This project had a lot of ups and downs, but ultimately I’m very proud of my development as an artist. I went into the project with no previous experience with 3D, and I learnt a lot about the process. There’s a lot of things I’d do differently in hindsight, I’d create more complex eye controls for my model, I’d make the animation more interesting, the camera angles would be more natural, etc. In all, though, I think it turned out really well despite its flaws.

I think in general that my skills have greatly improved. I have improved in modelling since the first assignment, and I feel more comfortable problem-solving in 3D software when there’s an issue. I would like to continue practicing textures and modelling more cartoonish proportions over the summer to push my skills further.

Personally, I would’ve liked to have more of a set role in the project. I had a lot going on in the background, but I don’t think that’s an excuse for not taking a more active role in the project. My development as an artist is apparent, but I think I could push it further with more practice. I’m going to focus on lighting and camera work, as I didn’t get as much practice with that as I would’ve liked, and I’m also going to model more characters to practice my animation.

This project really tested me, and with hindsight I could’ve done better, but despite everything the final product embodies what we as a group had in mind, and I’m proud of that. As far as this semester, I was thrown out of my comfort zone a lot, and it was definitely rewarding and stressful. After everything though, I really enjoyed this year. I loved learning about animation, it has truly highlighted that I love it in all its forms, even though 3D animation is unfamiliar.

Final Edits – OneDrive (sharepoint.com)

Final Edits – OneDrive (sharepoint.com)

This is the final animation!! There’s some issues with timing and rendering issues, but in all I’m very proud of how this turned out! If I could do this again, I’d change the camera angles, I think some of them are a bit too tight and uncomfortable, also there’s some weird camera movement. I also would pace some of the animation better as well.

Me and Ciara stayed for a week at the uni to get rendering done. It took 5 days due to multiple issues with corrupting files, renders randomly aborting, etc. I constantly checked the renders and problem solved any time there were issues. I also helped two other groups with their renders as they were having trouble. It was an unexpected struggle, we thought with a week before deadline that everything would be ok, but apparently not. So, in future, we’ll work with reduced render settings and save a little bit more time in case anything goes wrong.

I want to specifically thank Ciara and Lel for staying over at the university, they were incredibly helpful and helped keep me sane on the run up to submission.

Caity undertook most of the lighting for the environment. I helped figure out technical aspects and adjust the lights to make sure things were light enough. The first attempts were too dark, so we added a few more area lights to lighten then environment. We also gave the house it’s own light.

 

This was the final environment before the house’s light was added in.

I really like how the environment looks! It’s very close to the vision we had at the beginning of this project. I think we really achieved the vibe we were going for.

Animating for this project has officially begun! I’ve got to animate two scenes in the animation, the opening scene and the scene where the ghosts turn to see what the newbie ghost is doing.

First though, I did a small animation test to check that the rig worked as intended and it did. I had another test animation, but Maya crashed before I could playblast it.

I began with animating the opening scene as it’s very simple. We met up as a group at the campus to organise ghost’s layout and I drew out a small plan for each scene where all the ghosts appeared. It ended up being very useful when it came to animating so there was no overlap for any ghosts.

With that organised, we started animating. I did the opening scene first, this is the playblast of my animation. In hindsight, I’d relax the timing a little so it wasn’t so fast at first. The opening scene was only 96 frames, so I felt very cramped, but I should’ve paced it better. For a first attempt though, I don’t think it’s awful.

The second scene is when the ghosts pop up to see what the newbie is doing, I think this animation actually went really well. I like the timing, if I had more time I’d have animated more secondary action and eased in and out of the bounce up.

We made the unfortunate discovery this week that Corey has done nothing. He had been given the Old Ghost to rig and animate, since he’d used Caity’s pre-viz model. The rig he sent back wasn’t finished and also was unusable, so we decided to use Will’s ghost as a base and he did the animation. This is actually quite upsetting because Corey hasn’t been an active member, we have given him multiple opportunities to pull his weight and he’s ignored each one. He was supposed to also handle the lighting and camera work, but Caity has decided to take that on, she’s reached a point where she wants to undertake most of the project from here just to make sure it’s done, which is an understandable sentiment. I’ve been helping her with the lighting.

