Notes from 7/5/2010

Overview

-Reschedule of Work Session
-Particle Report from Randy
-Stylized Realistic Fur
-Tasks for Next Meeting


Reschedule of Work Session

Due to the July 4th falling on a Sunday this year, Monday (the 5th) was recognized as a holiday as well. Consequently, since DigiPen had reduced hours of operation and the school closed earlier, the trial work session will be changed to next weeks meeting.


Particle Report from Randy

Randy gave us a report of the research he's been doing regarding snow particle effects. He informed us that there are two things he has noticed so far that we should be aware of when moving forward with the project:

1) Deformation of snow (such as when the penguins are sliding through it and creating a path) is based on the original position of vertices. Thus, if a surface is smoothed with a process like turbo smooth or nurbs, the deformation will be offset if the surfaced of the smoothed geometry is not in the location of the original geometry. There should be ways around this - or ways to hide it - but it is something we should watch out for, nonetheless.

2) The areas that are deformed need to have a decent amount of polygons in order to deform properly. Therefor, unless we want to have a huge poly count for the environment, we will need to plan out the paths of the penguins ahead of time and insert more geometry in those spots.

Randy is still running more tests and doing more research, and will continue to have more info for us in the future. Nice work Randy!


Stylized Realistic Fur

A thought occurred to me while looking at the concept art of our characters Nyssa had done: how are we going to handle the fur? With as blocky and bold as the shapes are (as we decided the style would be), keeping the fur as solid geometry would almost certainly make the fur look fake, like plastic or clay. To avoid this look, we will most likely have to go realistic with the rendering of the fur collars.

However, instead of going fully realistic, we will used a stylized realistic approach, similar to how they handled fur in films like Ice Age. The large shapes and strong silhouette will remain, but the texture and rendering of the fur itself will be realistic.

This, of course, means we have more research to do regarding shaders and modifiers.


Tasks for Next Meeting

Here are the tasks everyone will be working on for the next meeting (7/12/2010)...

• Kieran: Meeting with Jimbo (he was not available until this week) and revising the script based on his feedback.
  
• David: Working on environment layout with Chase.
  
• Chase: Working on environment layout with David and concepting the Snowball Fight set
  
• Randy: Doing a test render of the snow particles. Refining snow particle controller. Time permitting, he will also begin researching fur shaders/modifiers.
  
• Nyssa: More turnarounds. Refining Dad design.
  
• Chin: Hanging out in 24-hour diners and TP-ing houses in Tenafly.

Until next time!