Biped animations

During the first semester of second year, we were given an assignment which required us to animate a biped walk and run cycle and body mechanics such as showing a heavy weight lift, an iceskater effortlessly gliding along the ice, dancing, basically just anything that shows weight and motion within the body.

Body Mechanics

To start off with, I decided to do the animation I thought I’d struggle with most, the body mechanics, as this gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time on it and not have to worry about rushing it because I spent too long on the cycles.

Coming up with the idea

Once I knew I was going to be working on my body mechanics, I had to choose an idea of what I wanted to animate and find some references online or record them myself. My first thought was I’ll go with yoga, as I thought it’d be nice and peaceful to animate and they’re usually quite flexible in how they shape their bodies so that’d make for an interesting visual, but after mulling this over and looking for a set of yoga references I decided dance might be more fun and interesting as it’s a lot more fast paced and rhythmic. With dance now in mind, I sat staring at the YouTube search bar trying to figure out what kind of dance style I’d like to research then I thought about all the Shuffle dances I’d usually come across and thought this was a good place to start as I like watching people shuffle and wanted to challenge myself to animate it.

I found a good source of reference from a guy on YouTube called Prokopik Yuri who makes shuffle tutorials which are step by step followed by a normal speed run-through of what it should look like. After looking through a few of his videos I settled in two that I really liked, his 5 Step Basic Tutorial and his self made shuffle Star Bomb. Obviously I couldn’t do both of them, though I really wanted to find a way to combine them I found in the end that’d be like jumping in the deep end without knowing how to swim, so I chose just one and went with the 5 Basic Steps. https://youtu.be/ZIcTHJrwaho

Using Syncsketch for key poses

After some research into how to download a YouTube video with VLC player, I saved it and brought it into Syncsketch where I could then take notes over the original video. I watched a few videos on how to find key poses and how to use video reference, as at this point I still couldn’t really understand how to use the video to get the poses I needed, and which ones needed to stay in and be taken out. –https://youtu.be/fMSrQc-LocQhttps://youtu.be/y1z8wGzszco– Now I had the knowledge, it was time to put it to the test. I scrubbed through my video reference and marked the very start and very end of my frames and worked on from there, going back to the start and marking every frame I felt was a key pose. Admittedly this was a bit difficult since it was a dance and his feet were kinda going all over the place but I just tried my best to distinguish the contact poses and every major change such as when he jumps and his feet pass or when he crouches in preparation for the next move.

 

Animating

Now I have my poses, I’ll jump into Maya with my University provided “Jack Rig” and start moving the controls to match the key poses of my reference. Starting off from the one second mark, I focus on the legs first, moving the hips up and down as need be to get the right bend in the knees, matching the up and down of the natural moves in my reference, once I’m happy with the position and rotation of the feet, I use S on my keyboard and create a keyframe then move onto the next pose until I have the feet animated. In this rig there are 3 controllers on the feet and I found the 2 new (to me) controllers useful as I could angle the foot with the “toes” controller and make a bend in the foot with the controller shaped like a lollipop (lack of better words) to give my character the illusion of weight being pressed down upon his foot.

Next I moved onto finding a reference for the arms as this video only showed his legs. It wasn’t too hard since these moves had certain names which I could just key into YouTube and get lots of results, but I found one with interesting arm movements and this video had the person actually dance along with the tutorial instead of just step by step and no dance which isn’t helpful. –https://youtu.be/C5KOrND2G90– I worked off the YouTube video for this, as I tried to freehand it without a reference and my arms ended up looking kind of dead and messy so I went through the video, pausing at poses i liked which I used to pose the arms of my rig in time with the appropriate feet movements. I tried to also give some variation between the hands by opening one and closing the other but I wanted the dance to feel synced and balanced so I didn’t disturb the flow too much by keeping the arms mostly in time with each other, following the same movements.

I retimed the feet so the dance felt more like a dance than a model moving every part of its body 5 seconds apart as this looked unnatural and floaty, so I used the dope sheet and pulled every key back 4 frames to quicken the pace, though this was then too fast so I pushed them back 1 and although it’s not as on beat as I’d like it to be, I settled with this as honestly I’m unsure of how to time it exactly with my reference. I spent a while scrubbing back and fourth between keyframes and moving a few of them out of line with the rest to give my character some weight and timing like in the reference when he jumps up on his heels and stays there for about a second before landing on his feet then jumping up for the next move. I messed around with the arms a bit here too, retiming them and repositioning them so the dance flowed more smoothly and the arms read clearer. At this point I also animated little jumps whenever the man hops up onto his heels and then back onto his feet and whenever he jumps and crosses his legs as I felt this looked more lively and like a dance rather than just sitting still in one location. I also made the head look down and back up a few times in rhythm with the jumps to get the whole body involved in the dance and make it more believable.

