Category: First Year

Week 10

In this week’s class we used an example mesh of an elephant to follow along in using the multiresolution modifier and sculpting to add detail into a custom normal map that could be used in Substance.

Although I didn’t get as far as baking and importing to substance, I found adding detail okay as it was my first time using a drawing tablet in Blender. which took a while to figure out. I mostly used the clay strip tool which I think turned out alright.

This week I made a lot of progress with my model as I finished modelling both my character and prop.

I’m really happy with how closely my model resembles my reference as I expected this aspect to be more challenging. The only part I found particularly challenging and tedious was joining my parts together while avoiding creating N-gons. I realised after my feedback for the previous assignment that previously I hadn’t checked thoroughly for N-gons so I made sure to be careful this time, though I had to resort to using quite a lot of triangles. My prop was very straightforward as I was able to make the model in about half an hour so hopefully I now have plenty of time to focus on texturing.

While I was adding the smaller, final details to my character I started to think about what details might be better left to Substance. I watched a few videos about using substance for hand painted textures as I had only really used the polygon fill so far.

This was my favourite video I found as it was the most succinct as clearly demonstrating the process of creating the style of texturing I wanted to achieve. Although more flat and painterly than the style of Hotel Transylvania, I would like to also take inspiration from Tartakovsky’s 2D shows such as Primal and Samurai Jack.

Week 9

Unfortunately I missed this week’s class as I had been unwell. I followed along at home with the first couple videos and then decided I should watch the remaining videos while modelling my character instead of spending a lot of time making the example character as well since I was conscious of time.

Although I think I could have made this look better, I didn’t have any issues following the tutorial and felt comfortable moving on to starting the head of my own character.

I expect the head will have been the hardest and most time consuming part (at least I hope so) as I spent most of it making the tufts of fur along the cheeks and ears but as there were so many I eventually felt I had gotten the hang of it and shouldn’t have any trouble with adding fur tufts to the other areas in future. The mouth also was a bit fiddley as it was very different to the mouth in the tutorial. Instead I treated it more like the eyes by making the teeth part out of a cylinder positioned inside the head much like the spheres used for eyeballs. I’m pleased with my progress so far and will move onto the torso next.

Week 8

Week 8’s class was an introduction to storyboarding, again I was familiar with storyboarding on a beginner level thanks to my foundation year, I also had to the advantage of already having a basic storyboard for my section of the animation-jam.

The first class task was to storyboard a sequence of a flour sack, however I slightly misunderstood the task and also animated mine:

I enjoyed this task as I hadn’t actually animated in some time and it was nice to warm up my skills again.

The next task was to storyboard another flour sack sequence this time based off of a template:

I may have slightly cheated by adding a face to my flour sack but even if I hadn’t done so I think my staging and poses would have been enough to convey the story so I’m happy.

For this week’s homework I made a final storyboard for my section of the animation-jam:

After finishing this storyboard I wondered if maybe my section was too long and discussed this with my group, I found I was able to drop the last two shots as they overlapped with Bethany’s storyboard, I also decided the 7th shot isn’t really necessary so I will also leave it out when it comes to my animatic. I also intend to find a way to add in a simple title reveal, once we have a title decided.

Week 8

This week’s class was similar in that we had the freedom to experiment with sculpting one of our character ideas rather than everyone following the same tutorial. I enjoyed this a lot more as Mike’s example was helpful to follow along and being able to apply the general process to my own idea made it more fun, I also enjoyed the freedom of not having to worry about topology as this class was about just getting ideas out into a 3D format which it feel more like sketching.

I chose to use my ‘Behemoth’ idea, based off of the character from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel ‘The Master and Margarita’. I made another Pinterest board to gather illustrations of different interpretations of this character. In short, Behemoth is an almost human sized black cat that accompanies Satan to visit 1930’s Moscow to wreak havoc upon non-beleivers. Behemoth also has a few interests that would provide interesting props: chess, vodka, cigarettes and revolvers.

In hindsight it would have been a lot easier to have used a T-pose for this sculpt but nonetheless I found this really helpful in both confirming that I wanted to use this idea as well as giving me a good idea of what basic elements this design would be composed of.

Before this class I had experimented a bit more with silhouettes for this character idea:

I still found that my first idea (rightmost) was my favourite as it had the best balance of both sharp, pointy contours as well as curves that remind me of Tartakovsky’s style and additionally, working well for this character being both evil and likeable.

For my reference while sculpting I did one more, clearer sketch with a few adjustments:

For homework I made a better reference including a prop and side view:

This time I used Procreate’s symmetry tool and added base colours, now I felt more confident to start modelling as I had a clear vision of how I wanted my final result to look.

Week 7

Our introduction to the next assignment began with a class on sculpting. After an overview of what each sculpting tool does we had the freedom to experiment and familiarise ourselves with them.

I started with a more basic teddy bear rather than a humanoid face. I used the bubble and grab tools mainly to make the ears and muzzle as well as the draw tool to make the mouth, however I wasn’t sure what else to do with this teddy bear idea so I spent the remaining time of the class playing with the grab tool to make a humanoid face.

