Blog Post 4 - Organization and Layout Planning

These blog posts seem to really get away from me, it seems. I don't mean to turn them in late. I just seem to forget to do them by the end of the day Wednesday, which isn't good. I'm going to try and fix this from now on, but for now, I'm just going to do this now and hope it is enough, and not too big of a bother or a worry. I have a lot of other things on my plate after all. So it's natural for issues like this to happen occaisionally. At least I am doing this sooner than I did last week, and at least I am feeling much much better this week than I was last blog post, which is nice. I was a bit of a mess last blog post, to be honest.

Life is a lot of ups and downs, and because of just. . .everything in general happening in my life right now, from five classes, to health issues, to trying to get a summer internship, to prepping for travel, etc, there's a lot for me to keep track of, and a lot of ways for me to slip under the surface, so to speak. The previous blog post was one of those times. My mind gets very overwhelmed and defaults to the worst situation it can think of, unfortunately, but that doesn't mean I won't recover!! I'm doing my best to always bounce back from any times I have issues, even when it's hard. Even just working on Knit Wits stuff feels too much and too overwhelming at times, and I feel slow, and more like an obstacle for my group than a helpful member, sometimes. The feeling comes and goes, but the fact that I struggle with many things my other group members don't, really, makes me feel inadequate sometimes.

That being said, my work from the previous post is continuing, and as such, the majority of my time, work, and effort for this class is taken up by the schedule. Which I am very happy with at the moment. Previously, it was a bit more "asset building" focused, and had people working on UVs, textures, rigs, etc etc. But I remembered, along with the rest of our group last week, that what we're aiming for by the end of the semester is a 3D animatic. So really, the biggest things that needed to be done were the storyboard, the shot list, the models, and maybe some of the rigs. It's interesting, really, to see all the differences in planning. I spent the past week adjusting and redoing the schedule to reflect the more layout focused workflow we're going for, and I'm hoping to update both the storyboard and the shot list soon, so that they can be easily connected to each other. Though I'm waiting on information from Isabel and Celia to see if any of the storyboard bits have changed.

Other than that though, our group is moving towards layout passes rather quickly, I would say. Isabel has the environments pretty much done, at least for a layout pass, and discussion of how to go about each individual scene was discussed. Any models that could be approved have been approved, either by me or Sam, and moved to the PUBLISH folder to be added to layout passes. I'm hoping that by Monday, at least one or two of us have started on our first set of layout passes for scenes. I'm not expecting them to be good. But a layout animatic will certainly be nice. And referencing the characters in will be a good way to get them set up for texture prep and rig production as well. I'm hoping that by the third production pass, we can have a mostly done layout animatic, and get some adjustments done to it before the end of the semester, and then work from there on assets and adding UVs, textures, and rigs. I'm honestly very glad we're going the way we're going.

With all that being said, I don't actually have much to show or a picture to attach to this specific blog post, because I haven't actually created anything new. The schedule has been edited and changed, and some of the things that have been organized have been moved around, but nothing else has really changed. So there is no picture included in this blog post either.