With the first part of the shuffle done and having taken so long, I realised I wouldn’t be able to do all 5 steps as it’d take too long so I just took the next step of the shuffle and focused on that before adding hip movements and final adjustments. The other shuffle “running man” with a slight hop was animated basically in the same way, I got a few different references for the legs and focused on them first, moving the waist up and down as need be, running my animation over every few seconds to check how it looked and making adjustments where required, then moved onto the arms using another reference. When doing the arms I tried to give them a bit of an abrupt move so it looked like he was pulling his arms back forcefully with a little pause in beat with the shuffle before continuing to move them again. I did this by offsetting the keys slightly from the legs and adding a “hold” frame after each pull back of the arm. https://youtu.be/vQR8LoVOF7A i used this video to help me with the legs and head bob, and this one to help me with the arms 0:33-0:35 https://youtu.be/MRjzecRlVGc.

Checking how the arms and legs looked when animated beside one another, I went through and made position and rotation adjustments until i was happy with how they ran together and added in head and hip motion and made the whole rig spin 90° to the right for when he stops one shuffle and proceeds into the other.

Walk cycle

With one animation out of the way, I now had two left, the run cycle and the walk cycle which I’m starting now. To get a reference I used Kevin Parry’s “100 walks” video on YouTube and picked a walk I liked https://youtu.be/HEoUhlesN9E. I’m interested in becoming a games animator so the SWAT walk cycle stuck out to me as I play a lot of FPS games and this walk reminded me of them and I thought it’d be cool to give it a go since I’m always admiring the walk cycles in CoD lobbies. I screen recorded the video with OBS and uploaded it to Syncsketch to start finding my key poses.

Once in Syncsketch, I placed a mark at the beginning of the walk and at the end just before it switched to the clown walk. I used these two markers to scrub through the footage and get the contact, up, passing and down poses of the walk cycle and marked them with an appropriate C, U, P, D. I marked some Inbetweens or frames I wasn’t exactly sure about with an I so I could come back to them later and they’d be there instead of having to look for them again. The treadmill made it annoying to try define what was a contact position and whether the foot was still on the treadmill since its always moving, but I did my best to differentiate them.

Back into Maya for animation

With my new key poses, I loaded Maya up again and used the same Jack rig as last time and docked Google Chrome up against my Maya window to have my reference up while I work. I started with the legs again as I find this the easiest way to work, using the feet controllers to emphasize the bend in the foot due to the pressure of leaning on it as the character makes slow steady steps. Since this walk is pretty rhythmic with around one step per second, I tried to move the keyframes to a point where I could mimic this and it works for the most part. As I was working with the feet, I moved the waist controller up and down as appropriate to give the knees their bend.

Moving onto the arms, I marked the frames in the reference with a G (for gun) where the actor moved his arms so I could just skip to these frames to see the pace and how much he moved his arms. Obviously I wanted to set a keyframe to tell the arms where to sit in the first place so I positioned them as if he were holding a gun and scoping down it and set this as the first and last frames. About halfway through the walk, I offset the key for the arms as they start to turn to the right, looking toward something in the distance. I used a second keyframe about 2 seconds or so after the arm started turning, this was for the point where the character would stop turning and take a second to assess what was in front of him, which I acknowledged by holding this position and giving the head an abrupt nod up as if to say “sup” to whatever he was looking at -I like to think there’s another member of his team in front and he’s acknowledging them, but you can interpret it whatever way you’d like.- Along with the arm movements, I made the back crouch over and moved the shoulders forward to follow the concentration of looking down the gun while also creating a nicer shape in the back. To finish it off, I set the head to duck lower down to be in line with the imaginary gun so it looked more accurate and gave the head and arms slightly offset little bounces to make the animation more interesting whenever he took steps.

Run cycle

To start off with, I found a reference on YouTube of a man running, though it was in slo-mo, who was wearing dark clothing so it made it a little hard to accurately see how his arms were moving and I had to pay close attention to which leg was in front of the other to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes (which, admittedly, still happened and confused me a few times lol) https://youtu.be/vWGg0iPmI8k

Same as the other animations, I downloaded my reference from YouTube with VLC player and uploaded it to Syncsketch to draw over it and mark out my key poses. I used the help of the image below to figure out which poses to pick out, though I had an idea already which poses I needed, I just wasn’t sure what they were labelled as, though the way my reference actor ran was slightly different to the illustrated run cycle so the contact and pass points were a little different. Since the actor was also in a strange perspective at some points of the video, I had to make educated guesses on where his arms where and how they moved, which I did by drawing a simple skeleton over his form with red for the foreground limbs and blue for the hidden ones in the back. I also used lines to measure how far up and down his head moved whenever he left the ground and landed with his contact foot. With all this information, I feel confident enough to load Maya back up and start animating.

