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 - Unity Timeline

I think I've said this before, but the Unity Timeline is fantastic! (Despite not playing sound). It works very similarly to Premiere Pro, a software I'm familiar with enough to transfer the skills over to Unity. For my final film, I imported my animation one file at a time and made sure they were set up correctly in the timeline before moving onto the next import. As I'm using alembic cache, I have to have a new model for each animation so after speaking to my classmate Diebrig, she told me that I can use an activation track to switch the geometry off and on which is much easier than animating it off and on. So my general timeline for 1 shot looks something like this: Now, in this first shot, the character loses two polygons which are separate cached objects meaning they need their own tracks. The first green track is an activation track for the duration that this walk cycle animation is running. The next track is the alembic cache of the walk cycle animation. The wh

A Quiet Place

Earlier in the week I went to see A Quiet Place and as someone that doesn't watch a lot of horror films, it was not what I expected. The premise of A Quiet Place is pretty simple: There are monster out there and if you make a sound, they'll come for you and it's safe to say that I have never felt more tense in a cinema (And on a side note, that was the quietest cinema I have every been in). The film's main dialogue comes from sign language with a few rare vocalised sentences. This means, for the most part, that we're focused on how the characters move, how they act rather than what they say and I was shocked at how quickly I felt attached to the characters: I didn't want them to be in this situation, I wanted them to be safe but, shockingly, they weren't. The pace of the film is just enough to make you think that there's a safe respite ahead and there are gaps in the chaos before a sound crashes through the screen snapping you awake. There are m

Dragon Bait and Animate

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