#knitwits

I can't believe we are finally here (late but here) at the final blog post. It has been a journey and looking back on post 1 to 27 is crazy. The progress we made and the final product we ended up with is crazy.

In terms of this blog post, I don't have much. If I could just write render, render, render, render, render, and post it I would. I worked on grooming all of the different shots of Barthalamew and then rendering them out. It was definitely a process. Everyone was burnt out and the Knit Wits team most definitely became a little snippy with each other (including myself) but we made it nonetheless haha. For the final week, I worked on the sound while Rianne worked on the edit. I was finally able to add in all of our foley artists sound effects, our voice actors hmmphs and hmms, and our music artists music. With all of the music and compiled shots, the final came out beautiful!

Hello (and sorry for the late blog post its been a hectic month),

When I was supposed to be writing this, we had about 2 1/2 weeks left until the final deadline of our short film Knit Wits! Boy oh boy has it been a hectic last month of production.

For this blog post I wanted to talk about the final hurrah from the fur sim, and boy was it a big one! I feel like every time I figure out xgen fur simulation, it throws another curve ball for me to figure out. It's the gift that keeps giving ;)

We were finally at the cusp of finishing up our scenes to start rendering. We had already started our little yarn ball guys and their renders but Barthalamew the cat had other plans for me... other plans in terms of not properly coming onto the rigged and animated model. It took days of finagling, but I finally came to a solution. Here is an image of the before and after. While subtle when looking at it from an outsider's perspective, when mentioned (and most definitely to me) you can see the difference between the two. Here is the before and after! Before, the fur was coming in with ripples (specifically on his arms and face), and after it no longer has those ripples. I found the before an issue even if it doesn't seem like a big issue here, because we had some closeup face shots of Barthalamew and it definitely did not look good.

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.

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!

Hi!

These past few weeks were texture-mania. I've been trying to finish up all of my texture assets and these are the ones I've got done so far!

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

Hi there! This week I worked on mostly administrative stuff for Knit Wits and a bit of texturing as well!

I got in touch with our voice actor for brocade, he is beginning to work on some hmphs and hmms for him! We should hopefully be able to hear them implemented in the next production pass or the one after that! I have also been working with our music production artist, he is just about done with the soundtrack which is exciting! I also worked with our foley artist and we should have his foley implemented in the next production pass as well!

Here are the textures as well that I have been working on!