Back in Maya

Sticking with the trustworthy Jack rig, I kept my windows docked beside one another to have my reference alongside my workstation and started posing the legs once again using the feet controllers to get a more accurate weight flow and clearly show when the foot is leaving the ground and making contact again. Flicking back and forth between my video reference and the run cycle illustration reference, I keyframed the key poses of the legs for one cycle as I didn’t need to waste time doing more than one cycle as I can just use Kappa later to loop my render. With the feet done, I move onto the arms and pose them to match the skeleton I drew over the video reference in time with the feet. I tried to close the hands but with the thumb inly having one main controller it looks a little odd and I’m pretty sure it clips through the fingers a little, but it’s not too visible so I saw no need to fix it. To finish this cycle I puffed the chest out a little so it looked like a confident run and made the head move in time with the steps to give the illusion of huffing in rhythmic breaths.

Final touches

To finish all my animations, I loaded them into separate project files in Adobe Premiere Pro and downloaded music from Bensound.com and sound effects from Zapsplat.com and added them into the timeline of the appropriate animations. The run cycle and body mechanics were easy enough as i just added the music track and exported the video but the walk cycle was a bit more difficult as i had to download 4 separate walking sounds and edit them in time to the animation.

Research

When working on my animations, I had to do some research before and during the process to help me figure out how to animate and which techniques to use. Looking into straightforward and blocking techniques I figured for me and how I like to animate in 3D, blocking would be more beneficial to me as I like to go from pose to pose rather than making one keyframe at the start and using my imagination to fill in the rest of the frames as this would result in a clunky and unbelievable animation. To keep everything in check and make sure my timing and poses were up to par, I used the “next frame”  and “previous frame” buttons on the timeline in Maya as well as the “stepped preview” which allowed me to view the poses from one to the next without hitting play where Maya would then put in-betweens in to make the movement more smooth. This helped me figure out the readability of my poses and the timing so I could make adjustments if needed.

Reflection

All in all I feel like I did a very good job with my animations, especially because before this I had absolutely no idea hoe to use video reference and it used to stress me out to the point I could only read step by step instructions, but now this has equipped me with a very useful skill for this industry. I had a lot of fun with this project, I especially enjoyed the shuffling animation as it was a bit of a challenge to go from a step by step walk cycle to something so high energy and unique. I’ve also never really animated a biped character before as I’m more interested in creatures and animals, so most of my previous animations are things like horses, dogs, dolphins, etc which made this a nice change of pace and a good learning experience.

If I had to redo this project again I’d definitely try make more time for it as I wasn’t able to use the three months we were given because I had too much on my plate so by the time i actually got round to starting it there were only two weeks left, so I’m kind of surprised I managed to do it. I would also like to embrace a more “personalised” run cycle as the normal run I did was quite boring. I was going to choose a unique run from “runs if animals were humans” but got confused on how I’d make it a run cycle instead of just a pass by the screen kind of thing. I’d also try get feedback off my classmates and tutors- though that would also fall under the category of time management as feedback was deadlined to December.

Reflection – Animation strategies

This module was quite fun and i really enjoyed being able to create our own assets within a group as it was interesting to see how everybody went around their own way of modelling things and the concept art was inspiring to look at. Though the groupwork could have been a little better in my personal opinion, I feel we achieved strong models and environments in the end, building our teamwork and problem solving skills as we had to improvise where others were unable to get work done due to personal reasons. All in all, it was still amazing to get to develop an environment with the support of others and offer feedback as well as receive it to then implement it into my work.

The tutors were really helpful and friendly again in this module and they’ve helped me slowly overcome the anxiety of asking for help and the fear of messaging people to get feedback or ask questions. Thank you.

If i had to go back and do this project over again, I think I’d make more of my own models and make my environment slightly bigger or make at least one big asset so i could use it as a secondary interesting focus point rather than scavenging around the small assets for something to put in my shots.

Fairy Realm Environment

Below you will find my finished cinematic which I worked on with 5 classmates, followed by a few screenshots and renders of my textures and props.

Assets credits in my scene:

Tree, mushroom houses, tiny brown mushrooms, mushroom steps on tree, fence, mirror shard by tree  models and textures – Thomas

Pond with rocks model and textures – Amber

Grass, Pebbles, Ground, Ivy, Creeping Thyme, models and textures – Me

Background trees, red mushrooms, swaying flowers, stump, debris – Unreal Marketplace

 

Unreal Engine screenshots:

3D asset substance painter renders:

Creeping thyme

Ivy – Heart

Ivy – Star

Grass tall

Pebble

Shrub

Grass medium

Maya Arnold renders:

Creeping thyme

Vines

My vines on a tree model made by teammate Thomas

Tall grass

Shrub

Medium grass

Ivy – Star

Ivy – Heart

 

Cinematic creation

Creating the cinematic was done by use of Unreal Engine where the shots were created and rendered, Adobe After Effects where i put all the shots together and ordered them then Adobe Premiere Pro where i added the music.

 

 

Creating the environment

Once all the assets were modelled, textured and sent round to everyone we had to start working on creating our individual environments in Unreal Engine.

Starting off with simple block shapes as placeholders, I created a cube for the ground and stretched it out to roughly the size i wanted the environment to cover, I then created cylinders for the shapes of the tree trunk and it’s branches, and created another thinner cylinder for the shape of where i wanted to position the pond. With the basics now laid out, i realised i forgot to actually create the landscape as the cube for the ground wasn’t able to be sculpted or textured for believability, so heading over to the landscape tab, i spawned the ground for which i could shape variation into.

