Production Pass Review #2 Fall 2025

Goals I wanted to achieve this Prod Pass:

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.

PROGRESS:

1. Complete✅

2. In Progress, would like to talk to Dan Finnegan first 🚧

3. Done and in Houdini, We as a group still need to figure out the canonical size and distance of the rocks/crash island✅

4. I did begin researching. Would like to ask Dan about this as well currently on the back-burner 🚧

5. I have found 2 different routes to explore, I built out the first one and need to do some tweaking, The second method I might need David and Jeremy's help with but I'll give it a shot. It's layered and might not be viable.

6. I interviewed Hogan and got his contact info, although he does work in Houdini it's mostly background stuff and our fields haven't overlapped so far.

7. Not sure about rig progress, I heard it was started last week.

Goals for next Prod Pass

1. Have a zoom meeting with Dan about the water shots in general and the boat.

2. Get new Spectra's into as many new shots are available

3. See if the layered texturing approach is feasible.

4. Tweak the mash planes to see if they can work as a texture method, otherwise use them to stick on geo like Unreal's Environment brush.

5. Experiment with bubble sim

6. FIND WAY TO PORT ANIMATED CHARACTER RIGS INTO HOUDINI THEN SEND BACK TO MAYA.