1/24/2024

We're back, baby!

The final semester of production for Bathroom Stall Galactica has begun, and we are getting the ball rolling quick. Our priority over the next few weeks has been strictly character focused, designing and incorporating hair and clothing into our rigs to get them polished and ready for animation. We have divided our efforts into teams to conquer specific aspects: Josh and I are focused on clothing for the alien and main character respectively, Isaiah and Kayla are working out hair simulations, Anna is tweaking the appearance of the alien and Avery has been commissioned from one of the other groups to touch up the main character's face. That leaves Logan, who is working on general hard-surface modeling and Unreal Engine 5 research.

On my end, I have been working hard in Marvelous Designer, designing the individual articles of clothing for the main character. The end goal is to have each of these cloth sims exported as geometry to bind to the main character using skin weights, maintaining the realistic look while sparing us the headaches of dealing with simulating the cloth throughout the entire short. I had already looked into Marvelous Designer over last semester so, in addition to the clothing tutorials that Anna has provided, I was quick to get into the workflow for the new software. Pictured above is the incomplete model for the main character's hat, minus some stitching an texture work to be completed in the near future.

On top of that, I'm back at it again with the storyboard, wouldn't you believe it? Over Winter Break, I received some advice from a friend of my dad's who had a strong foothold in storyboarding jobs. If I were to apply for a position like that in the industry, I was told to incorporate facial expressions into the boards in order to impress. I will be working on this alongside the BSG stuff. Our limitations as a group are beginning to set in, with a lot to do and precious little time to do it, but even if we begin cutting corners now, our base story is good enough to impress anyhow. So we'll keep at it until we get something that will truly bake everyone's noodle!