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 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.

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...

This week I started the 3D modelling for my character assignment having finished up the T-Pose and roughed out an almost-finished base mesh. I finished the base mesh but the topology was not ideal so when I took it into ZBrush I Dynameshed it before starting to move it around to block in my character. After the model was Dynameshed, I just started working on the general shapes needed to match the character concept art and T-Pose.  There is still a lot of work needed in the arms, legs and face but I roughed in the torso as well. I'm trying to keep it very stylised, using references from real anatomy studies as well as looking at some stylised sculpts.

After yesterday and today I'm feeling a lot more confident in the my general story idea. I like the pace and tone and now just need to find out what the ending means to me. I had several ideas about what it could mean including the guilt of selfishness as the character sits alone in a dead world as well as the feeling of loneliness and that no matter what my character did she was ultimately alone which I know can happen to people all over the world. However, yesterday we had a fantastic workshop with Mark Grindle where we got to talk about our ideas and hear his feedback. To him, my ending was comparable to the digital age and the loss of ourselves/humanity in a digital environment and I really like that concept, especially considering it's in a 3D setting. As for the story itself, there's one image that keeps sticking with me so I quickly drew it out today in Photoshop in about an hour to try and get it solidified in my head. I like the idea of the camera being close up ...

After talking through our inspirations and ideas yesterday, I went away and tried to research some styles and techniques that I could use in my final project and I think I know what sort of direction I want to go in. I love the low poly style of 3D modelling and animation but I don't want my film to look like a badly animated video game. I know a lot of good low poly work relies of keeping a sense of realism in the animation and not losing the character through a lack of definition. It also occurred to me that lighting in extremely important as that can change the entire mood of a scene but I have no idea where to look for lighting ideas in a low poly stylised animation. Until I stumbled upon an artist called Jona Dinges . Jona's low poly work is absolutely stunning and maintains a sense of self and personality across his designs. In particular he has some wonderfully lit mini scenes and even a small cloth simulation. This piece below was modelled in Blender be...