This week's focus was to work on our animatic, present it to our TA and Prof. Our group ended up changing our project idea due to time constraints. Our project now consists of live film and 3D animated characters. We attempted using new software for camera tracking such as Boujou, had some difficulties putting this file into Maya 2013, Maya couldn't find some of the images and wouldn't render scenes correctly. We spent a lot of time fixing different areas of the animatic in Photoshop and Maya.The animatic has been presented...now we just need to find out where to go next!

This week's focus has been Facial Animation 3. This is definitely the most difficult project yet. Facial animation is extremely complex and for good animation, and all trouble shooting solved, you need to have more than 2 weeks to complete something like this. 

Volunteering to do this for the team, I've run into a lot of issues with facial animation. at first after fixing my mesh to have some form of ears, making the head a little bit rounder, I then had to learn how to create skeletal controls for the face. By following tutorials, I was able to make a fully functional facial rig, fix the skin weighting, and make a controller with set driven keys. Problems that were encountered: the skin would un-bind from the skeleton when a small change was made. actually animating and setting keyframes in the timeline wouldn't work. each time that a key frame was set for a specific mouth movement, and then another mouth movement was added, the original key frame would somehow be deleted. We've had a lot of trouble shooting on this model, after having the rest of the team each take the time to take a look at it, we got things figured out and got the animation up and happening. 

With Facial Animation 2 done, we've been working on our VR experience in Unity, as well as MP3, creating an animated matte painting. This has been an interesting experience, none of us have had experience with Unity before, and so have found somethings somewhat difficult to resolve. The most difficult thing we found was trying to combine the unity character controller with a modeled character in Maya. Our character would float where ever we had indicated the controller to move, and at times that character would randomly fall into space. We finally got the issue resolved and handed in.