This week, we officially entered the production phase. Following our instructors’ advice, we gave the two elderly characters names and created biographies for them to better inform the visual design and mood. We explored details like where they met and their past careers. The male character is named Oliver, and the female character is named Margaret, and we’ll be referring to them by these names moving forward.
Our technical artists have started working on key sections of the animation. The three main environments—the kitchen, the toast galaxy, and the orange juice forest—are all in progress. Lucy is using SpeedTree to design the trees for the orange juice forest, opting for a cartoon-like style with large spherical silhouettes and bright colors to enhance the fantasy atmosphere.
Since Margaret has passed away in the story, we needed to convey this to the audience without dialogue. To achieve this, we decided to portray her as a ghost. Xun created a translucent material in Unreal Engine and applied it to Margaret’s model, giving her a classic ghostly appearance.
This week, we also received the cleaned mocap data from Justin. Our mocap specialist, William, began importing the data into Oliver’s model. Using Motion Builder, he aligned the skeleton to match the animation. After some debugging, we imported the animation into the scene, though we still needed to manually animate Oliver’s hands.
With the scene assets modified and placed, the kitchen scene has started to take shape. By adding the animated Oliver, we’re beginning to see the style and visual direction we envisioned for the cavern.
