Evaluation
Overall I am very proud of the team and how they pushed themselves during this project. The last few weeks of the assignment were extremely stressful with taking over extra work between each other very close to the deadline, but I believe we made a great final piece that matched the brief and something we open Ulster Museum will be proud to showcase. It was great getting to learn the potential of Marvelous Designer and how it could be a great asset in animations and Unreal builds. This is software I would like to become more familiar with and come back to in the future. We produce 4 scenes in total, with a final video coming in at just under 3 minutes, and cover aspects from 3D modelling, using Marvelous Designer, Unreal scene building, character animation and how to import between all of these softwares.
What I was would change
- The team made general mannequins that looked great, but when the dresses were imported we realised that the dresses are snap-fitted to the rig, and didn’t fit great on the mannequin. I tried my best to get past this by widening the dresses, lining them up as best that I could, and avoiding very obvious ill-fitted dresses by speeding past them with the camera shots. If we had noticed this issue earlier in production we would have remodelled the mannequin more to the shape of our rigs, and then could have focused more still museum shots on the filler dresses.
- Although I was happy with all areas that I took part in, I would have liked to create more 3D assets. I had the intention of creating more filler objects like ashtrays and different bottles, but this was not possible just due to the timing of production.
- I would have liked to experiment more with creating atmosphere within the scenes, as we had originally talked about adding things like ciggerate smoke. This would have been great for the bar and lounge scene but was unfortunately put on the backburner in production and we didn’t get back around to adding it in in time.
My full responsibilities for the project;
- Initial idea creation and research
- Creation of animatic/storyboard
- 3D Asset creation (full list here)
- UV and Texturing of Assets (full list here)
- Bartender and Band Dresses creation in Marvelous
- Bartender and Cello animation in Maya
- Entire rebuild of museum scene in unreal due to issues with file/incorrect setup
- Setup and recording of museum scenes
- Final Video export and clipped together with all videos, then adding sound being on top for final outcome.
This list is not exhaustive and does not include weekly updates such as helping group members with elements of design or helping to fix issues/files.