Production Pass Review #1

Honestly didn't know this was an individualized thing. I thought it was a state of things like last semester where one group member just wrote everyone's states and turned in one thing, so my bad. That's why this is so late.

My goals for Prod Pass 2 as of 9/11 were the following.

1. Figure out how to port whitewater to Maya.

2. Make an actual simulation for what we need. The beach sim I was one day away from presenting was a literal beach sim, the waves are slow as they crawl onto the surface, done for an ocean, it doesn't really look like water because the beach sim is so slow. It's also incredibly inefficient.

3. Wait until teammates are done and use the actual beach layout instead of my placeholder.

4. Begin researching wood collision sims and how the pipeline for getting a boat to float works.

5. IMPORTANT, find replacement for Houdini stylizer, do my best to ensure that it can stack on top of David's texturing method to save time. Also take Prod Pass notes into account and make the ocean itself darker.

6. Get mentors to help me in Houdini.

7. If possible (if rig gets done on time) help with animation.

09/05/2025

Currently still making progress on the sim for the production pass since school started again. I'm making a video that details everything, so this post being due before the production pass next week is irking me a bit.

Anyways.

Our assets being true to their real life scale has caused me numerous issues because in Houdini their size gets multiplied by 100 and in Maya they aren't visible without using new clipping planes settings.

I initially made a temp scene to port to Houdini for the beach sim but realized that I had made a mistake and the og layout wasn't as broken as I thought. I had forgotten a step and blamed my group. Turns out I missed a step, I apologized to everyone.

Some of the OG scene still isn't workable because of incompatablity with the sim. I ported Cassie's lighthouse to the Sim and will slowly try and update the layout I made with the OG assets as I continue editing the sim.

We made some big story changes and finally nailed the pacing for about 2/3rds of the film. Rose truly cooked with the editing with what she was working with.

I'm a bit scared about the timing because we need new models and rigs of all 3 characters. Motion data is crucial for an accurate sim so until the new characters are finished I have to work on the sims for all the scenes that the characters are obscured.

05/09/2025

I fully committed to animating all the shots for Scene 3 (minus shot 3 which was agreed upon not to be animated for technical reasons). I finished and had running playblasts for all my shots by 05/08. I waited for all the other shots to be done and for Rose to comp everything so I can send the 3D version to Kat so she can update the score to the new runtime (Future Dario from 05/14 here. The new comp was finished on 05/13, the Prod pass was the next day and Kat had a final, so no new score). The pacing although it wasn't the focus, is still too fast. I was honestly hoping the pacing would somewhat fix itself in shot 6 with me having to set the amount of movement and speed of Captains jump. He's an old man after all so I had to carefully select how much mobility to give him that would make sense for him both physically and narratively. I need to spend the summer figuring out how to do the Ocean sim in Houdini and then figuring out how to port everything to Unreal.

Semester recap: I feel like I got better at animating, so I will be putting an emphasis on that next semester. I feel dumb for being so behind in Unreal, I knew Unreal was powerful but damn, I'm going to explore this summer to see if it can fit into our pipeline.

Finally talked to IT about Houdini, it will be installed over the summer along with HTOA.

Although not everything went the way I wanted it to, I'm happy that my group is open minded and has been receptive and honest about my ideas and changes to the film. Quite a lot of the stuff I've suggested is now apart of the film, some isn't but looking back, the rejected idea's weren't great :|.