Before going any further, I opened photoshop and got to work with the ground texture which i already knew i wanted to resemble Irish Moss, so i went in with a grass brush and layered different shades of green on top one another then dotted small blobs of white on the canvas to make it look like the small white flowers. Finding a tutorial on YouTube, I followed it and created a seamless texture using the offset tool and the spot healing brush so it wouldn’t look as industrial and tiled when used as a texture in my environment. The tutorial can be found here: https://youtu.be/YNdbxEEQ9no

With my ground texture now finished, I loaded it into Unreal Engine with the import tool and made it into a material which i then plugged into the landscape using the following tutorial: https://youtu.be/X0MN9xWr-iI

Happy with the texture and the scene layout, I opened the Discord group chat where we sent all our folder links and gathered the assets and textures that were needed for my scene and got to work replacing the placeholders with the real assets, starting with the tree and the pond, then using the foliage mode to place in my grass and creeping thyme. At this point the scene looked too empty so i checked with my tutor before going to the unreal marketplace and downloading and importing free and appropriate assets such as the pinecones and mushrooms on the ground, and some animated flowers along with other assets to which will be a full reference list at the bottom of this post for credit. Before moving onto camera sequences, i messed around with the default materials and decided i like the moss and gravel texture enough to put them in my scene so i set them at a low opacity and flow and painted them onto my environment to create a pathway leading up to the tree and little scatterings of moss around the path and the outside of the path, placing my pebbles and other assets to make it look more incorporated in the environment.

Moving onto the lighting and camera creation of the scene, I watched some videos on blackboard that were uploaded by our tutor to gain a better understanding of the options that were available to me and how i could improve my cinematic through use of colour and camera focus. Being a fairy realm, the environment had to have an air of magic to it so i created fireflies with the particle effects following this tutorial https://youtu.be/WFMQf-STGaU and rotated the sky light upside down to make a night environment (using this tutorial https://youtu.be/yLY7shd0ugs) then placed a post volume effect and turned up the intensity to make a thick fog over the scene, changing the colour to a purply pink to fit with the purple fireflies/sparkles. I wanted the environment to look magical yet mysterious so i kept with the one directional light to create a quiet looking lighting over the whole scene, then adding in a spot light and positioning it over the tree to act as a kind of god ray lighting, helping to show that the main focus of the scene was the tree. I did try a few other lights previously such as a spot light above the pond to help it glow, but felt it took too much focus off the tree and made the scene a bit cluttered with no main focus so i removed it. At this point, i added in trees from the marketplace with the foliage tool to help make them look less uniform. These trees served as a key asset to help set the scene of a special place in the middle of a forest and helped scatter light better for a magical atmosphere.

When creating the camera sequences, I was just trying to find interesting features in my environment and show off the assets that me and my team had created such as the pond Amber had created, or the tree that Thomas made and assets that i had made like the pebbles and the grass and creeping thyme. I messed around with this quite a bit and have many drafts and unused shots in my files as i really wanted to try capture the tranquil atmosphere and push the fact that this place is hidden and safe. The camera pacing i tried to keep quite slow to give the audience time to admire the scene but also to enforce the atmosphere of tranquillity as if the pacing was quick, it’d feel more like a dangerous environment or more suited to an action scene.

Below are a few test environments i created at the start whenever i was trying to find an atmosphere that i felt fit with the mood i was trying to create for my environment.

Whenever I was brainstorming how to layout the tree and creeping thyme, i draw a very rough plan in photoshop of two different angles to help give me a better idea, this is also where i knew i wanted hopscotch like pebbles and purple sparkles/fireflies.

 

Assets

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1hkuQ1UOQ7VNXEl3DR-LvFVdepGkowtQm?usp=sharing

References:

Marketplace assets:

temperate Vegetation: Meadow Flowers – Project Nature – Props https://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/dynamic-meadow-flowers

Megascans – Stump – Quixel Megascans – Megascans          https://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/a4fc2c99427647f6ae56d5815fd031f5

Megascans – Debris Nature Vol. 1 – Quixel Megascans – Megascans https://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/8b89a22c6e854b11bd3eb5c0ab9c6b6c

Megascans – Nordic Forest Vol. 2 – Quixel Megascans – Megascans https://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/2cbdd7a1c33648458349376e16b146cc

Megascans – Natural Scatter Debris – Quixel Megascans – Megascans https://marketplace-website-node-launcher-prod.ol.epicgames.com/ue/marketplace/en-US/product/0a653a928d5c4e7396fea02f488b4956

pictures refs:

Above are a few inspirations for how to layout the scene and give it the atmosphere i wanted. I really liked the night scenes as they gave the chance for strong glow which i felt was important to capture the magic of the fairies, i also really liked the idea of surrounding trees with lots of foliage and big mushrooms.

