Cure - Rigging and Assets

I've spent the last couple of weeks tweaking the character mesh to tidy it up for rigging. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 again to rig this character as well as looking at a few online tutorials to make sure I got the most out of the rig. I also used Advanced Skeleton to build a facial rig which works better than expected although the blink function didn't work properly so I added in my own blend shape to allow the character to blink.

I also tweaked some old assets and built a couple of new ones to bring into the final environment.

I forgot that there was an email about sending in artwork that might be selected to be used on the Masters show posters so I posed my character and pulled together a render in Maya that I felt represented my project and compared to earlier work, I feel that this has a lot more style and personality.

So now I'm pulling in all of these assets and final ideas into Unity for the final project and I hope to have this all set up before the beginning of next week so I can start a pre-vis and begin animation.

In other news I updated my storyboards to a REALLY rough version of a tighter and cleaner story line that I feel makes more sense and has more personality in the camera shots and angles.

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Cure - Advanced Skeleton 5

I spent a fair chunk of the day yesterday playing around with Advanced Skeleton 5 in Maya and honestly, it's amazing. I wasn't sure how well it would work with my model because it is so low poly but I came out surprisingly well. So Advanced Skeleton gives you the joints from a template and once they're all lined up you can build the controllers to see how it will move. Because you do all of this in stages, you can change and update the rig at any point. There are a few different methods to bind the skin and this is one of them, but in the end I didn't use the Skin Cage because it didn't seem necessary for my model. Once the body rig was done I spent a LONG time trying to get the facial rig to work. I was clearly doing something wrong the first few times I tried it because it worked just fine when I sat down and worked through it step by step! The skeleton also comes with pre-made walk cycles so I put my character into these to see how the de...

Cure - Animation Tests

I created a really simple and rough animation to test out a kind of animation style I had been looking in to. I know I don't want something smooth or too natural looking as it wouldn't match the character art or environment. I recently saw the Into the Spider-Verse trailer and was really intrigued by this kind of 'stop-motion' style of animation so gave it a go in Maya. I tried the animation with auto tangents before switching to stepped tangents on every 2nd frame and then every 4th (roughly). I actually really like 4s but I want to see how this looks with a full body animation rather than just facial.

Cure - Story and Unity

On Monday we had a chat with Mark Grindle again, having met him first in October. We all went through out projects and he helped focus our ideas before we begin final production. Cure has been a little stagnant since we started the Going Live projects but it has always been in the back of my mind. I've looked into scene set up and even mocked up a rough poster. However, after running through the idea with Mark I think it's clear that I need to strip it back even further. I want to keep the core of the story and the themes of mental health and depression. Mark seemed to really like the idea of a fragmented world and the idea of shifting from chaos through to order so I want to take that idea further. Our character should begin in a fragmented world, chaotic and in constant motion but when she finds her 'cure' the world stops and settles but nothing changes: She has still lost parts of herself (I might remove the piles of dead polygons) and the world is still ...

Dragon Bait and Animate

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