Dim Progress Check #15 - “Squashing Some Bugs”

We are slowly making progress toward our upcoming production pass in three weeks. Our goals are to have roughed animation for our entire short, but with the manpower, we have assigned to that task it doesn’t feel very possible. It also doesn’t help that there were a couple of complications that hindered the amount of work I feel like I was able to do. Due to an issue with the character meshes that were textured having different UVs from the character meshes that were rigged, Andy had to spend some time transferring UVs in order to not break rigs. Because of Maya’s… “unique traits” (that’s a nice way of putting bugginess), there was an error occurring that resulted in us having to use a script in order to accomplish this. This process worked great, except for with Finn’s mesh. For some reason, his controls made Maya lag, but thankfully this could be solved by deleting non-deformer history.

 In addition to fixing this rig issue, I started to give textures to the meshes in Maya. While we have them in Unreal, having them in Maya will help us animators better understand how our characters are moving. 

The last of my updates is that I re-exported the animatic to give to the person making our original score for the film. This was necessary because of the timing issues and some of our previous shots missing. Ultimately, while this week wasn’t the most productive in terms of moving towards our upcoming goal, hopefully, these efforts make things run smoother in the long term.