Dragon Bait and Animate

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...

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...

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.

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...

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.

The last couple of weeks have been a bit weird, I've been trying out lots of different things both in 3D modelling for my character as well as in Unity to see how the film may look. I've also looked back on my storyboards and know where I need to tweak things to make the film work. I wasn't entirely happy with the character design and as Sang said, it needs to have good topology, especially in the face, as everything will be visible in the low poly style. So I took a head I had sculpted and retopoed in 3D Coat as a base: I also changed the body to make it simpler as well as changing the device on her arm to be more fragmented. At the same time I was doing regular testing in Unity to see how the character is going to work in real time as well as how certain parts of the animation was going to look. I wanted to have a play about with how the character might look, knowing that I have a fractured and abstract environment, I feel like there is a lot of room to ...

I realise I've been pretty quiet on here but I have been working away at the 3D kitchen scene for Ping and Noodle over the last week. There still needs to be some colour tweaks because the character won't quite fit in with it just yet but I think it's mostly pulling down the saturation. Right now I have 3 light sources in the scene for the 2 windows and the door but I might swap a window out and add in a light at the microwave or the oven as a colour light but we'll see how it all comes together. At least now, if we're unhappy with something we don't completely have to re-draw it, we can just make a few tweaks and re-render.  In other news I looked at pulling a sketch Anna had done of Noodle into Photoshop and tidying it up. Then I took it into After Effects and tried out the Puppet Warp tool to animate it a little. It took longer than I thought but most of it was a learning experience more than anything. If we have the right character art we...

We've been given another Going Live project this semester involving the composition of a character into live action footage. I've done a little composition before for my honours project but it was all done in After Effects and Premiere Pro whereas now I'll be using Nuke. So we spent yesterday out trying to film some footage and it was very difficult! The weather was against us for almost all of the day with it changing every 5 minutes! We tried as best we could and managed to snag a few minutes of locked footage. Now it's a case of preparing the footage for compositing and animating the character!

So I spent a few days updating my storyboards to make the timings a bit better and the story more clear. I then did the usual and put these all together in an animatic. (With some cheesy music...)

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...

I spent a little while working on setting up a basic scene in Maya and found a lot of inspiration the the PS4 game 'Bound'.  I love the way they do the far away scenery and I like the idea of the world cracking and moving around my character so I tried to incorporate this into the test scene I was building.  There's a lot that still needs to be worked on, especially the far away background but I'm happy with how it's slowly coming together. I also spent a bit more time playing about with lighting in Maya and trying to get it to look a bit more like I wanted it to look originally and the idea that the face is projecting it's own light and coming to life. Again, there's lots more to work on but I feel like I'm getting somewhere.