These images gave me inspiration as to how to not only lay out the pebbles in my scene but also how to shape the actual model itself, as i liked the big flat rocks but i also liked the more natural shapes and volume the rocks on the bottom image had so i made my rocks a nice oval shape and flattened the bottom and smoothed out the top a little so it looked neat but still had the volume.

 

Feedback

On Thursday, I contacted my tutor and asked for a feedback tutorial for that day to help me gain an understanding of how my CV should look, but we ended up talking about all of my work which I’m really thankful for as it let me know what i needed to do to move forward in my work and improve.

We started with my CV where I had to share my screen, my first question being whether the example template I switched to on Vmock was better than or more appropriate than my own CV I made in word with my own layout, which I was immediately told not to worry because the Vmock site used a science layout and it was just there to help with words in sentences. We then looked at my original CV in word and went over it piece by piece, pointing out which sections were strong and how to fix the others such as my personal statement as I told him I was struggling with how to phrase my last sentence.

Starting with the background colours, I was advised to get rid of the little box I put my name in as 3 different shades of green was too overwhelming in a CV so i deleted it and pulled up the colour beneath it so there were now two solid colours. Next i had to change the colour of the writing on the left as i didn’t have a reason why it was in a different colour from everything else, and it attracted unnecessary attention towards itself before the important information, breaking the crucial hierarchy. Sorting through the fonts, sizing of fonts and their layouts i then deleted unnecessary words that made my bullet points too long, switched round the chronological order of my experiences so it went from most recent to earliest and fixed my personal statement.

Below is the finished version of my CV updated from all the feedback from this session. The leaf is just an icon from Word that I’m using as a placeholder until i create my own logo as i know i want it to incorporate a leaf, but I’m not sure how.

Next we had a look at my showreel where I was given advice on how to lay out the order of my work and the reasons as to why. There was a section where my animation wasn’t too strong so was advised to remove it as your showreel is only as strong as the weakest piece. There wasn’t much to talk about at this point as I hadn’t been able to develop my reel too far but I was given recommendations on what to put in my showreel and what order.

Lastly, we talked about my environment and I was given tips on how to more accurately control the lighting in my scene, including the use of Photoshop. I went through a lot of different settings, just messing around with colours, exposure and fog features to create an environment closest to what i had imagined.

Another 3d asset – Creeping Thyme

During the concept phase, I came up with the idea of adding Irish moss or creeping thyme to our environment as i felt they would help accentuate the magical essence of the fairy realm, but i wasn’t really sure how to even go about starting to make either of them since my concepts were just like drawing textures. On the weeks of deciding our assets, we settled with the creeping thyme instead as it had a nice purple colour to it and gave some texture variation to the grass rather than tiny white flowers. I started gathering real life reference images to study as well as looking at other peoples 3d models to give me an idea of how to go about modelling this. I noticed that the flower itself was a cone like shape with petals branching off four sides and stamens protruding out the top. The very basic shape of the cone popped out to me and i realised i could make this with a square by elongating it and scaling down the bottom, so already i had an idea of how to make this. Starting up Maya 2020, yes i need to update my software i know but my internet is terrible, i created a polygon cube and switched to vertex mode, grabbing the bottom vertexes and pulling them down to make my cube more of a rectangle, then used the scale tool to scale them down in all axis, creating my cone shape. From this shape, i selected the top face and bevelled it slightly to create 4 new faces on each side of the square face, these would be the start of my four petals which were made by then individually extruding each of these four faces and pulling them up with the move tool then individually pulling them apart and off to the side to resemble the real life counterpart. Selecting the face in the middle again, i gave it another bevel and moved it down to the bottom of the cone, selecting the vertexes and scaling them down to fit inside the outer cone, much like whenever we were tasked with creating vases for our homework in first year. Going back to the petals to give them more shape and definition, i added edge loops to the bottom of each so that when the object was mesh smoothed, it would keep it shape. I decided to also add edge loops to the top and bottom of the cone as it wasn’t really giving me the shape i wanted when i pressed 3 on the keyboard to preview the mesh smooth, it was folding in on itself and acting more as a spike than a smooth cone. This made everything look nice and neat and is already quite close to the end product i was working towards. Starting to create the details of the flower, i went inside the cone and went into face selection mode, using the multi-cut tool to cut it into 4 even squares. I selected each face individually and extruded them, using the scale tool to scale down the vertexes at the top of these extrusions in all axis, then added an edge loop to the top of each to create a more rounded shape. Soon I realised, this wasn’t the best way to go about it as my shape had distorted into itself and they weren’t even, so i undid these actions and gave each square a second cut before extruding them all at once, repeating the rest of my actions, giving a far better finished shape.

Using the vertex mode, i pulled all the extrusions apart from one another and diversified their heights to make it seem more like a natural flower. The smooth preview was my best friend in these times to check my progress, helping me notice i needed to tweak it a little from there until i was happy. Once finished with the mesh, I selected the whole model and smoothed the mesh two times to give me a nice rounded and softer look.

