Knit Wits

I know this was due on the 24th, but I have more recent stuff to talk about, and this is the last blog post.

Lucy taught everyone how to do fur simulation and I assigned everyone who showed up to learn 5 different shots to groom the cat on. I had a convention that took up my entire weekend, but I still managed to do some 2D animation that Cal and I decided we wanted to place on a lot of the shots.

When I got back, I had four shots to groom the cat on and realized I was kind of slow and terrible at it. But I'm willing to anything, if not poorly, so I persisted.

Pretty much everything except for cat shots were rendered by the 24th, but there were a LOT of issues in terms of lighting mistakes and broken fur sims, so there weren't many shots that we didn't have to rerender at least once.

We are in full swing of things. I am setting up every single scene that has a light done for rendering. And then I just decided to render them myself. There's no real point in setting them up and then not pressing the actual button to render. Things are going fast!

Oh- and then we discovered that the renders of Barthalamew look TERRIBLE. They flicker like TV static and have bald spots. So we made the decision to sacrifice our free time in order to individually fix and groom the cat in every single shot. It's kind of terrifying but I have faith that we'll get it done in time.

I am now generally done with animation, so I'm making edits to animation (such as STWL-SW1 and STWL-SW6) and starting some test renders, such as this one from ARG-ARG6.

Finished all my animation on the 19th. That includes HID-PL9, GDDY-UP4, TOSS-IT1-4, and some edits to the GDDY-UP sequence. That was all the animation work I had to do, so when I get back from spring break, I will be helping everyone else get their stuff done and then set up all the renders!

I've been grinding away at my shots. We agreed to finish everything by March 20th, which means I have one more week to get everything done. And luckily, I have about 6 shots out of 41 left to do! I'm honestly just chipping away at it all. There's really no time left to be precious about the stuff we're doing or to make any changes. (And luckily, I kind of got everyone on the same page about that) I'm going to be away all spring break so I'm making sure I got all my stuff done before I leave.

Only clip I've taken recently is this so have the blocking for a shot I reworked

I have a lot of work to do. 45 shots out of the 109 in this entire film. I kind of panicked today when told that a lot of my team didn't quite "get" the stepped animation in one of my biggest scenes. I told them; and now I have told them three times; that I have an obscene amount of work to do and can't put a whole lot of polish into every scene. And I especially can't change something as large as all of the stepped animations in all of my scenes and experiment with it. We set a deadline of *March 20th* to complete all the animation which is 3 and a half weeks away. I have put some substantial amount of work into (if not completed) 23/45 of my shots. I'm probably not going to make this deadline, even though I have been working for hours after my classes every day in order to get to the point I'm at. But I'm *especially* not going to get it done if I have to keep changing things. I'm kind of freaking out. The more expectations put on me, the more work I have to do, the more even looking at the next thing on my to-do list makes me miserable. I'm burnt out as it is, and I know everyone else is too, but I don't know how else to tell them that whatever you see at this point is what you get.

Anyway, cat rig is at least able to be animated, so I spent today working on this. (It's also the shot people say they no longer like the stepped animation on.) Alongside all the other shots I've been doing.

Meant to put 2/7/2026 last time.

Lila finished the premade walk cycles and uploaded them to Studio Library. So now I'm able to put those walk cycles in the scenes where characters were moving.

I totally get that they look a bit janky, and break a cardinal rule we've been taught about keeping characters from sliding when walking. But we've got just over one month to finish all the animation, so we've got to cut corners where we can. And Lila did a fantastic job with what she had to work with.

Tomorrow we have a team meeting including telling Rianne that her cat rig may not be working out and we need to find a different solution. I'm pretty terrified for that. She's invested a lot of time and emotional effort into that rig and it's not from lack of effort that it's not doing well. I guess we'll see how it goes.

Doing everything I can to avoid animating the cat currently. We're getting some nice stuff in though so I still have work to do. I now get to go back to all my scenes and animate Seed and Brocade's weapons, along with Brocade's facial expressions. I get the impression that some of the shots I have are not going to get the full polish treatment, but I want to do my absolute best. Despite saying that, here's an updated version of ARG-ARG6 without proper weapons and Brocade expressions lol

New semester! This also happens to be the last semester.

