3/27/2024

Spring Break is over. The final Spring Break before I graduate. It's beginning to set in how far we have come and how much time we have left. There's a sense of unease across our team - we are still struggling to meet deadlines and commit to our work. And I should admit that we saw this coming to a degree. It's evident that some changes to the story are required in order to maintain a consistent quality in our film, which is harsh news you never really want to hear as a creator. However, we are still taking steps to get as much work done as we can before we turn in the final product. We have spit ourselves in two to tackle specific issues with our shorts; Josh, Kayla and I are focused on fully animation the short, starting with the main character who finally has a complete rig. Logan, Anna, and Isaiah are focused on asset creation and texturing.

The animation side isn't going stellar, but we are still continuing to make progress. The rig for the main character may be complete, but it is clearly lacking in terms of accurate skin-weights. The collar of his jacket appears stapled to the neck, the hips and pelvis don't move like they should, and his forearms clip through his shirt when the arm is bent at certain angles. At this point in the development, however, fixing these issues will have to be a stretch goal, and the nice thing is, if these issues get resolved in future, transferring our animations onto the rig in Unreal would essentially be a non-issue.

On the asset side of things, It's going relatively well as far as I can discern. A bunch of the major assets are being modeled and textured and they don't look half bad. One issue is that they are having a difficult time coming up with new assets for the robot arms to be flinging around with the bathroom. I had some simple props drawn up for the storyboard, but it was never meant to represent what was going on entirely. Moreover, this was something that was designed to be tackled at this point in the process, so it's a much better problem to have.

Overall, we really need to focus for the next few weeks if we want to hit our display deadline. We will still have time to refine our short for May in the interim, but that's not a good thing to rely on. Nevertheless, we will strive to press on, and regardless of how the short turns out at the final screening, I'll be proud. Proud that us six were able to make something wonderful with the time and resources we have.