Hurlyburly Productions

Hazel:

Ellie:

This week I spent my time polishing assets, such as giving my characters eyelashes and also producing their dead textures.

I also dressed the banquet room as we were pushed on time for just one person to populate every room one after the other. Ideally having more assets to fill the table with would have been ideal as it looks a bit empty for a banquet table at the moment, and also meant that the original concept could not be followed. This is something we can work on for the final competition hand in.

My final job this week was helping with the matinee. I was in charge of the run through of the second level (Banquo's), and also helped to troubleshoot rendering and editing issues with the matinee, as we ran into a few technical/lack of knowledge problems whilst doing the video.

Jacob:

Carrie:

Liv:

Chris:

This week I spent most of my time polishing, or creating some new asset variants, in particular broken versions of the fence, trough and cart. I also created a final version of the grass for use in the large landscape area outside of the castle.

I spent most of the last two days working on the matinee, contributing to the camera's movement tracks, setting up the blueprint for the director track and helping render the video as well as working out how to compress and edit the video using Adobe After Effects.

Hazel:

This week I did a lot of work:

I textured Liv's castle and also made some geometry to go in the distance:

I created a deer skull:

I textured the theatre and created the theatre curtains:

I also spent my entire weekend working on the engine, copying over the levels, dressing sets and creating blueprints:

I also managed to spend a bit of time polishing Macbeth, adding hair alphas and subsurface:

Ellie:

This week was very busy for me. I completed Lady Macbeth's texturing at the beginning, so now both my characters were finished (until re-visiting them in polish week), and ready for rigging.

Rigging is where I hit a bit of a wall. As both King Duncan and Lady Macbeth wear long robes, this means that using a standard biped rig was extremely awkward, causing stretching, clipping, and overall mesh distortion around the leg area (and around Lady Macbeth's sleeves). While this wasnt too much of an issue for Duncan as he didnt actually need to be animated, we wanted Lady Macbeth to walk.

In the end I managed to get both rigs to a standard where i could carefully pose them (with a bit of editing to the actual geometry), but in order for Lady Macbeth to properly walk she would need a custom built rig, which unfortunately at this stage in the project we dont have time for. To counter this, I was informed of a "morpher" modifier by a friend. This basically allowed me to create several poses for her using the transpose and deformation tools in ZBrush, and then in Max the modifier could make the poses "morph" into each other. Using this, I was able to make a rough animation. Due to the nature of the process I used I had very little control over the final animation other than putting in keyframes for the modifier to reference, and so it turned out a little jerky and in some parts seemed to stretch the frames out a bit. However Lady Macbeth will only be seen walking in the distance, and so we're hoping it wont be too obvious, and this is something I can come back to next week.

I also posed Lady Macbeth for when she's in her room. Originally we wanted her to be collapsed over the bed, but the rigging issues plus the fact that she has no legs under her skirt led this to be tricky to pose, so to save time she ended up just lying in the bed. I also quickly created the sheets to go over her, based around the bed we've also used for Duncan.

My other job for this week was to help catch up on some of the asset work, as we were lagging behind a bit on that front. I did not have much time to put into these assets which is unfortunate but as with everything I will return to them should I have time next week.

Jacob:

Carrie:
I completed the Audience models, and created a very quick bush to populate the terrain - since it was quick, I will probably return to it to improve the texture to ensure it fits with the environment properly.

The completed textures for Banquo, with posing:

And then a rework of the bush model and texture:

The Audience later needed subtle reworks to the texture and retopologising of the robe since it was too high poly.

Liv:

Chris:

This week I continued to work on the grass, experimenting on various fronts such as in the colours, altering them to match the base grass texture more closely. I also made some changes to the material, adding a simulated wind effect, as well as turning off tangent normals and changing the shader mode to achieve the best lighting.