Greetings and salutations readers!
In this week's production cycle, I largely focused on finalizing the rest of the pipeline in order to help finish our short's blocking process.
The biggest thing that I spent time working on was recording a video tutorial for my team mates on how to export out animation and cameras from Maya, how to import them into the level references I set up, how to render the shots into the Nuke compositing pipeline, and how to write out frames from Nuke so I can automatically version up shots in Nuke Studio. I had to record the video twice since I accidentally had a bad crop in my first attempt, but here is a hyperlink to the recording that I made.
After that, I created new Unreal projects for all our filming locations, such as the abduction bay, bathroom, and deep space, and created the levels, level sequences, and cameras in each level to easily drop in work when my peers and I make it.
This week also had a larger troubleshooting days where I tried to fix different problems with versioning up the UFO rig. The first problem that I faced was when deleting and adding new materials to the UFO model, the rig would have green faces where no texture was assigned. Through experimentation, I figured out that if the referenced model had the same object names with the missing textures, the skin clusters would remember the old textures and break. However, if I changed the names of the objects, the rig would adjust but all the painted weights would break. The painted weights could not be transferred over from old objects to new ones since the names changed, and trying to replace the reference would cause it to leave the rig group and not properly come along in animations using the rig.
The eventual solution for my problem was just redoing the painted weights, since at least in the case of the UFO, all geometries were flooded with values of 1. I learned that its really important not to delete textures from the modeling file, and just be aware of what objects and textures are used in rigging.
In addition to fixing the UFO rig, I blocked out two more shots at the gas station location, and I also began modeling the goggles that one of the more specific aliens in the film has. Here is a screen grab of that:
I will probably need to enlarge the lens section even more and reduce the nose bridge section of the model, plus we would like extra lenses and accessories to be mounted onto the goggles so I will try to work with those soon.
Thanks so much for taking the time to read this, and I look forward to sharing more positive updates in the future!
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