Next i had to UV unwrap my model which was somehow a lot easier than i imagined so either I’ve done it wrong or I’m learning and getting better.

Firstly, using the edge selection i selected the edges running along the side of every petal and made a cut so each petal would have a front and back, then went along the bottom joining lines of each petal and made cuts to separate the petals from the main cone body. I moved these to the side and dolly’d my camera through my model to see the inside where i then cut along the edges of each stigmata, then cutting a seam into the underside of each of them so they could lay out flat when unfolded. Finally, i moved on to the outside cone and cut a seam down the side, selecting all the UVs and unfolding them before using the layout tool to fit them all nicely in the box.

Exporting my flower as an FBX, i opened Substance Painter to texture my model with fairly straight forward fill and paint layers, just adding on colours and designs with the smudge tool i thought would fit the flower both for realistic believability and the magic of the fairy realm.

Once i exported the textures from substance and plugged them in in Maya, i duplicated the flower and decided to then make a simple stem from a cylinder which i just scaled up, adding edge loops on the top on and bottom to create a more rounded shape. I then decided i wanted a leaf so i used the multi-cut tool and bevels to create a little face on the side of the stem where i then extruded and pulled out the face to make a little arm like shape which i then cut edges into and shaped into a leaf. I realised this wasn’t the best looking thing so for some reason i went the long way around and duplicated the stem, used face selection to select only the leaf from one of the models and delete it, patching up the edge with a target weld tool and deleting the edges then using the fill gap or bridge too cant remember which, but main thing is there was no longer a hole in my model. I took the leaf from the other model after deleting the stem and closing the hole in the end of the leaf with a bridge, refining the shape then adding a stem to the leaf and rotating it round my original stem model, duplicating the leaf and placing it at various angles to create the leaves. I was going to add small buds to these but felt it was over working myself as you wouldn’t be able to see that amount of detail in the scene.

I tried to texture the stem in substance but felt it looked too weird so i binned it and just used a flat colour in Maya which still worked well and helped draw the eye more towards the flower which i placed on top of the stem after combining the stem with the leaves, then combining the flower with the finished stem, duplicating it a few times in different sizes and angles to give a variation of a natural growing patch of creeping thyme.

I brought the final version of the thyme into unity to test in the foliage painting and thought it actually tuned out quite well, and i was very happy with it. Here is the finished product alongside some earlier tests when i just had a single flower with an uncoloured stem, and a few other tries at getting bunches.

refs:

These pictures let me get a better understanding of how the flower looked so i could model it more accurately and it helped me find out the patterns in which the plant grows and how to clump it together for a more realistic way of portraying it in my environment.

More 3d assets – Grass

To go along with my ideas, since i was tasked with the foliage, i had to create some grass for our scene. I was a little confused at first on how to do this so i went to Discord and messaged my tutor Henry for some advice, and as always he was quick to respond with some very helpful information and some examples, as well as a tutorial he recorded himself specific to my question.

I opened Maya and after looking at the Maya files he sent me, studying the way the planes were shaped and positioned, I created a plane with 10 height subdivisions and started to make my own attempt at grass.

I’m not going to lie, this really frustrated me because I’ve always found grass a challenging task whether it be in just drawing it or modelling it like now,  just don’t understand how to make it look natural yet still appealing.  had to look up a lot of different reference images of real blades of grass and 3d models just to get an idea of the shapes i wanted to go for, while also flicking back and forth from Henry’s examples.

Using vertex selection mode, i started to scale them down in the x axis to make the grass thin, tapering the top, then up in the y axis to give them length and duplicated my main blade of grass so i could create different variants. Using the soft selection tool quite a lot of the time, i was rotating the planes in directions i thought would look interesting, coming out of it a few times to precisely select vertexes and move them one by one, rotating them so they didn’t go out of shape. I placed each blade of grass slightly apart from one another, trying to get appealing overlap but my first attempt didn’t look very good to me so i started again.

My next attempt i did basically everything the same, but i tried to think of it more as a 3d object than 2d planes, and this resulted in something i was much happier with.  I took the blades of grass ,using D to move the pivot point to the bottom of the blade, and rotated them but instead of rotating them left and right, i rotated them outwards, curving like a real blade of grass, then positioned them in a more circular formation to give them a sense of volume and fullness rather than 4 blades in a straight line.  Since some of the normals were reversed which could be seen by a black surface, i used the reverse tool to flip the normals back to face the outside where my texture would later be displayed.

Once happy with my model, i UV unwrapped it using the create planar tool on the z axis of each grass blade then unfolded it and used the layout tool. There was no need for creating cuts as this as a 2D plane and not  3D object with multiple sides. Before exporting, I selected the clumps of grass blades and combined them, creating three different clumps of grass so it would hopefully help make the landscape more interesting.

 

I took each grass clump object into substance painter and textured it by using a fill layer to begin with for my base colour then using paint layers above that to go over it with different shades of green, yellow and a cyan colour to make a stripe down the middle of each individual blade for detail.

