MoTR Production Update: Week 6

AHOY SAILORS!

Wooo boy, I'm having a strange week.

With Natka busy with FUMI after the very succcessfull release of Mouse: Pi for Hire (it's a great game btw) and Katherine busy with her university finals, it's a bit of an off week.

So expect this to be a very small update. :P

Current Status

General

Well I'm very happy to say the first pass of the MoTR Design Guide is done! Woo! It'll be a document we constantly update as we go further into production. I'm actually very happy with it and on a personal note I can tell my art style has improved since starting this project. So that's VERY gratifying. :D

As it is right now my focus is on ironing out our plan for going forward into animation proper. It's important we get this part of the pipeline settled as we bring others in to work on the shorts and episode 1.

Ideally I want us to develope the pipeline for MoTR during the creation of 2nd Short and be able to carry that through the rest of the series. Hence it's importance.

Storyboard Updates

So with the majority of the pre-production material that I'm handling squared away, it came time to circle back to the storyboards/animatics completed for the shorts and episode 1. The primary reason for this was that as Katherine has been modeling the ship, the height of some of the floors and levels have changed. As such some of the shots are now horribly misaligned. Thus a touch up was required.

I've attempted to limit myself from going through EVERY storyboard and animatic sequence across the project and updating it, as the model itself is still not 100% completed but I have gone through and updated the animatics of the shorts that feature the characters on the top decks; Short 1 and Short 2.

Future Storyboard Updates

There's a particular sequence in Episode 1 of MoTR that has Hawkins climbing and jump all over the top deck of the ship. In this sequence there's a part where Hawkins orginally ran up a set of stairs. Those stairs are no longer part of the design.

As you can see above that means that a portion of a very energetic and 3D heavy sequence is going to have to be redone. I'm actually looking forward to getting around to doing that so I'm planning to have Hawkins orginally run towards the ladder, getting blocked and then attempting to climb the inside of the tube slide, dodging Statigues and Intrufish before getting to the top.

But I'm holding off on working on that for now, as the model is still being updated and our production pipeline needs to be sorted. That process might lead to changes to the boarding stage.

The MoTR Pipeline

A pipeline is a vital part of every production. It helps organise a group and keeps everything working towards the final product. In the past I've by enlarge worked alone, thus I could play fast and loose with my own pipeline, jumping from bit to bit. As I'm (thankfully) working with others a defined pipeline is nessersary.

What the MoTR pipeline is, is something we're actively working out as we go. It's a big reason why we've created several shorts. These shorts give us a chance to iron out possible difficulties we might come across before heading into the full first episode, work out design and animation details and still result in something tangible to show to a wider audience.

The current bottle neck comes from us defining how exactly we'll be going out mixing the 2D characters in a 3D enviroment. There's two methods as far as I can see.

Method 1: Flattern the 3D

In this method we'd essentially turn the 3D enviroments into a flate plane like the 2D characters and simply place it behind the characters. We'd do this by turning the 3D enviroments into static pictures or video clips following the movement of the camera for that shot.

The benefit to this method is that we'd be animating in a traditional 2D enviroment which is what we're used to. It'd also reduce issues with characters potentially clipping into 3D models.

The downside is we'd miss out on all the interesting possibilities of having our characters in a 3D enviroment. Like using blender to help cast shadows, light characters and interact with other 3D objects in the enviroment. Plus we'd have to essentially lock the camera movements in and never change them again. As any moevment to the camera would result in us having to rerender the background and potentially alter all the animation for that shot.

Personally I don't like the restrictions this method would saddle us with and I'm not confident it'll produce better results.

Method 2: Embrace the 3D

We animate characters and import them into the 3D enviroments using planes.

The benefit to this method is that our characters are actually in that enviroment. Our camera wouldn't be locked and edits to the shot could be made even at this stage. We can also use the 3D program (like blender) to help light and shade both the enviroment and the characters.

Some potential downside is that we may come across clipping issues and potentially the camera could move in such a way to make the 2D nature of the character obvious. However I believe a lot of these issues could be resolved by editing the animation or adjusting the position of the animation.

If we did go with this method what we were animating would be altered. By placing the characters themselves in a 3D enviroment we'd focused on animating just the characters with no regard to distance from camera, as the nature of a 3D enviroment and the 3D movement of the camera would sort this for us.

There's also plenty of tutorials on how to go about this, but most of them focus on importing animation from a 2D program to Blender. Unfortunately for us, the storyboarding has been done in Storyboard Pro and I've yet to find a method to import the shots from Storyboard Pro into Blender whilst retaining all the infomation (such as camera locations etc etc).

The personal issue for me is a learning one. I've never attempted to have 2D Characters exist in a 3D enviroment. It's actually been a pretty big glaring hole in my skillset for many years. So in a way I'm actually looking forward to learning how to do so effectively.

Never the less, because both Katherine and Natka have fully booked week we've arrange to have a team meeting to discuss in detail this portion of the production next Monday. My hope is that by the end of that meeting we will have settled on exactly what we need to continue effectively and I'll have more to show. ;D

Small Bits and Bops

Because this is a bit of a slow week in terms of production as I wait for the Monday meeting I've instead taken the liberty of updating some of the images on this website based on some of the altered designs.

A lot of design alterations were small, but I nevertheless deicided to update the pictures of the characters in the rings that you can find on The Revelry and The Forces of Darkness pages respectfully.

The coming week

1rregularCharlie

My coming week look pretty relaxed untill Monday. I'm planning to casually update images around the website and continue researching moxing 2D animation in 3D enviroments.

Also myself and Natka have been playing through Mouse: PI for Hire in little chunks every evening since it's release. It's been really fun getting to nerd out over great animations and discussing a bunch of the behind the scene elements of the game. Always enjoy talking shop.

Natka

This coming weekend Natka will be with FUMI attending a convention to show off Mouse: PI For Hire so her focus is on that for the moment.

Katherine

Katherine is a busy student bee and with her midterms coming up she's focused on that, working a part time job and doing 3D modeling when she can.

She's also the DM for a Crooked Moon dnd campaign that we're playing and I'm looking forward to the next session. :D

THAT'S ALL FOR THIS WEEK. SORRY IT WAS A SHORT ONE.