Personal Observations/Progress
- Feelin' the crunch time this week. I worked pretty much around the clock all week to get my final scenes done and in place. Although our deadline may be Sept 10th, I really feel like I need ot be done by the end of next week and have the final weeks for solving issues and putting polish on my submission. I think I will need at least a week to complete the promo images, logos, marketing screens, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think I will have much time to have various people go through the experience and provide feedback. Overall, I feel confident with where I am and what I think I will be able to submit. However, there are a lot of features and elements that I just won't be able to have in place by September.
- I'm starting to stress out about the music situation. Initially I got responses from the artist's management and this week I reached out to the label that the song was released on, and again I got an initial response but radio silence thereafter. At this point, I'm going to have to move forward with using temp score and library music, which really sucks. The song I'm trying to license is such an important part of my piece that I feel it will really suffer without it. Anyway, I gotta keep it movin'!
Production Progress
Task: Integrate the Angels
From my initial sketches, to the concept renders, to the final animated model, I've been waiting roughly 6 weeks for this moment. My modeler/animator finally delivered the Angel for my project and it was perfect timing! However, it took me nearly 2 days to get the shading and materials right and to also get the animation clips broken up in Mecanum. I also had to figure out a system for triggering the appearance of the angels and playing the appropriate animation, which required a lot of thinking and a little programming. However, after all of the tweaking, one of the key components for my experience has been integrated and it really brought things together. If you want to check out the progression of my Angel character, visit this link: https://avcv.biz/wam-concepts
Ongoing Task: Complete All Scenes
So, going into this week, my goal was to build out and finish every scene and include all of the main actors. Although I had completed my main (and largest) scene weeks ago, I still didn't have my "bookends" in place. Well, I finally built my opening credits, starting scene, final scene and linked them up with transitions. Today, the goal is to build the full project out and have my first full viewing!
For my opening and closing scenes, I relied on the Asset Store and found some great core assets. Of course, I still had to spend a lot of time setting them up and making them work the way I wanted them to. However, the scene that took the most time was the opening credits scenario. My idea for the opening credits was fairly simple, however when I started making it, it proved to be really challenging. In the end, I figured how to get it working but it took much longer than I expected!