Although I didn’t get time to add much detail I felt that during this class I got a good idea of how I could use these tools for my main assignment despite finding it quite difficult at first.

For this week’s homework I made a pinterest board to organise my favourite images of Genndy Tartakovsky’s character designs as well as references from other artists of their interpretations of the mythical creatures etc. I wanted to consider.

In particular I liked this sheet of ‘shape suggestions’ as it clearly illustrated the diversity of Tartakovsky’s silhouette designs for hotel Transylvania so I applied a similar layout to my initial sketches.

For the following week I aimed to have narrowed down my ideas and picked one to focus on designing in more detail.

week 6/7

Week seven’s class on ‘animation 101’ was nice to have a recap on what I learnt in my foundation year about timing, spacing and the 12 principles of animation. During class we had the very straightforward task of doing some bouncing ball exercises.

We started with the simplest version, of a ball just bouncing up and down in a loop, stretching as it gets faster and closer to the ground, then squashing on impact.

 

 

Next we incorporated the principle of arcs by bouncing the ball across the screen. I made two versions of this one, the first where it bounces off screen following the same height of arc forever, and the second where the arcs decrease in height as it looses momentum.

 

 

The last bouncing ball exercise was for homework. We just had to do the same as before but with a ball of a different material or mass. I chose to imagine a bowling ball that wouldn’t have any squash or stretch and not bounce much, loosing momentum quickly and rolling off screen.

 

Overall I enjoyed this class and homework as it was very easy to understand and useful to recap before starting to animate our group projects.

During week 6 when we didn’t have any formal class for studies advice week, my group started to storyboard ideas to help us think about organising our story in a way that would be easy to split up into parts of equal workload for each group member.

I only completed the intro to the story and was beginning to figure out how I imagined the fight scenes before we decided how to allocate the sections of the story for the rest of project. We decided it would be most fair to allocate them randomly using a number generator which I was able to do quickly on my phone and send into our groupchat:

This meant that I would be working on the intro, Bethany and Dylan on the fight scenes and Aaron on the ending.

For the second half of week seven’s class, while waiting on Aodhan to talk to each group, I worked on making a reference design for Jack-O-Bonny.

Although I tried to simplify and stylise Bonny’s design, I still felt it was too similar to the original and felt it could be a lot better so I wasn’t too disappointed or surprised when Aodhan got to our group and suggested we leave the FNAF character behind and create new animatronics of different animals that aren’t already in FNAF to show our ability in character design better. Although it was unfortunate that we had to redo some work, I didn’t mind as it gave me an excuse to draw a cat and anyone who knows me knows I’ll never miss an opportunity to draw cats.

I still followed the basic structure of Jack-O-Bonny’s design but added cat features to make them appear original while still undoubtedly FNAF inspired. I also made two versions of colour palette as I wasn’t sure if I preferred using the same colours as Jack-O-Bonny, which coincidentally made them look like a ginger cat which I like, or a purple/pink palette which I also really like as it makes them look as though the animatronic was cute before it fell into disrepair (and started killing people) However ultimately I’m happy to let Bethany and Dylan choose however they want this design to look as it will be one of them who has to actually animate this character.

Reflection

At the beginning of this year I had no experience with Blender or any similar 3D software. Part of me had almost forgotten it was part of the course after during my foundation year we only focused on 2D animation. The first few weeks I felt that I was working too slow and worried about the assignments piling up close to the deadline. As I was working slowly I also worried about not having time to try animating the assignments, even though it wasn’t required for most weeks. At first I was also a bit embarrassed to ask others in the class for help as I assumed I was behind most people and didn’t really know anyone already.

However now that I have finished the module and I can look back on how I’ve done, I can see that the assignments didn’t pile up close to the deadline. Once I got over the first few assignments and felt comfortable with the basics, the last couple assignments and class workshops turned out to be a lot less of a slow process, or at least they didn’t feel as slow since I enjoyed getting to pick my own subjects to work on. I also found it a lot easier to ask peers for help through my group for the 2D module.

Overall I’m satisfied with how much I’ve learnt so far over the last several weeks and I think that now I’ve settled into the course and gotten over the initial nerves of getting into something totally new I can go on to enjoy the next module.

Week 5

This week’s class was an introduction to Adobe Substance. Our class workshop was to use a premade model in blender, export it to substance and add texture.

I found this workshop to be pretty fun as there were so many materials to browse and settings to play with, while also feeling a bit more intuitive to navigate than when I first used Blender.

This weeks homework, being the final of the module, was to model a helmet and use Substance to texture it. Like my sword from the previous week, I chose to use an item (the ‘Phantom Helmet’)  from Breath of the Wild for my reference as I felt comfortable with the level of detail while also seeing how it could be a reasonable challenge.

At first I found this less complicated than the sword as I was able to make a good start on the basic shape of the helmet using cylinders for the base and the horns, cones for the bolts, sphere for the head/mask.  Since making the sword I also felt more familiar with the knife tool to make the ‘eyebrow’ shapes and solidify them to then join onto the base.

