No fun Nonsense

This was another week where I had set out to finalize some systems we have yet to see in the short film, i.e. the collars on the characters, the ringmasters effects, and the crowd, but ended up being confronted with a continuous larger problem with our characters. Early in production we had created a 'published' version of the characters, and a 'for texturing' version of them, The texturing version was just the model without the rig, and was intended to make it easier for the texturing artists to access what they needed. What this ended up actually causing, was for the Rigged 'published' version to change and the UVs to be different than what the texture artists worked on. We tried several (and i really mean several) different methods of getting the UVs from the textured models onto the rigged one, but they ended up just corrupting the UV's even more.

At this point I realized that transferring the uvs solely was not going to work, and we instead had to either effectively re-rig all of the characters, or re-UV and texture them all. Me, being stubborn and not believing in the hard way, eventually came across a convoluted but do-able middle ground. I was able to unbind the characters body meshes and re-bind new ones (identical meshes, correct UVs), but when it came to the faces, I ran into large scale issues with Advanced Skeleton and was not able to use the same process. From here, I realized i would not be able to just re-bind new meshes for the faces, but could keep the re-bound new body meshes. I then re-did the face/head UV's and have now corrected the entire characters.

To me, this was the most effective solution available, as I am not qualified or fast enough to rig all of the characters over again, (and it would have likely caused issues with our animation), and I also did not want to force the texturing artists to redo all of their work due to an organization error that is largely not their fault. We both have to re-do some work, but it has been resolved and the characters just need some re-texturing on their faces and we should be back in business.

After all this, I re-imported the characters into ue5 with their corrections, imported our new Roughing animation for sequence 0 and got it into the animatic, and established the method which we will use to make the Character collar system work in ue5.

On top of all of this, I have been working with professors to revise my resume, and I have been in contact with a Recruiter for DreamWorks and a current employee at DreamWorks, (Hunton Hodgkins), as I am trying to further my networking and like we talked about in class, increase my visibility for the upcoming Dreamworks internships. (I'm aiming for the Artist Management position). I also realized that Jaylen and I have actually been creating a SOP (Standardized Opperating Procedure), as we have created various Video tutorials to document and teach our team specific procedures for our project.

Sorry for the long read, but had a lot of technical work that I pushed through today and not a lot of pictures.