot. Not all of them were implemented into the video first pass, but they are all in engine and imported in the corresponding sequencer shot.  

 

 

 

 Finally, one of the last things I did this sprint was figure out a uniform art style for VFX and for the 3D textures with the other leads. This way, the tech artist have some references to go off of when creating their VFX.

 

 

Artist Interviews Project

 

Interactive Experience - A Stage

 For this part of the experience, I focused on fixing the arms in my animations based off of previous feedback received in the last stage. Admittedly, I was having trouble with the new rig we were given, so changing the arms specifically with the controllers was kind of difficult. Other than that, there's not much to say for this stage, I just focused on updating my parts so that the state machines could be updated. 

Interactive Experience - "B" Stage

     For this stage I focused on polishing animations using some of the feedback given during the last stage. For example, I fixed the timing on the old man's "notice" interaction. I also made sure that all of my animations were in engine and in the correct folder so that they could be implemented to the gameplay. One of my animations for the killer however is importing incorrectly so in the future I will be focusing on getting that corrected as well as any further polish that needs to be done. 

Interactive Experience - C Stage

    For this stage, I focused on creating breakdowns and polishing the animations I created last week for our Interactable Character, the Old Man. I then reimported the referenced rig to the updated version from my team's 3D artists. I also put the Old Man character's idle animation into the character's blueprint.