Catch Up

Due to the dissertation taking over everything lately the project has had to take a back seat, something I hoped would never have to happen. The team have spent the majority of the last two weeks at home staring at blank word documents in the hope that something will appear. However we have been able to churn out the odd bit of P.O work in our 'free' time or on the days we regroup at college.

Grigsby has been working heavily on lighting and texturing the 'Edshot' as well as sorting out render layers and optimum render settings. He has done an absolutely brilliant job of bringing the scene to life and has kept in constant communication over the phone and the blog. Up until last week none of us had witnessed a render which could be classed as 'the final look' of the film, however I now feel we are ever so close to our vision. Below is the latest render (without ramp shader tests), hope you dont mind mate...

Simon has been focusing primarily on textures for the bed and pillow as well as making constant changes to the machine upon our request. Somehow he is able to tap the keyboard and he completes two thousand words of his dissertation so he has been almost fulltime on the project lately!

Dave has finally given in to my constant pestering and completed the Ed rig which is delicious news! After tremendous effort he conquered the stretchy arms and has done a really good job of setting up easy to use controls for the neck spline, as well as the head spline. The eyes along with their controllers have alos been parented to the rig meaning everything is now nice and simps. He will be posting a video of the working file shortly. Hopefully animation can commence later this week (fingers crossed).

I have used project time to foucs on Jed as he has been neglected lately due to the rapid progress with Ed. I had to make adjustments to the model before blendshaping could begin such as extruding eye sockets, creating eye lids, and re locating the neatural mouth position. I also had to reassign some textures as the image sizes were too large for the computers to handle ( resized to 2048 x 2048). However today I began creating blendshapes on the latest textured version....

I managed to kncok 7 out however I soon tired and with the help of Alec decided to see what this baby could look like rendered nicely. He set up a few lights and whola....

Awesome sauce. New renders always reinspire me and fill me with confidence that the boring lamberty file is actually going to look half decent at some point. So cheers Als.

This leads me on to what Alec has been up to. Well truthfully? Not alot. He admitted today that he's been a bit lapse with both projects and has yet to produce enough work. I think the meeting gave him a much needed kick up the backside as he stayed with me till late tonight working on the nightime lighting for the intro scene. Although still fairly basic and with alot of work needed, he managed to set up a lighting system and achieve some soft shadows. He has taken the file home so hopefully he will continue with this at some point...

Other than that, the progress has been slow the last week or so, and with the dissertation hand in fast approaching I cant see the pace changing any time soon. I cannot wait until it is out of the way and we can just work soley on the project!