SANM560 Weeks 1 & 2

(Links to images and videos for now because wix won't let me add them directly)

During weeks 1 and 2 of the project, in addition to helping brainstorm ideas for the final premise alongside the rest of the team, I also started discussing possible assets and workflow with the tech team, and started experimenting with some effect ideas that were thrown around during brainstorming sessions.

Brainstorming Input

• Building off of suggestions to add more color to the initial wasteland idea, I proposed the idea that the world is already in the process of recovering, which led to the idea of having the environment be overgrown with colorful flowers and greenery

Tech Team Ideas

• Owen and I started discussing some 2D card assets that could be used to break up the repetitiveness of the environment, such as animated cockroaches, various levels of cobwebs, falling dust and pieces of stone, etc.

• Robin, Owen, Carlos, and I put together a "master" naming convention for file organization that will eventually be tailored more specifically to each pod's needs

  • I suggested including an indicator of which pod produced the file to easily check who to reach out to for questions without necessarily needing subfolders

• Carlos and I started discussing how we would integrate the planned physical train car with the virtual train cars on the wall, primarily through the lens of photogrammetry.

  • Due to highly likely time constraints between the completion of the physical train and the shoot days, I proposed the idea of using a stand-in train on the wall, likely with tracking markers on it, and then photoscanning the physical train car post-shoot to composite it back onto the footage from the wall

Experimentation

One of the ideas that was mentioned a few times was having timelapses of flowers growing out of various places. The context changed a couple times but I figured getting a head start on the effect might be a good idea, so I created a simple blossoming test, trying to imitate the look of a timelapse. I then experimented with exporting the simulation as an alembic file into Unreal. This test was mainly to test the process of being able to import pre simulated meshes into Unreal, something I'd been wondering about for a while but hadn't tried before.

Next Steps

• Working with others on solidifying more of the layout of the environment

• Possibly assisting Owen in getting VR location scouting to work if needed.

• Working with production design team to start getting models matching physical set plans made/acquired