Dragon Bait and Animate

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...

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...

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...

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.

After our presentations last Wednesday, I got a lot of feedback about how my project was going to look, something I have been trying to build on for months. I've finally decided that I want to take the project into Unity to be able to use real time rendering and add that as something I can do. However, as for the actual look of the project, it needs revisited. Initially, I had planned to do everything in shades of grey, with a few colour exceptions here and there but after some feedback, it's obvious that just using grey makes the project look unfinished and as if it has just been pulled straight out of Maya. TRON was mentioned during the feedback so I looked into how both the original and modern TRON rendered a computer world.     I particularly like how the accents of light and the layers of the costumes are build around the form of the actor. As such I'd like to try and take this idea into my character, using the topology of the model as ...