The Divided: Animation Update

Just read the brief again for this semesters animation project and realised I've supposed to have been posting reflections on the production progress periodically.

Bit late to be starting them but here goes.

We are currently less than 3 weeks from the submission deadline. Up until last week we managed to stick to our production schedule. This is quite good because in week one we purposely gave ourselves tight deadlines for each stage.

It's hard to say exactly where things have gone off though its likely to be a few things anyway, plus everything has a knock on effect on what follows.

I've found in the past that with these types of projects its very easy to slack off a bit in the early weeks and the work always expands to fill what time you have. This obviously eats into time for the following tasks.

There's been one single item that's given us loads of trouble: the bird. We've had a tonne of bother getting the model right for rigging and texturing. It just seemed to be one error after another. It's getting to the point now where it really needs to be being animated. Thankfully we seem to have finally ironed out the last of the problems tonight with getting it set for texturing and the rig is almost complete.

The texturing in general has also taken up a lot more time than expected and is still in progress. 

Right at the start we decided to keep the actual character animation to an absolute minimum and from the looks of things now, that is the only reason we MIGHT finish on time.

I am starting to really feel the pressure. A lot of our days also seem to be eaten up with lectures I personally feel we should have had sooner. It's obviously scheduled as best as the uni can do it and they will be making adjustments each year but it really is a drag when you have a bit job you are desperate to find time to focus on and instead you have to go for a lecture right in the middle of the morning and then another in the mid afternoon. We are mostly left with evenings, long late nights and weekends to get the project done. The presentation we just did for another project today would have been much better at the start of the semester but hey ho, its done now and im glad to be rid of it.

I'm doing my best to keep all the small annoying tasks going as well as doing my fair share of texturing and modelling. It's also tough because all of us bar maybe Amit are learning quite a lot of what we are doing on the job.

Think I'll leave it at that for now. I'll try and make another post next week and by then hopefully we are a lot closer to actually rendering and comping final scenes because if we aren't we are royally screwed for finishing in time.