Dragon Bait and Animate

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...

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 ...

So after a long week, our 48 Hour Film is finally complete! We finished it up yesterday afternoon and showed it off today along with everyone else's work in class. I'm really proud of how everything came together and how everyone's ideas were listened to and incorporated into the final piece. We had loads of fun shooting it and got to play around loads in Premiere Pro with special effects and bringing the whole edit together which turned into a big collaboration! I have to say as well, Daphne made an excellent "comic addict"! In terms of dialogue we were really unhappy with how a lot of it had come out once we were editing the footage. Much of the dialogue hadn't been captured or was far too quiet to be of any use so I suggested a small voice over of Daphne telling us what she was going through a-la Blade Runner . I don't think the group was up for the idea to begin with but after convincing them I think it worked out really well and added an ext...

Today we pulled together all of the footage we've shot so far for the 48 Hour Film Project and whilst there are a few gaps, we've definitely made a huge dent in the workload. So we brought all of that footage down to the Edit Suite where we get to play with the entire Adobe Suite! So far it's going quite well (as in there aren't many arguments... yet), here's hoping that mood keeps up! We've divided some of the work load so there's some editing going on in one corner whilst someone else looks up the visual effects we're going to implement as well as someone else searching for some music we can use (Me). I really like the concept of our project and it's put my geekery to good use as I have a pile of comics from home that are now getting their moment of fame in the film. We're really playing this quite tongue-and-cheek with a film that's trying to be serious but definitely isn't and is also skirting the 'drugs territory'... I...