I found the head/mask part more complex as I found it difficult to make the nose until I remembered I could use the proportional edit mode to smooth out the shape. In the end, I ended up leaving out the mask part as when it came to unwrapping and exporting to substance I realised having two parts to my helmet wasn’t going to work at least not until I’m more familiar with texturing. Below is a screenshot of when I realised I had two UV maps on top of each other for the two objects causing my layers in Substance to become a mess. You can also see here that along the edges, particularly the eyebrow parts, there was a pixelated white border where the texture didn’t seem to cover the whole area I had selected.

After leaving out the mask and simply choosing a different texture to use, messy layers and pixelated edges were no longer a problem. I chose to use a concrete texture for my helmet as I think it was the most appropriate for imitating the matte look of the BOTW art style while still appearing like dull metal when the roughness was turned down. I also added a smart mask to create cracks in the metal similar to the few dents/scratches that accent the original design.

After exporting my texture back into Blender I found that much of the details of cracks weren’t as visible and it looked like the roughness was much lower even after I added a frame for hue/saturation/value which improved it somewhat.  Regardless I’m still pleased with my final result as I like how my using a reference in Blender the same way as with zubat or the sword, I’ve maintained the original silhouette but with substance’s textures it becomes a much more realistic version. Some things I would do differently include tidying up the inside of the helmet more as I didn’t originally plan for it to be visible because of the mask, and I also think I added an unnecessary amount of seams which become more noticeable after adding texture.

Week 5

Week Five’s class was an introduction to character design, our first task was taking the character we had worked on last week and making a quick expression sheet of sketches exploring different facial expressions.

I think a few of my expressions look too similar and that I could have exaggerated them more but I found it difficult to maintain Nick’s likeness when more exaggerated expressions require more drastic stretching and distorting of the face’s structure.

Our next task was to quickly draw a front, side or 3/4 view or our character in full.  As I had already drawn Nick in full from front view I chose to sketch out a side view.

I found this quite difficult in the time we had in class as I don’t feel very confident with human anatomy and often find it hard to make a character look consistent from different angles, in particular Nick’s face and posture stands out to me here as needing more practise in different angles/poses before I have to animate him.

Our final task in class was to make a character line-up of our front view drawings and present it to the class, giving a quick catch up summary of what we’ve been working on.

Our line-up got a good laugh from the class as did our quick explanation of the story we had planned already. I also wrote out in bullet point form our story so that our re-joining members could catch up. I decided to stay with group 6 as since I came up with most of our plot I’ve started to feel a lot more invested than when I initially joined just feeling confused by the concept.

I also made a quick mood board based off of a Pinterest board I had been compiling of ideas for our cave/dungeon environment as I felt we needed to make our environment more simple than the groups ideas from before I joined which was a combination of both an industrial post apocalyptic world as well as a whimsical fantasy world. Instead my idea, which I made sure the other group members liked as well, was to make the underground world for the animatronics to come from simply be a sewer under the city they were causing havoc in.

I took inspiration for my sewer concept from artwork for old school dungeon games and comics (Bob Maurus, top right. Johnny Ryan, bottom middle right) as well as similar sewer/underground environments from some of my favourite games such as the sewers from Stray (bottom left) and BlightTown from Dark Souls 1 (bottom middle left)

Week 4

Unfortunately I was sick and missed week four’s class but on the plus side I found the class tutorial much easier to follow that the previous classes so it was a relief to get caught up quickly.

After doing the dice and can parts of the tutorial and watching how to do the hammer I felt comfortable enough to get more up to speed and start the homework.

For my sword I chose to make an ‘Eightfold Blade’ from Breath of The Wild.

This is the reference I chose to use while browsing images of swords from Breath of the Wild because I thought it was a good medium between not being too complicated for my level of confidence in blender while also being interesting enough that it would still be a good challenge.

Here are few different angles of my final product:

This was the first homework assignment I really enjoyed even thought I think I could have done a lot better. My main setback was that I forgot to set my normals to zero and realised this quite late on. As it would have set me back a lot in managing my time to redo all I had done so far I decided to instead make my texture images in procreate by tracing over the UV map and drawing the shapes with how the map was stretched in mind. I understand this is a very silly way of doing things and I will learn from my mistake to not have to do it again.

Another challenge I had was realising after making the separate textures for the blade and hilt that the ring/guard part around the hilt was very messy on close inspection. I forgot to take a screenshot of this to better show my mistakes but on my second attempt I found whatever I had done wrong was easy to avoid again.

Early on while I was beginning by making my blade following the reference, I found it confusing to find a simple way to make the edge of the blade sharp. However after watching a quick youtube video I found it was actually pretty obvious to just add a loop cut as shown around 4.30 in the video. I didn’t watch the rest of the video though as I thought some of his methods looked awkward and I enjoyed figuring out the rest myself more enjoyable.

Despite these problems I think my sword turned out well for my first time modelling and texturing something myself without a step by step tutorial and I enjoyed the process more than previous homeworks as it felt more creative.