Star Wars Project Episode V: The Cohort Strikes Back

 Team Progress:

    Work work work- we turned up the juice these two weeks to power through our production phase and get all our assets as finalized as we could.

    From a production standpoint, we were able to hit most of our goals during this fifth sprint, which leaves the team able to use our last two weeks of work to polish our assets to the highest quality we can! We successfully completed the following:

• All models finalized
• (Almost) All textures finalized
• Dirt/Rubble Effects and set dressing
• Animation pass 2/2
• Lighting pass 2/3

    We also had a few happy surprises happen during the sprint regarding the characters:

    A collaborative effort between the animation department and the character modeling department (read: me and Eric) led to a Storm Trooper Skeletal Mesh Update. Together, we worked to split the topology of the Trooper between the flexible leather uniform and the hard plastic-like armor, and with the additional polish time, Eric updated the Trooper's topology to be more skinning and animation friendly. This allowed for significant polish to the trooper rig, including the addition of secondary animation on the shoulder pads and belt pouches to reduce clipping and breathe more life into the trooper's motion capture performance.

    Additionally, Jedha now has a new robot friend to keep our Gonk Droid company- our Prop Artist Kirsten was able to create a new BB-8 model along with finishing all of her planned set dressing props.

    Our environment is coming together nicely with a beautiful update to the rubble set dressing and procedural sand/stone textures along the buildings and a second pass at scene lighting.

    And finally, animation is being polished to perform as naturally as possible. Another cool surprise the additional time allowed for was a re-animation of our second camera.

    We went back to the motion capture studio and connected our Star Wars scene to our Vicon Shogun Live set up on stage and used Live Linking to record live animation data for our camera directly into our sequence, reacting as if our point-of-view character was ducking away from the searching stormtrooper.

Animatic Version 5: Unreal Sequence

Still to Come:

• Placing the blasters in the trooper's hands correctly
• Final Lighting Pass, including volumetric fog
• Final Sound, courtesy of Yegues Schettini

Stay tuned for Episode VI...