Week 5 Polish! – February 16th, 2024

(2.12-2.16)

In week five, we continued our full-production mode. On the first day of this week, we made alignments regarding both artistic and logistic aspects. 

Artists had come up with a list of 3D assets with individual assignments as well as priority, including the 3D models in Scene 3 (tutorial), several 2D works containing textures for the deer, ground, leaves, and cloud. The environment also needs visual effects including the fog, wind, and fire to be developed by our artists. 

(tree model)

(wind Niagara VFX System)

Our programmers focused on working with the animation sequencer, interactions with Kinect, and motion capture data. We assigned the “guidance movement” to our dancer which will act as the tutorial for the guests to follow and mimic. 

As we went into Cavern for a demonstration testing, we found that the middle ground felt a bit busy. We decided to remove some of the trees to focus more on the foreground and background. Thanks to all the technical support team-members in ETC, the resolution and other technical issues regarding the lighting had been improved prominently. 

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• Plan for Next Week

– Art

1. Apply designed-color for each season in Scene 3 (tutorial)

2. Scene 2 Environment Building 

3. Scene 1 (cave art) with separate layers according to the specific interactions 

4. Scene 5 (save the dancer) storyboard aka environment set up & level design

5. Cloud asset revision

6. Water shader for Scene 2 (for river)

-Sound: Music apply & sound effects for interaction feedback, ambient sound, characters SFX

-Tech

1. Animation sequencer polishing

2. Integrate assets from artists into the interaction scene (cloud, wind, fire etc.) and make them reactive to user’s interactions

3. Implement transition between different weather/skybox in season material controller