Our Last Semester Begins

So far this semester is off to a really strong start. We have 3 months to finish our film and we are working through Animation, Layout, and Texturing. It is a lot of work but so far we are meeting our goals consistently and the whole team has been motivated at a level that we were not seeing last semester, and it feels good.

I have been working to organize our meetings, join in with our animation efforts, and solve technical problems within our pipeline this week. I am taking a less detailed and more broad approach to this semesters Gantt chart, as the overhead of breaking down and timing out tasks is something we can not afford at this point and it is more efficient for our team to get the broad strokes and play it by ear.

Outside of Organization, I have tried to set an example by doing. So far I have animated a blocking pass of one of our short film's sequences, (our goal is to have a fully 3d animatic in three weeks).

I have also re-familiarized myself with our animation pipeline, specifically getting it from Maya to UE5, and created a tutorial for my team to reference on how to export/import our animations and characters into UE5, as I recognized that I would be doing lots of various things and not have time to do it all myself.

After that I ended up compiling a list of rigging issues we had with characters and have begun polishing them. I have also been using Blueprints in UE5 to create custom parameters and systems for our materials and effects in Unreal Engine 5 to give our artists more control over our film in an easier way, and have begun setting up a system for characters to attach and detach their collars through the film using Blueprints and Sockets.

It has already been a busy semester, which means to me that we are getting a lot done. More to come soon. :)