SCHEDULING
25-10-2022
My initial schedule allotted the first semester solely to the pre production elements, with the intention of getting into main production after Christmas.
The majority of this time was spent researching my ideas and inspirations, as well as potential rigs that could fulfil my needs.
14-11-2022
By the middle of November, I had completed my environment research during my trip to York, but needed to allocate some more time to my rig research whilst I made my final decisions.
I began working on my Storyboards and Previz simultaneously at this time
10-01-2023
Throughout December, I worked on my Storyboard and Previz, but was unable to finish it until the first week of January. Unfortunately, this delay did mean that I had began to stray from my initial schedule and I adjusted to Gantt chart to accommodate.
At this point, I had a completed previz and had started to gather some reference footage. During this time, I also began experimenting with my Maya to Unreal pipeline, as well as Unreal Engine's potential to fill my simulation needs.
By the 20th I had done extensive tests into Unreals ability to perform cloth and destruction simulations, and determined it would be more than viable to do all my simulations inside UE5.
30-01-2023
By this point, my original schedule had me well into my main production. However, in reality, my recent research into the Maya to Unreal Engine pipeline had revealed some serious road blocks.
As it turned out, the Sylvanas rig I intended on using was not built to work in Unreal Engine, and any attempts to export the rig as an FBX resulted in the face geo not transferring. This lead to a tireless weeklong endeavour of trying to find a suitable solution.
I go into it more here, but it delayed the start of production as I knew without finding a viable solution, the whole project was going to be in jeopardy.
However, once I discovered a working solution to those problems, I was confident on moving into production. I used this time to create an initial walk cycle for Sylvanas, as well as finalize my Animation schedule.
Up until this point, my Gantt chart had just categorized animation in one big [temp] category, but now that my Previz and Storyboards were finalized, I was able to break down my shot list and allocate time to each scene.
I created a detailed shot breakdown in Google Sheets and grouped certain shots into scenes based on similarity, complexity and transference of motion. In total I ended up with 38 shots, grouped into 16 scenes, which I then allocated time on my schedule based on difficulty.
This revealed to me just how little time I had in reality. With the aim of getting a blocking pass done by mid February, this meant that each scene would only get a couple of days work if I wanted to wrap animation by earlier April.
It didn't seem impossible, but I knew I was going to have to focus up if I wanted to stay on track. At this point, only time can tell...
(Animation Gantt chart breakdown 30-01-23) - At this point I also figured out how to display my task status on the Gantt chart.
Pink being 'To-Do', Orange being 'WIP' and Green being 'Completed'.
01-03-2023
Throughout February I was well into production, working through animating my shots. However it was starting to become clear that I was already straying from my schedule and that it was a very real chance I would not complete the entirety of the animation. Furthermore, I had yet to build my environment and I knew that I had to really knuckle down if I wanted to get a worthy final product.
06-04-2023
By the start of April I had completed my environment and was trying to get whatever animation I had into unreal and rendered. I spent much of april solidifying my unreal set up and render process, but once I had things figured out my workflow was simple. I began working on getting shots into Premiere and working to add sound. I had unfortunately strayed too far from my schedule at this point and was operating on a mindset of 'get whatever I can get finished'.