Dragon Bait and Animate

I've really enjoyed keeping a production blog throughout my masters course so I'm hoping on over to Tumblr where I can follow some other awesome 3D artists! So you can find me here: http://harlequin-werewolf.tumblr.com/ Also, a few of my classmates are on Tumblr here: https://diebrigkuchler.tumblr.com/ https://myanimationjourney.tumblr.com/ https://picturemoving.tumblr.com/ https://tututugod.tumblr.com/ http://mayacossette.tumblr.com/

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.

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...