39. LOW RESOLUTION STAND-INS

With the sets and the characters completed, it would be time now to add animation to the characters, and help them tell the H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Music of Erich Zann."

I figured that I would start with the first scene first, and then move forward from there. Right from the beginning I saw challenges that this project was posing on my computer. I didn't even try to animate the characters nicely at first. I just wanted to shape and block out animatics in order to get the roughest version of the film done, and then I could see where I could improve the animation, sets, and even cameras. Even the simplest animations, and moving around the scene were causing my computer to slow way down, and I questioned if I would ever get through these bottlenecks to finish the project. For every hour that I worked on the animations in their respective scenes, I would need to restart my computer at least once.

However, I have dealt with this sort of problem before, and so I intended to solve it in the same way I did before, by creating a low resolution version of each of the sets. I would hide all of the high resolution geometry, and simply build a layer of very low resolution geometry in the exact same spot.

In order to help improve the look of the low resolution geometry, I rendered orthographic views of each of the buildings, and then I could use that rendered image as a picture to slap on top of the cube that I would use for the low resolution stand-in.

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