Spring 2023 Senior Project Version 4
Working Title: Stabbing
This week came with a few unexpected hiccups, one better than the other. The first thing the week threw at me was that one of the people that were supposed to help me film the fencing reference footage got Covid, so I had to change which shots I was filming for this week. The second is that I've decided to learn Substance Painter!
To make up for being unable to film the fencing reference footage I chose to film one of my other more difficult shots, the most emotional one. The story of this film is very personal to me, so I knew that tapping into those emotions to get into character for the footage would not be a pleasant experience. However, if I held back it wouldn't be genuine enough. It took a long time to fight against my instincts to keep my emotions under control, and once those broke it took even longer to come back down from being inconsolable. I am very happy with the reference footage I got.
The more pleasant unexpected thing this week was that I decided I'm going to learn Substance Painter. I have several rigs I need to age up, clothing with specific details I want to model, and I've always been slightly interested in learning the program regardless so this is the perfect opportunity. Hopefully it also means that it will make my workflow faster later in production as I work on more details in the assets and the environments. The downside with this is that I wasn't able to age the rigs I had planned to this week, but since I've been working on learning Substance Painter I'm still making progress towards completing those very soon.
Animatic Version 4
I made a few changes to the transitions this week, and I have a few more I would like to adjust. I didn't implement the changes I wanted to for the final tournament scene quite yet since my vision is still a little fuzzy on it. One thing I am sure of that I was still unsure of last week is that technically, in an actual fencing tournament the final bouts are up to 15 points, not 5 points. Fencing is not a very well known sport so most of my audience will not know this, and since the first bout shown in to 5 points I chose to make the final bout to 5 points as well. That way the majority of the audience will understand that 5 points is to win, and it helps me avoid having to figure out how to include up to 30 different actions for both of the fencers to reach 14 points. The downside is that the people that will view my film who are fencers might be confused, but I think in the context of the story they will understand the stakes of winning that bout regardless.
For the actual editing and composition of that scene, I'm going to spend this next week indulging in as much reference as I can find. I'm going to watch sports movies, tournament montages, anything even close to what I want to achieve so I can figure out how to make the viewer feel more like they're part of the action. I originally planned to do that this week, but chose to reprioritize a few other things.
Modeling
One of the things I chose to work on this week was modeling Stevie's signature jacket. I've never modeled clothing before so this was another thing I had to fully learn from scratch, luckily with much less of a learning curve than Substance Painter. Depending on how well the smoothing and render tests go I might restart the jacket to fix some of the geometry, but only if it'll be absolutely necessary. This jacket will also have several patches that Stevie has earned in tournaments and collected from other fencing clubs, so I plan on designing those and texturing the rest of the jacket in Substance Painter.
Rigging and Modeling
This is the current state of my epee model and rig. The rig is fully completed, but I chose to take a shortcut with it. The most standard type of grip for epees is called a pistol grip, which is a more modern and ergonomic grip than the french grip. The catch is that the pistol grip is far more visually complex than the french grip, so I chose to save time and instead model the french grip. This will not affect filming reference footage or how the hand will be wrapped around the grip when I animate it, so I chose to save the time and make it more simple. Where I am using that saved time is creating the rig.
I'm trying to create an IK system for the blade, since it bends at the tip when in contact with a surface. It doesn't bend evenly and the blade still has to be used from the grip so it's definitely not as easy as I was expecting it to be. In its current state the IK system is working, but there is no soft bend in the blade so that is what I will be finishing with this rig next week.
What's Next
Next week I will begin blocking the scenes I'll have reference footage for. I also plan on completing the epee rig, Stevie's jacket, aging up all of the necessary rigs, and completing a few render tests. Most importantly I want to make all of my desired changes to my animatic, especially the climactic tournament scene.
Of course this will most likely change as the week progresses but this is my rough plan. Even though I have a lot of prep work still to do, I need to start making progress on the animations and worry about implementing all the prep work later. My film is starting to push 3 minutes. It's now twice the upper limit of the recommended length. If I fall behind now I'll never catch up and I know this is a film that I can confidently complete.
I'm going to work on all of the shots without the epee and the mask first since I'm still finishing both of those, then once those are completed I'm going to shift my focus to those scenes since they will have some of the most complex animation in my film.
