Okay. So winter break may be a time for people to chill and spend time with their loved ones, which I do plan to do, I also want to make some major progress since I have less stuff to do theoretically than I do next semester. It's my last semester of college people, I want some chill days. So to hold myself partially accountable, I plan to post my progress every single day of what I do. And I have a planner filled with what milestones I need to accomplish on each day. The end goal is to have my models for the most part DONE, the segmented rigs completely working, and do complete first and second pass animation to make sure the timing checks out, as well as the camera movements with the characters in place. So there's about three passes of animation I am planning for. Four in some special scenes or moments. First pass will conclude of just putting the character in the appropriate place. They'll look as if they're being dragged across the screen, but hey if the camera movements don't work it's better that they're just being dragged rather than changing tons of animation positions. Work smarter not harder. Second pass will consist of basic posing. I wasn't planning on including blinks but more robotic poses so you generally know what they'll be doing. Third pass, will be the icing on the cake, putting blinks and hopefully adding in smoother transitions that will make it look seamless. Four passes may include key poses like when he's falling down or a certain scene that will be hard to animate, which until I start first pass I won't realize just yet.

Okay, hopefully you kept reading, if you didn't tune out just yet. I did start my progress two days ago. So I'm gonna give you a breakdown of what I've done so far. Then I'll just post what I've done every day.

So let's recap:

First day (Friday Dec 16) 33 days left till break is done - I completely cleaned up all of my files in such a way that every asset is referenced in the shot. I also made sure that the linking for my characters would work properly in order to ensure efficient workflow. So for example, the stars are different in every scene, but essentially they are one type of star. I have a file with a single star which is referenced in separate star scene files, if I make a change to the single star, EVERY star in the film would be replaced. That's pretty cool and nifty. I also made sure the scaling was done appropriately with the sets and characters. And finally, I made sure everything had a naming convention. This took me so long, but it's a like a junk drawer that you've finally cleaned out. You feel satisfied, and can work with a clean space.

Just to show you what I did - I organized my whole project into 4 different categories: Assets, Concept Art, Overall Shots, and Sound.

Assets contain Characters, Effects, Environment, and Props.

Characters have all of the models and rigs organize into their appropriate files, and within those folders, is a folder named Final. The same goes for Props. That Final c4d file is the one that gets referenced in the scene.



Each scene file has an Environment file that contains all the assets linked, and that is the one linked into the master file, which in this case is : Scene_1.c4d.

The textures are all organized into layers as well. See, super organized. Shout out to Brent Wiley who gave me references and taught me what an XRef even was...