Dragon Bait and Animate

After a year of planning and working I can now present my final film: Cure Cure from Leah McEwen on Vimeo . Cure - Breakdown Reel from Leah McEwen on Vimeo . Leah McEwen 3D Generalist - Showreel 2018 from Leah McEwen on Vimeo .

After our final presentations on Friday I took on board the feedback from the lecturers and implemented it into a final version of Cure. I agreed with everything they said and listed off what needed to be fixed: The biggest issue was that the story wasn't coming across properly as the 'dying polygons' were only ever there in the first few shots and the character didn't seem to lose that many polygons. There were some camera shots that lingered for almost 10 seconds and they needed some variation. Some of the animation needed to be more obvious and expressive. There were errors in the recording from Unity, the eyes flickered and the lighting updates needed to be cut at the beginning of each camera change. The sound needed to be boasted as it didn't come across through a TV. I first fixed the issues of the dying polygons by adding more black polygons to the character that progressively spread as the film went on until she got the cure. I kept these to the...

It was so nice to see yesterday that an interview I did with Lucy Galloway had been published on the university website! You can read the whole thing here

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...

On Tuesday, I ran through my animation with Brendan as there were a few shots that really needed some work. These were the ones where she falls to her knees - in my animation it was too controlled and not natural - and where she stands back up - the weight was off as she stood up. Brendan spent some time talking me through how to fix these as well as going through the rest of my animation and tidying up mistakes and errors that made the animation look less natural. However, whenever I was importing my animation to Unity in FBX form, the facial animations didn't translate very well. Some of the controls when much further than they had in Maya resulting in stretched meshes that looked unatural so I came back to an idea I'd had the other month. I had talked about using an Alembic cache in Unity as they had used this method for the Unity short film ADAM . However, this isn't yet an official Unity plug in and is only available on GitHub where the instructions are in Japanese s...

One of the things I really wanted in Cure was a moving title, something really simple but abstract enough to fit in with the rest of the film. I had a plan based on an older concept piece of lines coming away from the title. The font I used is Appendix from Da Font which is 100% free for use. So I typed out Cure in Photoshop and kept it as a smart object. I then added in different lines that I animated using the transform function in Photoshop and the video animation window.  I then saved out the frames as individual PNG files with transparency. The PNGs were loaded into Unity and set as Sprites so that I could use them in the Canvas layer of the UI. I selected all of the images and dragged them into the Canvas which automatically created a frame animation for me. I then edited this animation to add a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end.

Between myself and Ryan, we've got all of the animation done for Cure, now it's time to go back and tidying up any mistakes and fix any glaring errors. I've pulled together a video with all of the animation in order (Apart from the introductory walk cycle) and now I'm going to go through it and try and pull out any obvious errors. At the same time, I need to go through the clips after she attaches the "Cure" and add it in for continuity. I also need to add in the "Dead Polygons" before I export to Unity and after that I want to add in any animation required for polygons falling off her. Phew, lots to do! So the things that need improvement from this video are the points where mine and Ryan's animation mix. I didn't realise until I pulled it all together how different are styles are and I need to smooth out that transition. I also need to cut down some shots and extend some shots. Specifically where she picks up the Cure needs to be a li...

To match my stlyised environment I wanted to apply a kind of stop-motion style to my animation. Throughout animating, I've made sure to animate how I normally would so that I still get all of the right curves before I start to make it stop-motion-esque. The first time I did these tests I simply went though the curve editor and every 2 or 4 frames made a key. It was tedious and time consuming so I now know that to achieve this quickly I can simply bake my animation. Baking means I can chose how often a key frame is added, whether it's every 2 or 4 frames and lets me keep any unbaked keys as well if there is a mistake in the animation. Once the keys are baked, I can then simply select the curve and set the tangents to stepped.