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...

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...

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...)