CG Asset Creator and Illustrator

Week 7: Final Timeline, Setbacks, and Catching Up

05/08/2025

Over the weekend, I could not make as much progress on my own scene as I wanted, due to several days spent not having access to the required software. We had our first post-leadership change presentation, and it was, admittedly, received quite poorly. Our idea to have the "dreary" black-and-white shots have unique CG environments to enhance the grungy look was considered to be too confusing, and I am inclined to agree. We have decided to walk the idea back to our original concept of having more subtle edits to the black and white shots so we can reduce the workload and excessive amount of environments.
Due to our lack of time for reshooting, we need to find a way to reimplement the shot with the store itself and not have an actor disrupting the new flow of the storyline, and we are heavily considering adding a voiceover to make up for any missing context. Furthermore, it was pointed out that the skateboards taking up the same amount of the frame in ever shot makes it feel less dynamic, so for shots that may need cropping, we may need to use Topaz or something similar to upscale pre-existing footage.

Current Progress

Due to the large amount of suggestions given in class on Monday, this week was once again dedicated to mostly organization on my end. We have a better timeline set up than before, and our professor even helped to set up a more thorough progress-tracking document. Everyone was given individual goals pertaining to their own scenes, and I fully expected to spend the rest of the week working on building a simple background for camera projection and manual camera animation due to my difficulties with the tracking.


Thankfully, I managed to get an accurate camera track much earlier than expected. As it turns out, the lack of accurate camera information I was given lead to me attempting to track using an incorrect focal length. Once I had the correct focal length, I was able to not only get an accurate camera track, but also generate a dense point cloud mesh to set up the scene properly, as well as make considerable progress on the animation for both creatures. As a result, I was finally able to create multiple test stills, as opposed to the single one I had been w=using for weeks along with animation playblasts.

The updated animation draft with accurate camera tracking. The crab is no longer stationary.
A stained glass fish and crab positioned on top of a skateboard and placed directly onto a live-action shot. A stained glass fish and class appearing to move towards the viewer with a skateboard in the background.
Still renders with minimal editing showing the start and end of the animation.

Upcoming Work

This week, we set up a more concrete timeline to ensure that we stay on-track for the rest of the quarter and meet our deadlines as best as we can. Our current "hard" deadline is May 19th, allowing us to receive critique and spend one last week making minimal changes before the true deadline. Due to my unexpected "free" time over the weekend, the time I am not spending tweaking my own scene will be spent helping with other shots or updating universally-shared assets.