The Apothecary Week 30 - Fixing Old Lady Textures and Potential Bifrost Fluids

Dated: 03 April 2025

The week before this one was Spring break and I didn't get to work on this project as much as I wanted to. I picked up a bunch of shifts at work, and I had issues with the VPN being slow and seemingly off at some times. Even with not as much progress as I may have expected going into the break, I still made a ton of progress in the week following. One of the first issues I ran into is that the textures on the Oldy Lady would move and slide when adjusting features on the rig.

I show the before and the after pictures of the textures in the image above. I only moved the old lady a few degrees for both examples. The textures on the old lady on the left side were moving around due to a miscommunication between Olivia and myself. There was history on the rig due to the UVs being added after we polished the rig. After a bunch of troubleshooting, this ended up being a pretty simple fix as we just had to adjust the UVs and then reload the model into the rig so the history was removed.

After I fixed the old lady rig, our team had the idea to re-think how we will approach our bookcase flooding. This was caused as we made an agreement with one of the juniors who said he would help us with some of our water simulations. After a few weeks and no progress, we decided to continue our senior project without him as he didn't meet the expectations of my group's needs and demands.

Throughout this senior project, we have many shots where our main character, Basil, pours potions into cauldrons, honey into bowls, and other liquids into jars. I tried playing and testing some ideas to solve this issue. It would look strange if Basil poured potions with nothing in them so I have tried creating some fluid simulations with Maya's Bifrost plugin. It has been working strangely and it doesn't work necessarily how I want it to, but it is a good start, and I can add these later if we have extra time closer to the due date.

I have been adjusting all of the issues with the old lady rig, building a bookshelf rig, and trying to find a solid solution to any liquids. While all of this has been going on, I have also been working on polishing animation and some of our editorial work. Making sure that our story makes sense by rearranging shots and adjusting camera angles for clarity is important. I have also been slowly adding audio to our film including footsteps, bottles drops, etc.