For One Last Time

For our social media awareness and content, our character artist, Megan and myself will be overseeing this area.  I will contribute and supervise the Facebook side of content, and Megan will oversee the Instagram side of things.  Together, we have produced a list of potential and decisive components that we want to include within our social media pages for The Happy Place.  These will involve the areas of 'meeting the team', concepts from pre production, developments of the team and project, as well as giving our followers small, regular insights into the Happy Place and what they can expect to see when we present our final piece. Below is a screenshot of our current Facebook page as it stands.  With posts relating to our team and content of our early concept work, we have built up a small following of friends, family and students who are keen to see how our project developments from now, until the date of premiering our work. I created the cover phot...

Below are our teams final character animations created in Maya 2018.  From here, we will export these animations as fbx files and import them into Unity, where they will be pair with our prop animations.  Also listed below are the tutorials we used for importing.  Our director, Lorna took on the challenge of pairing up animation and introducing our fbx exports into our Unity environmental file.

Alongside our character animation, there is more to our scene that just an environment and moving characters.  The assets that these characters engage and draw attention to, also play an important part in the overall dynamic and quality of the story.  Assets such as the coffee pot, paper, crayons, clock, cloth and menu are some of the elements of our project that also need to be animated and worked with in partnership with our characters. Within this blog, I will discuss the process of animating these elements and provide playblast videos of what these models look like in action. Firstly, our menu.  The menu has been talked about a lot ever since we have our story line finalised way back in October.  We never really tied down how this object would appear, how it would animate and what features it would have.  Originally, the AI waitress would pull the menu out from behind her back when welcoming us, set it on the table and it would come to life....

It has long been discussed and ignored that we needed to measure and be made aware of what our layout and space allowance is for the End of Year Show.  With this drawing closer and closer, we finally got an answer in regard to our confusion.  Each team will get a designated space and each person will have a board to use to present renders, visuals, concepts and developmental progress images that those attending the EOYS can see. The allowance for equipment for each person is 1 board, 1 table and 1 mac.  We have been told that the dimensions for the boards are 80cm x 120cm and we should plan out what images and size of sections we wish to include on these.  In addition, our space has to facilitate a place for our poster as well as room for a mac to sit on the desk surface to display our showreels. Desk and Board Size Below is the initial plan, we as a team have drafted together to give us an idea of how we want our area to be laid out - Based on th...

Due to being unable to attend our User Testing Days, this post will incorporate alot of information from my teammate's blog reports on these days of tests.  3 were carried out in total and following each user's experience of our project, questions were asked regarding their understanding, feelings and advice for the project as a whole.  This feedback was noted down and was then used by each of us to improve various areas of the project, whether in the area of animation, effects, textures, modelling, lighting or narrative. Below are results and notes taken from our March User Test by our Producer, Lorna - Our First Survey group consisted of 10 people, a mixture from our own year group, as well as people from other courses in their final year, so the majority of the age group where in their early twenties. For this stage we had our environment, blocked animation in with basic posing, as well as some holographic effects in the scene. After the test we asked a series of ques...

Before heading into the big bad world of employment and potential freelance work, it is essential we leaving Undergraduate level with a professional portfolio of components we can use to sell our skills and help put us on the industry map to propel us towards a future career. This is in regards to two main pieces of self promotion.  The CV and business card.  It is important we have these designed, printed and accessible on the night of our end of year show so that company reps, directors and other industry members can view our projects and then take something tangible away from it to remember who we are and what we are capable of. When it comes to CV, I have always been taught through my years of business orientated education that it is simple, clean and not overly creative.  I was always taught that colour is tacky, images are resented and icons are acceptable but need to remain minimal.  When I approached this initial design stage of an updated and a...

To optimise our scene even further, myself and our Director, Cassie, decided to start deleting faces for various models in our scene that are never seen by the user.  These are mainly on furniture, large counters, table items, counter items, fridge and kitchen door.  In this blog, I will post the videos of a few of the newly optimised models, some images from the process and explanations from other blogs and videos I watched as to how basic models need to be to ensure our scene is optimised as much as it can be. I found the article from Evermotion on optimising scenes to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge and understanding of why optimisation is such a large part of a project such as ours.  The real time rendering that we will be using within unity is processing a lot of information at one time.  If a project has a lot of textures, geometry and animation, this can be described as an expensive project.  Not that it costs a lot of money, but rather i...