Week 5 (already! whaaaaat....)

Hello. This last week and a bit I've been trying to get Six textured. He's almost very nearly done I think.

Here's a render:

I had a few fights with the mia_material_x shader but I think I've got it now. Turns out all the reflection maps I had plugged in for the muck and dirt were doing didly squat because I forgot to check alpha is luminance in the texture settings.

Then when I figured that out I had to go back to the textures in photoshop and tweak all the levels. There's the option in the colour balance sections of maya to do this sort of stuff but I'm trying to keep it all to a certain format because there are so many maps.

ANNYYYYWAAAAY.... I'm really pleased with the general look I've achieved. There're a couple of wee bits here and there to be fixed and some seams to be cloned out and then I'm calling him done.

We also decided after the peer review last week and getting some feedback from Kieran and Tom that the showdown at the end of the film needed to be a tad clearer. It was a bit frustrating at first but I feel a lot better about the new ending now. It's not a drastic change but it's going to be a bit more dramatic and also provides an opportunity for some more action-y animation.

The peer review was great. The addition of some sound and music really helped make the whole piece clearer to the audience. The main thing I was worried about was that the story wouldn't be clear to people but the only thing that was flagged up as not being 100% clear there was the transition from the present into the flashback - we'll just need to make that change really obvious with the sound, music and lighting contrasts. And obviously later it turned out a few people had completely the wrong idea about the battery swap at the end which I just mentioned in that paragraph up there ^^

Lastly, it was driven home that we badly need a production schedule for the whole project to work from. 

I've been quite vigilant with staying on schedule and forward thinking and I think the whole team has been great at flagging up potential issues at the production meetings and then finding ways to deal with them ahead of time but things from here on in are only going to get more chaotic and having a physical schedule to work from will really help keep everyone on the same page.

Good news though is we started animating the first scene today( 5 days ahead of my head schedule!).

Not going to post any new storyboards til I've re-cut the animatic which I'll do sometime this weekend :)