Dragon Bait and Animate

I've been working on my animation since our last presentation. It's just as time consuming as I knew it would be and I'm actually starting to get a little burnt out from it. I've put all of my current animations into the video below. This includes the walk cycle which is used for most of the film as well as some of the main shots in the film. One of my classmates, Ryan, is also helping out with animation so I will work with his to create the finished film. I also intend to go through each animation before exporting to Unity and key it on 2s or 4s and step the curves.

I offered to 3D model one of my classmates characters as she has 4 characters in her final film. So I made Dalila's character, the Moon. I sculpted in ZBrush and used a mix of ZRemesher and Maya retopology to create the finished model which was smoothed in Maya. I had a lot of issues with the head piece and spent a long time trying to get it to look right until I eventually decided to use the Curve Strap brush in ZBrush to create layers around the head. I could make these low poly in ZBrush then just smooth them in Maya. Concept by Dalila Trovoada :  Block in: Adding Detail: Further Detailing: Adding shirt with transparency test: Retopoing:  Final Arnold Render:

Today was spent trying to work out how to make a face try black then fall off of my character as she was moving. In prior tests, this was easy as she was just a static model but with a rig in her and animation it complicates things in Unity. After a lot of trial and error my best method that I can (hopefully) repeat for other polygons is as follows: I need to duplicate the model as a whole with the input graph, then delete every face that isn't the one 'dying'. Duplicating with the input graph keeps the rig and animation intact. This polygon also has to be slightly pulled away from the mesh so that it doesn't intersect and cause strange rendering glitches. Keeping this individual face means that I can animate it on its own in Unity. I animate the alpha channel from 0 - 1. Going from transparent to opaque. This is set from 0-60 frames (2 seconds) I then need to have another duplicate of the face with no history. This polygon then has no rig, or an...

So my biggest issue from the last few days was that I was animating on the wrong file. This file had the wrong eye mesh that when imported into Unity looked completely wrong - and a little unsettling. I managed to see Sang Yu at university yesterday and he and I went through a whole heap of things that could fix it until at last he set up locators for the eyes and imported the correct eye geometry before parenting it to the locators which were in turn parented to the joints for the eyes. Although this in itself was a hassle because I had used Advanced Skeleton 5 which is great and quick for rigging but when there's an issue doesn't make it easy to find individual joints in the face rig. The animation I was working on is my final scene and by far my favourite shot so I wanted to spend some time on it before the deadline gets too close. Before I had completely finished the animation I did some tests on how animating on 2s and 4s might be and I actually really like 4s but ...

I've spent a lot of time recently trying to sort out how I'm going to get my "dead polygons" to look on my character. My original plan had been with texture but then I decided my character wouldn't have a proper UV map so that I could have a gradient effect from top to bottom of the character. So with this in mind, I couldn't build a few textures and just swap them out. So I decided that I would create a duplicate of the model, but just the faces that were "dying" and layer it on top of my model with a slight offset. This worked in early tests with a static model but I knew I would have issues once I started to animate. I didn't realise how many issues... Once I duplicated the mesh and deleted the faces that I didn't need I needed to delete any non-deformer history otherwise when I pulled it into Unity it would still be 1 whole mesh without any missing polys. This either crashed Maya (repeatedly) or it created strange, twisted and st...

A few quick updates on Cure. I started animating this week and I'll admit, it's something I've been neglecting so it's time to really push myself and get this done. I whipped up a quick walk cycle and then spent a while tweaking it up I could never get it to look right so I took it in to speak to Brendan. Spending an hour or so with a professional animator was more helpful than days of YouTube tutorials! I still need to look at how the animation is going to be stylised to fit into the environment so I want to pull together a few animations and bring them into Unity before testing different styles. I also updated my post-processing in Unity. Unity have only released version 1 of the Post-Processing Stack, however, there is a version 2 available on GitHub as a free download that gives me many more options in regards to layering different effects, in particular, this means I can have different depth of fields for each shot and I can animate between them! With this s...

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.

I spent some time pulling together a rough pre-visualisation. This took a lot longer than I expected as I was learning how to use Cinemachine and setting up each Virtual Camera. This was a bit of a learning curve but it should save me time in the long run as all of the cameras are already set up.   Each half cog/half camera is a Virtual Camera linked in Cinemachine. These are very light and don't slow down the whole process as they only use 1 main camera. Some of the cameras are attached to the character and 'Look At' certain parts of her, her eyes, the device, her wrist etc. Once she's animated and walking the cameras should bounce along with her.    The whole scene has been updated in Unity so that each camera angle has a full background rather than too much white space. I have also downloaded and imported Unity's Post-Processing Stack. This helps change the look of the film into something closer to what could be achieved in Maya and Premiere Pro...

Cure is now set up in a new project folder so that I can keep a more organised structure of all of my assets, that includes all of my 3D models and any textures being used on these models. These textures then need to be converted into materials that Unity can use.  This is my set up in Unity. Most of the background assets are to the left and top of the scene as this is where most of the cameras view. If needed I can add in additional background elements as and when they're needed. At the moment, they have a yellow-ish texture on them, but that can change easily as I have the material set up in Unity to just pick a new colour. I'm also creating a pre-vis file using Unity's Cinemachine. This means I can set up "Virtual Cameras" in the scene, keeping it light and quick rather than bogging it down with lots of "Main Cameras". Building this pre-vis means I can see how the final film will be composed and how the lighting will effect the scene in gene...