I exported the textures from substance and applied them to my models in Maya, the exported the FBX files from Maya and imported them in Unreal, using the foliage mode to plug the grass objects into so i could turn up the density then start painting on the landscape to see how the grass would look, and it didn’t look too bad. Below are the many different attempts i had at making the grass and painting it onto the land, the first three screenshots just have a placeholder lambert texture for the grass, while the rest are the textured materials.

Updating after ive finished all assets: I created a small scene with the grass and I’m quite proud of how i seems to be turning out.

refs:

Looking at these pictures helped me understand how i could model my grass and position it to make it have more volume and look more realistic. I also looked for 3d models of other creators to see how they approached making grass.

Working on the foliage – ivy leaves

Knowing i was in charge of creating the leaves for our project, i set out to find a tutorial of how best to create them as i hadn’t done this before so i needed some guidance. I found this tutorial on YouTube which went at a nice pace, and if need be i just slowed the video down https://youtu.be/Ycu3A_vf-YU 

To begin, i opened Maya and created a plane with height and width subdivisions of 4 and 2, these would be the base for my leaf as I now have to switch to vertex mode and manipulate them into a leaf shape by using the scale tool to achieve a symmetrical look.

Of course, I’m not just free handing this, so beforehand i imported my reference image of some concept designs i drew up for the leaves and throughout the whole process I’m constantly comparing them. For this leaf, I’m following my “star” shaped leaf references as pictured below.

To achieve the star look, I moved some vertexes around with the scale tool, pushing two points outwards at the same time, and selecting rows to push them up with the move tool to have a more symmetrical star shape. Unfortunately I ran into problems with the symmetry so with my faces option, I selected one half of the star, deleted it, then mirrored the right side on the -X axis.

Once finished, the star looked good, but there was no where to give it depth that leaves have where they slope in slightly due to gravity, so to fix this, I used the multi-cut tool to create loop cuts around the star where i thought was necessary. Later i can use these edges to manipulate into small dips and folds for the more believable leaf shape i was looking to achieve.

With the plane now shaped, I went to face mode and selected all the faces of my polygons, then pressed shift = e on my keyboard to bring up the “extrude” options. Switching to the move tool with w, I dragged the extrusions up on the Z axis to give my leaf edges and bring it from a 2D plane to a 3D shape.

Due to getting caught up in the work and trying to problem solve, I forgot to take screenshots of some of the process such as extruding the bottom faces of the leaf and tapering them in to create the stem, selecting the edge that runs through the middle of the leaf and pulling that down to create a gentle slope, and having to go through and merge the vertexes on the edges of my leaf because it wasn’t behaving as wanted with double vertexes accidentally placed right beside the true vertexes, so i had to get rid of these, as seen below.

Pressing 3 on my keyboard to smooth out my model, I noticed the stem was looking a little bit strange where it connected to the leaf, so I added an edge loop with the multi-cut tool to make that area more defined, giving me the preferred look in the second image below. At this stage, I also went into vertex mode and started rotating the leaf downwards, using B on my keyboard to get soft selection and then using the move tool to slightly adjust the height where appropriate. Working my way down I adjusted every vertex as I wanted this leaf to look a little droopy as if gravity was pulling it down like in real life, because leaves aren’t stiff and rigid.

Continuing to work on the believability of the leaf, I went back to edge selection and started pulling down the middle edges of each individual point to give them all a slight dip that’d lead back to the middle. After working on the dips I moved back to vertex mode and started pulling down and rotating the vertexes on the points to make them follow the same pull as the rest of the leaf, obviously remaining a little more rigid and supportive near the top of the leaf where it connected to the stem, which i also gave a soft curve to follow along with the leaf.

Once happy with the shape, I tried to select the bottom faces of the points and change their rotation and translation in order to create thickness within the leaf, which i found didn’t really give the results i was after but after a little tweaking, it looked alright and since it was just going to be a small leaf on a vine, it probably didn’t matter too much.

Selecting the vertexes on the end of each point, i used the scale tool to scale them down on all axis to create a better point, this also tapered the end of each tip and made the leaf look a lot better than before, so it was a real trust the process here.

Following along with the rest of the tutorial, i bevelled the edges of my leaf the whole way round to give it a defined edge helping create thickness so it wasn’t just paper, as seen below with a few more angles thrown in to let you see it better.

Before exporting my model, i have to UV unwrap it to ensure the textures will work correctly in substance and it helps me to create more accurate details in Zbrush. With my model selected, i navigate to the UV editor and select all the faces, creating a planar on the Z axis then using the edge selection mode I found the edges i thought most suited to placing cuts as they need to be placed with the smooth mesh in mind which can sometimes change how the uvs look compared to the original model. For this model, i placed cuts on the top and bottom edges of the leaf, and all four sides of the stem. When I had made all my cuts, i then selected all my uvs and unfolded them and used the layout button to fit them all neatly in the box.

