As this week rolled around, it became clear of two things. First off, we needed to further organize the workings of our group. Second, we also needed to get started on our hair simulation, as we knew that it would be one of our biggest kinks to work out in the pipeline.
With the first objective in mind, fellow team leader Ethan and I met over the weekend to create a concrete schedule, prioritize assets and scenes, and make references for said objects. This went fairly quickly, as we used the school calendar as a rough frame to make the schedule, then filled in specific dates with objectives. From there, we polished up some of the specific dates to make sure that we had time to make corrections if we needed to and posted it to our drive.
After this, we moved onto our asset list. Going through each of the assets and comparing it to our animatic, we decided on the importance of each asset and how much we needed it to get a complete, full-feeling scene. We then rated it on a scale from 1-3 on importance, also making a color code to go along with it. We also placed a series of links next to each of the comments, leading to references to an idea of what we want the final pieces to look like.
With that done, I moved on to creating the hair for Saint George. I knew that the hardest part of his character design would be the ponytail off the back of his head. Alongside that, without a basemesh for the character yet, I couldn't specifically create it on the mesh we were going to use, so instead I did some R&D work on a default face exported from z-brush. My main goal was to create the look of Saint George without worrying about simulation first.
Using the official SideFX website, I walked myself on the creation and grooming of hair. I learned the updated workflow for hair in Houdini 17.5, as well as the new grooming tools. With this toolset, I was able to experiment with different ways in creating the hair I was striving towards.