Fighter Kites - Progress Check No. 6

This week, the team got a lot further with the animatic and we're about halfway through. It would be efficient if we had all the playblasted shots ready by Wednesday, so the audio and timing can be sorted through by Friday. Since I will not be here in person for the next production pass meeting, I'll Zoom in for the presentation.

The main character model has been my main focus for this week, and I am hoping to speed up my process for next week. The topology is going much slower than I expected, but I am becoming more comfortable with the process, and I can see my speed increasing.

For this model's body, the topology is coming first, and the ZBrush modeling will come second. I know that the face will most definitely be modeled in ZBrush, but I have yet to figure out if I will use Quad Draw later on, or do the topology first as well. I might even sandwich them, who knows?

Knowing that the character will be clothed definitely assisted in considering the topology of the joints. As Paul mentioned today, which I find extremely interesting and worth noting, the current hip geometry works well for a clothed character, but otherwise, the geometry must flow with the bikini line instead. I spoke with the team about toes today as well. To toe or not to toe? We decided that for now, the big toe is important, but the little ones aren't, so the idea is to separate the big toes but not the little ones.

Above is a shot from the animatic, and I noticed that organization is a vital element to even something as simple as this. We sorted it out today, and everyone can now see what we have so far and what still needs to be done. At first, we just assigned shots for each person, but we needed a collective folder in the X-drive for everyone to upload their shots. This worked well for the organization for our whiteboxing goal.