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ba3bzayrick · 3 years

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Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

1st Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

Now that we started the second half of our showcase. I started revising all the things that I’m going to produce on my design template. My first week is all about completing the stage set of my film. I managed to create all the 3D assets and I also established the lighting of my animation. The things that didn’t go well is the fact that I did not realise the sizes of the object and I should have based it on my character’s height. It is also the feedback that I’ve received from Anand telling me that I should use proper actual sizes and using centimetre will help assist and guide me. Next week I’m going to focus on creating my characters in Zbrush and hopefully start with the retopology in Maya.

2nd Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

Now that I’ve got my character’s 2D design from BA3a, I can now use it as a guide to building it in 3D. With the help of Mark’s 3D tutorial before Christmas break, I now have an idea of how I start. The material z sphere serves as the base and the skeleton of my characters. What didn’t went well is the fact that I combine the hair with the original mesh and Mark told me that it’ll be better if the hair is separated as the hair can potentially be animated, plus it looks more normal compared to the original form. I also got feedback with the legs of the characters, Anand told me that I should straighten the leg 90 degrees and the feet should be facing forward because according to him, the advanced skeleton is very critical about certain small things as it can crush the rig very easily. Now that I’ve finished 3D modelling and received all the feedbacks, it is now time to rig it next week.

3rd Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

During this week Anand’s lesson, I asked if what is the best way to rig my characters in Maya and he highly recommended advanced skeleton as it will truly sharpen and lessen the fault and impairment of the rigged outcome. Anand told me that I should delete one of my characters as it will prolong my time in rendering plus Allan, the character that going to be deleted, doesn’t have any role in the film. Anand sent me a 5 part YouTube rigging tutorial videos using advanced skeleton. It is the right video tutorial for me because it is aimed at a student like me that are not specialised in the rigging department. I’ve learned many things about the videos as it walks me through everything from installing the tool to completing my characters with full-body animation controls, it was pretty straightforward and very understandable. The thing that didn’t go well is the facial animation part. It seems that the advanced skeleton tool does not want how I build or retopologised as it did not work after I’ve tried the facial rig stage. My tutors told me that advanced skeleton is very critical, captious, and fault finding. I thought I was going to leave it without the facial animation but Anand and Ben told me a saving alternative which is using the blend shape method. After I’ve done doing all the face gestures and actions the second problem occurred. The problem the blend shape animation is moving when the rig is steady or not moving but once I create a keyframe the blend shape controls disappeared. I asked Ben for help as Ben used blend shape for our group project. I have to talk to him online ignorer to help me with my problem. We encountered that the wet paint of the blend shape faces should be accurate with the original one. All of the faces should be centred on the body. What we did was copy the skin weight, bind skin, and redo the blend-shape method. I did it to every single blend faces including the blinking of the eyes. Now that I change all the options my characters are finally can do some animation. The finished rig characters don’t only have normal controls, I can also activate some of the IK handles controllers to move my character depends on what situation or scenario. For next week, I intend to produce and start some animation tests.

4th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

Regarding me completing the rig models, it is now time to do the parts of my animation scene. The feedback I got for my first scene is I should use a wide-angle camera view to demonstrate where he is and the environment he’s into. I started the scene with bright lighting as I wanted to dim the light as the scenes are getting spooky. What didn’t go well is I still added the other charger and again Anand told me to remove it as it serves no purpose. I reference myself doing a reaction on getting a notification through my phone and edited it on after effects to render it as a jpeg sequence to play it as a video on Maya. It took me the entire week to animate the first scene and for next week I’m now ready to start the second part.

5th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

With the first scene finished and out of the way, I can finally start constructing and animating the second scene. The second animation is a walking scene and from the past 2 years, I’ve animated a decent amount of walking animation sequences from different animation mediums. Even though I was used to producing walking cycles, I have got feedback that getting a video reference is still a safer method to get the animation timing and action right. Anand told me that I should delete all the things that are not going to be in the scene to decrease the render time. He suggested that I should create 3 original Maya files containing each place of the scenes because it will cut back some of the lags of my computer and it will be easier to render. Now that the second part of my film has been animated, for next week I will layout on how I’m going to animate the third scene.

