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...

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...

One of the things I really wanted in Cure was a moving title, something really simple but abstract enough to fit in with the rest of the film. I had a plan based on an older concept piece of lines coming away from the title. The font I used is Appendix from Da Font which is 100% free for use. So I typed out Cure in Photoshop and kept it as a smart object. I then added in different lines that I animated using the transform function in Photoshop and the video animation window.  I then saved out the frames as individual PNG files with transparency. The PNGs were loaded into Unity and set as Sprites so that I could use them in the Canvas layer of the UI. I selected all of the images and dragged them into the Canvas which automatically created a frame animation for me. I then edited this animation to add a fade in and fade out at the beginning and end.

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...

So my biggest issue from the last few days was that I was animating on the wrong file. This file had the wrong eye mesh that when imported into Unity looked completely wrong - and a little unsettling. I managed to see Sang Yu at university yesterday and he and I went through a whole heap of things that could fix it until at last he set up locators for the eyes and imported the correct eye geometry before parenting it to the locators which were in turn parented to the joints for the eyes. Although this in itself was a hassle because I had used Advanced Skeleton 5 which is great and quick for rigging but when there's an issue doesn't make it easy to find individual joints in the face rig. The animation I was working on is my final scene and by far my favourite shot so I wanted to spend some time on it before the deadline gets too close. Before I had completely finished the animation I did some tests on how animating on 2s and 4s might be and I actually really like 4s but ...

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...

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 spent some time pulling together a rough pre-visualisation. This took a lot longer than I expected as I was learning how to use Cinemachine and setting up each Virtual Camera. This was a bit of a learning curve but it should save me time in the long run as all of the cameras are already set up.   Each half cog/half camera is a Virtual Camera linked in Cinemachine. These are very light and don't slow down the whole process as they only use 1 main camera. Some of the cameras are attached to the character and 'Look At' certain parts of her, her eyes, the device, her wrist etc. Once she's animated and walking the cameras should bounce along with her.    The whole scene has been updated in Unity so that each camera angle has a full background rather than too much white space. I have also downloaded and imported Unity's Post-Processing Stack. This helps change the look of the film into something closer to what could be achieved in Maya and Premiere Pro...

Cure is now set up in a new project folder so that I can keep a more organised structure of all of my assets, that includes all of my 3D models and any textures being used on these models. These textures then need to be converted into materials that Unity can use.  This is my set up in Unity. Most of the background assets are to the left and top of the scene as this is where most of the cameras view. If needed I can add in additional background elements as and when they're needed. At the moment, they have a yellow-ish texture on them, but that can change easily as I have the material set up in Unity to just pick a new colour. I'm also creating a pre-vis file using Unity's Cinemachine. This means I can set up "Virtual Cameras" in the scene, keeping it light and quick rather than bogging it down with lots of "Main Cameras". Building this pre-vis means I can see how the final film will be composed and how the lighting will effect the scene in gene...

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 ...

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 ...