Me and Ciara agreed to split the UV maps between us, but it ended up that Ciara unwrapped most of the models. She stayed up one night and did most of them, so I only unwrapped ones she’d had trouble with, which were a tree and the house.

The house presented a lot of problems, there was a lot of broken geometry, and we’re cutting building the environment very close, so Henry gave me a couple of tips, and because this is an asset that won’t be seen really, he said it should be ok. This uv map is at least usable, which is better than the first attempt at unwrapping it.

The tree wasn’t too much of a challenge, I’m sure the UVs could be better, but I think they’ll do fine for now. Alec had a look at it and agreed that it should be fine, the textures are supposed to be very simple for our animation.

As the project goes on, I’m finding that I don’t have a specific role assigned to me, every time I’m supposed to split something with someone else, they end up doing the majority of it in one sitting. I think it’s an issue with communication, but I don’t mind being a clean up artist, which is what my role is slowly becoming. I can point out a few things I’ve done so far, like modelling and uv unwrapping, but mostly I’ve been jumping between the different members in my group and helping with their tasks.

This is a compilation of the animation tasks over this semester. First we had the blendshapes task, below is a recording of my attempt. I found it really convenient, and I utilised this for my model’s mouth, eyes and eyebrows.

The next was a parent constraint exercise, I already had some experience with parent constraints due to the start of the semester when we had to do the cactus animation. It was a cool little exercise that can come into use with our animation.

This is a very fundamental animation exercise to understand movement, arcs and squash and stretch. We used the ball bounce to look at timing along with other key principles. Animating in Maya is very strange for me as I’m primarily a 2D artist, but the idea is very similar, and applying the same principles results in animation that is more visually interesting. If I were to do this again, I’d not make the squash and stretch so dramatic, but I do like the fluidity of the movement.

The next exercise was trying constraints to create a wheel. I had to use an orient and point constraint. I animated it after to show that the constraints work.

The last exercise was using a provided rig to create a jump animation. The first two recordings were my blockout phase. It caught the general timing and movement that I was looking for, but I wanted to make it more natural with better anticipation. The last playblast is my final animation, I think I could do better, it could have more build up and some more ease in and out. In general though, I think it was a good first attempt!

I’ve almost finished the rig! I realised that I needed to straighten out the mouth to make it easier to blendshape, so I did that and finished the blendshapes. I chose to make the eyes blendshaped as well because I’m running out of time and making the eye controls created it’s own set of problems. We need to move onto animating as soon as possible, so blendshaping the pupils makes sense for a character who is only in the background.

A Few Days Later

I realised after trying to bend the arms that there needs to be another joint in the arm, so I went back and added those. In hindsight, I’d also add another joint in the fingers for better pose-ability, but for a character who will only be seen for a couple seconds, I think that I can leave it for now.

For a first attempt at a full character rig, I’m happy with the results. She’s quite expressive and I value the experience because I learnt a lot. There’s quite a few ways to problem-solve issues in Maya, and it interesting learning new techniques.

 

Corey sent a screen recording of the pre viz for us to show in the next presentation for class. It was ok, but as can be observed in the video, the outliner was impossible to navigate. The environment wasn’t workable so we couldn’t make proper edits without there being problems. We received some feedback, which can be seen in the screenshot below.

Group 4-Graveyard Shift 2 – Google Slides

Caity then redid the pre viz as she was ahead in work so she had the time. This version is far closer to what we are aiming for, so we will be referencing this during our animating process.

We were given the feedback to shorten it down and consider better camera angles, so if we have time we will go back and adjust the pre viz.

Finally, I made some progress on the character and her rig so I could show the lecturers. I haven’t done the skin weights yet, but it’s pretty much done. I added the flower and then uv unwrapped the whole thing just in case we decided to texture the character’s in substance painter.

I figured out how to do the outer shell, I duplicated the body and made the inner body smaller.

The uvs aren’t great, but they function ok.

I tried to keep the rig simple as she’s just a background character. I plan to blendshape the mouth and eyebrows, I’m not sure if I’ll create controls for the eyes yet or blendshape them as well, but we’ll see.

The last thing I did this week was adjust her colours to be more vibrant and just nicer in general. I also added finger joints after this screenshot.