6th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

Completion of the third scene was my mission this week. I started this week realising that one of my characters which is the ghost has not been rig. I have put NURBS circle because the only action I wanted from the ghost character is to have certain small rotation actions and I might animate her rotating as she appears from the last scene. I also did some NURBS circles to the door as I’m going to animate the door as well. I’ve got a problem with the camera angle action as it creates unusual unnecessary actions whilst panning to the left. I’ve got feedback that the camera angle action should be animated with auto keyframe toggle as it will keyframe the time frame the same amount I will pan the camera using my mouse. They also told me that the knocking action is a bit too slow so I adjust the timing and made it a bit normal and quicker. The last changes from the feedback were the turnaround running animation. I animated all the NURBS circle from the body to make him not stale and I also animated the elbow and the arm correctly as he runs away from the scene. Next week is all about implementing my plans for the next scene.

7th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

The first thing I did this week for this project was to record myself acting exhausted coming from being a ghost. The first thing on my feedback that I wanted to implement was to observe the breathing movement as this is the fundamental action of this scene. Same as I did from our group project, I’ve animated all the NURBS circle controller as my character body and armrest to his knees. My tutor also told me that the IK handle controller should play a major role in animating the sequence and it truly helps me tremendously because I didn’t encounter any frame positioning towards the arms as it stays when I create keyframes from the other animation controller. The last feedback I got this week is they told me that I should include the character have frames where he is trying to go back to check on his sister. I agree with the feedback as I thought that it was too quick and the audience should know the flow and where is the scene is going.

8th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

The next animation scene I’m doing is the door kicking animation. What went well this week is the fact that I’ve finished this in two days and had feedback from it. With that working pace, I had time to put more work and effort into my group project. I ask my tutors which is better to do: doing a door kicking at home as a reference or finding a scene on a film or YouTube video of door kicking for the reference. They said that doing research online is the best and the safest way as I wanted the action on this scene to be more aggressive and on point and I don’t feel like I can accomplish that at home as it will create a tremendous amount of noise. After I’ve done the animation, I’ve got feedback that I should include some after effect action of the door coming from an impact. I also adjusted the timing of the foot landing from the door kick and now the animation action looks more polished. For next week, I intend to do the last scene and hopefully start rendering.

9th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

What went well this week is the fact that I’ve finished the last scene early. The main problem is the blend shape face animation of the second character. It seems like it does not cooperating when I put a keyframe but when it’s steady the face controls seem to be working. I tried to copy skin weight and skin binding and I thought that it’ll fix the situation just like when I optimised the blend shape of my main character but unfortunately Gina’s Maya file seems to have errors when I do bind skin and copy skin weight. The feedback that I’ve got was just to cover his mouth and don’t let the audience see the yawning part. The unusual part is when I did it to the hair and the eyes, they seem to be fine to animate. There is nothing I can do to fix the face rig of my second character as I do not specialised in rigging so I just took the feedback to fix the scene. Next week, I will focus on finalising the lighting option and start rendering and editing my film to an outcome.

10th Week Personal Showcase (Blog, Research, Journal)

Before I finalising the scenes ready for rendering, I’ve checked all the lightings in every scene and did a current frame render, see if I need to adjust the options. Fortunately, all the scenes don’t have major issues with lighting, I just did a few changes such as modifying the colour, intensity, and exposure. Now that I’ve done the lighting, the next thing I did was to set all the project on the main folder. The rending process took me the entire day. Now that I’ve got all the render scenes, I first put them on after effects as I prefer it to use to combine all the images. After that, I’ve rendered the animation and put it to audition to put all the sound effects and ending sound. The good thing is I still have the NUA sound file that our tutor shared last year. For the ending sound, I went to bensound.com to pick the right soundtrack for the certain genre I’ve chosen. The last step of the process was to finalising it on premiere pro. Adding the correct font of the title and also adding all the credits. I’ve shared the outcome with my peers and let them criticise the film and they told me that there are a couple of misspelt words but besides that, it is now completed. This week, I have also done the experimentation reels on my personal and the collaborated project. The last thing that I need to do before submission was to do the evaluation.

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