The first time i did this, i did it wrong as i didn’t realise this so after sitting here confused for some time i messaged my tutor henry on Discord for some advice and he was very quick to answer telling me that the uv maps needed modifying because my cuts should be on the bottom of the leaf, creating two uvs for the top and bottom of the leaf and the same with the stem, so in total i should have about 4 or 5 uvs. He sent me a video to go along with his written advice to help me understand it better which i really appreciated because I’m more of a visual learner so this helped me understand where i went wrong and how to fix it in the future. Below you will find my fixed UVs.

For reference in the conversation: I’m Leaf and my tutor is Henry

This helped me fix my other leaf uvs as i had done them the same way, but that was an opportunity to learn more and create a better texture which I’m a lot happier with compared to the old one, so not all mistakes are bad mistakes!

Now that the mesh of the model is finished, i can delete the history and freeze the transformations before exporting it as an FBX to import into Zbrush for some detail. To start the detail, i had to import my FBX into Zbrush with the FBX importer under zplugins and draw my leaf into existence, using the edit mode button to have it recognised as a 3d model and not a 2d plane. Rotating the model to face me using the alt button, i navigated into the geometry menu and hit the subdivide button about 4 times, giving my model 5 subdivisions for me to work with as this would make my sculpting easier and more accurate.

To begin sculpting, i hit the lightbox menu button and chose brushes, heading over to the “scratch” folder where I selected the scratch 2 brush as i thought this would help me easily create veins in my leaf to give it more believability. Changing the size of the brush to reduce the radius, i got a reference of a real leaf that was as close to a star shape as i could get and tried to mimic the veins in the points so my star didn’t look strange.  The scratch brush was still a bit too harsh even with the intensity turned down so i had to hold shift and use the smooth brush, much like in blender, to give the original model back some of its shape and to make the scratches blend in a lot more naturally so they didn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Once finished sculpting my details, I headed back over to the zplugins menu and used the FBX option to export my mesh as a low poly with one subdivision and a high poly with 5 subdivisions, as this brings my normal maps as well to allow me to bake them in substance painter afterwards.

Below is the result of my sculpting on the leaf.

Now i can take my model into substance painter and texture it to be more like a leaf. Opening substance painter, i select file, new, and select my low poly leaf model from my computer files, setting the resolution to 2048 and hitting ok to start texturing. Thankfully the tutorial i was watching also covered a little of the texturing process so i mostly just followed along with this, using my own settings for the generators and such. Before i got to texturing though, i have to bake the mesh textures from the high poly to the low poly model with the texture settings so simple enough, it runs through all the maps quickly after i select the high poly model and all the sculpting details show up.

With a new fill layer, i selected a colour of green i thought would look nice for the base colour, adding another fill layer on top of this an right clicking, adding a black mask then adding a dirt generator and messing around with the parameters such as contrast, dirt balance, rotation, scale, etc as each setting helped to make my leaf look different and more realistic. Duplicating the previous layer, I adjusted the dirt parameters to be slightly different to what i thought looked nice then created another fill layer with a darker shade of green and added a black mask with fill rather than another generator, then looked for the grunge smeared wipe heavy and messed with the parameters on that until i felt i had a nice ivy look to my leaf with all the different coloured splotches and spots.

To finish off my textures, i used three paint layers to add details such as a bit of dark green around the edges, a bright cyan type of colour for the veins so they were more visible and adding more realistic colours to the stem like a lighter green and a reddish brown near the bottom of the stem where it would connect to the vine. I then exported my textures after choosing a save file destination for them and headed back to Maya for my final preparations.

Above are four screenshots of the textured leaf in substance painter from before i got advice from henry on the UVs, with the below picture being the new texture with fixed UVs so it came out much cleaner and that was the one i actually used.

Finally, loading up my model in Maya again, i applied a new lambert material to it and selected my colour file as the base colour texture i just exported from substance painter. Once everything was placed on my leaf texture-wise and the mode was smooth meshed, i went to the game exporter and saved my FBX to be used in Unreal Engine.

Below are examples of the old leaf in Unreal Engine beside the other old leaf i created, as i was looking at the improvement in such short time.

Below is the finial rendition of my leaf in Unreal Engine with the proper UVs and fixed texture, I’m quite proud of it, especially since the tutorial i was following was for a basic shaped leaf and having this be the first time I’ve modelled something like this, i think i did well, i learned a lot of new things and it came out good! The background behind the leaf is a texture i made for the ground, its meant to be seen smaller and look like Irish moss, since we used Thyme in the actual foliage i wanted to still incorporate this somehow.

For my other leaf, i made a heart shaped ivy leaf to give some variation between the leaves on the tree and make it look more interesting. I created it basically the same way as the last last leaf, just making a different shape at the start and whenever i extruded the plane to make a 3 dimensional object, i used the rotate tool to give the leaf varied thickness instead of waiting for the bevelling process later on. I also had to go back and fix the UVs on this model because i made the exact same mistake so it was an easy and quick fix regardless.

 

 

refs:

These helped me see how i could shape my leaves and how to place them on the vines as well as how to place them on the tree so they look as if they’re growing on the surface.