We had a meeting before the semester officially started discussing dates that everything needs to be completed by: March 20th, all animation and textures need to be FINAL! That gives us a month to render everything and do comp work so that we can have a FULLY COMPLETED FILM by April 30th! And that gives us... one whole week of potential leeway, for the screening to be done on May 8th. Phew.

That means I need to get work done on polish animation! When I say "polish", I really mean opening up every single file I made last semester and giving everything a second pass of work. Mainly, I'm going to need to animate a LOT of shots with the cat in them. I also need to plug in Lila's walk cycle animations and Brocade's several "other forms", once those get done.

I've done 6 shots this week, though some of them are fairly basic. I have 37 shots I'm currently assigned to, and I expect to get some others from my classmates who aren't focused on animation.

This was just two weeks ago now. I think by 10/24 I had completed all the scenes I was initially assigned and so I took on a few more from other people: The STWL sequence and the GDDY sequence.

The STWL sequence is fairly long and complicated, and in between this blog post and the last was our Production Pass #3. That production pass commented on the title sequence shown off in STWL-SW1, and we agreed to create one more scene - STWL-SW7 - to tackle the title card instead.

By 11/14, I had completed STWL-SW1-6 and made a rough draft of STWL-SW7.

Also, I submitted the last blog post, so I'll share what I've done up to the current day - 11/30/2025 - as well.

I took a detour to fully animate the scene ARG-ARG1 so that I could have an animation example on my portfolio when I went to CTNX2025 last weekend.

Our group collectively set a deadline for the Tuesday after Thanksgiving break to have all of our animated scenes completed, giving us a week and two days to re-playblast everything and edit it together for the Preview Screening on 12/11.

So over the break I completed STWL-SW7, GDDY-UP1-4, and then took on four extra scenes; SEED-SAD1-4; to help everyone meet the deadline.

I'm back from my trip and I also immediately got sick! That doesn't stop me from making progress on my scenes, though.

I completed HID-PL3 and 4, BRCD-TOSS1 and 2, and SWTR-OFF1.

This was my first time using our rigged string model and to be honest it's a huge pain to work with. But I think BRCD-TOSS1 in particular turned out pretty good and it was a nice learning experience.

Also, I think I missed this in a previous blog post, but a while back, we (mostly Lucy) had to redo our whole set in order to fix issues with lag and mass amounts of foster parents in our outliner.

Since then, I was put in charge of taking everyones' completed model, UV, or texture files, and replacing a particularly named file in the REFERENCE folder with the updated file, in a specific way that doesn't mess anything up. Mack even made a big spreadsheet for it.

From what I can find, I think I was working on the shots HID-PL1 and 2 during this week, though I was largely missing.

This shot did include my first attempt at a walk cycle though. This helped me discover that Berry in particular is very difficult to animate walking. His legs don't really extend past his own body. But he still needs to move at the same pace of the other characters... I'm still figuring it out.

Week 4 (I got it wrong last time) was right in between Production Pass #2 and I was going all in on blocking out scenes for the film (as I would be for the rest of the semester.)

Mostly, I completed ARG-ARG2-6, and also almost immediately revisted ARG-ARG6 in order to adjust timing and the cat's movements.

Hi, I'm going to make some more chronological blog posts that attempts to recall everything I've done this semester to get my grade back up :)

Week 2 i worked on roughly animating scenes CLB-CB1-4 along with the blocking for ARG-ARG1 (a scene I have now fully animated)

I've been working for the past two weeks on making this primarily (I'm attending CTNX2025 this weekend so I wanted something nicely animated from my thesis on my portfolio).

Once again, not good at keeping up with these. I have been animating! So much! I can't show off the shots due to Tumblr's limitations but here's my stuff on our shotlist:

It's a new semester! I'm still really bad at making these updates but I'll be doing my best.

So far, this semester, I have:

Cleaned up every asset file (added an aistandard, set catclark to 2 subdivisions, resized to be proportionate, deleted backfaces, deleted history, froze transformations, and renamed the file to have consistent naming conventions)

Redid both of our sets using these updated files

Made 21 seconds of 2D animation for the very start of the film, from sketch to completion (as of writing this I haven't added the text)

Made a test animation using our new rig for Seed