This area of our module focused on putting together a CV, cover email, and showreel together as examples to use and help prepare us for contacting industries. This is not only Important for employability but also will help us gain personal skills on selling ourselves to industries and using our skillsets to make us desirable to employers. This is important because it gives a chance for employers to choose you over other candidates, and will help make you the most desirable option to hire, in comparison to your peers.

Job role

The job role I decided to focus on, was storyboard artist. This is for a multitude of reasons, the first being that storyboarding has always been my favourite area of the animation production pipeline, and I have a lot of interest in being specifically able to focus on that area of the pipeline. I also found out from my lecturers and industry speakers, that storyboarding is a surprisingly very vacant area of the industry, and I found this to be a really good opportunity as it could give employers more incentive to hire me, as opposed to if I focused on one of the more oversaturated areas of the industry.

I researched on the necessary skills required for storyboard artists in the industry and some of the key skills required are good teamwork skills, some knowledge in cinematography, layout and design skills, the ability to work quickly under pressure, and a good adaptability with working for different directors. I feel like I do possess all of these skills, so I made sure to include them in my CV and cover email to express that I am fit for this role.

CV

For the CV, I went for a design I found on Canva, as I found it the perfect blend of both visually engaging and capable enough to hold the right amount of information I wanted. I made sure not to put too much information into the CV or make it too long or rambly, as employers would prefer a more clear and concise CV. I included my qualifications as well as experience, though I ran into the issue of not having much experience. I realised I could use my time tabling at a convention last year as an example of experience I’ve had, since it involved me making my own designs for merchandise, working with customers, working on my own business, advertising myself and keeping myself to a professional and friendly standard with my customers.

I also made a section listing out my skills. I made sure to research the skills that are most suited for the roles of storyboard artists, so I could prioritize including those skills over all others. I also included a link to a small portfolio I made on one of the blogs, with a mix of 2D and 3D work. I included a photo of myself to help give employers a better idea of who I am and how I present myself.

I do like how my final CV turned out, I think the presentation is a mix of colourful and has personality, but also has the necessary information. My only wish is that I had more experience to showcase, as I feel I don’t really have enough to be of much value.  I included the software I use as an extra, as I thought they would be a good thing to add to give employers an idea of what I am knowledgeable in.

Cover email

I did struggle a bit on the cover email, being a little unsure on what exactly to write and what the best ways to sell myself through a cover email, to an industry was. The studio I decided to target my cover email to was Paper Owl Films as I had always found their work impressive and back when I did want to do a placement, they were my first choice in mind. I made sure to keep the email fairly concise, while explaining to them why I want the job role. I also tried to be specific and speak about Paper Owl Films as a company in the email.

I spoke about my experience selling and tabling at a convention, as well as speaking about the skills I have gotten through the modules in this course. I also tried to keep my language as formal as possible and come off as enthusiastic and positive about wanting this role. I made sure to speak about my passion for storyboarding and how I would love to become a part of the team and also help contribute with Paper Owl Film’s creations

I feel fairly satisfied with how the final cover email came out, and I got people to help proofread it for me and reword anything that didn’t seem right or was a bit too wordy. I hope this cover email can express a good example for what I hope and intend to do when working in industry and learning from the professional workforce.

Showreel

The showreel was the most simple part of this assignment, simply putting my best animation clips together in a slideshow. I made an opening card, with my name and email address in PowerPoint, and converted it into the video, which I made using shotcut. I also downloaded some royalty free music to use for the background to help make it more engaging. I started it with my animation studios short from first year as it is probably my favourite animation I have done, as well as my most recent work around the start too. I do wish I had a bit more work to show in my showreel other than just assignments, as I have not had too much time to work on animations in my own time, so this is something I will aim to achieve for in the future. I do think, although I wish I had more refined work in the showreel, it showcases my skills in different types of animations and has a versatile range in styles and types of animations, which help show how flexible my work can be.

Overall, I did find this module to be useful, as it helped me to put more thought into how exactly to get myself more out there and involved with the industry, as well as homing in on what specific job role I want within the animation industry. Creating a specifically animation focused CV and cover letter is something I haven’t done before so it was a new experience learning about how to specifically cater my skills to a certain studio. However, due to my work on the game assignment, I really did not have much time to focus on this area of the module much, as I was much too preoccupied with making sure I got my work done for the game project. Also, despite finding what I have learned this module very useful, do not plan to do a placement year for a multitude of reasons, and have more interest in working in freelance rather than in the industry. Despite all this, I still think this has helped me build up skills that I can utilise in the future for any opportunities that present themselves.

Intro

This module was focused on collaborating with the game design students to create a game, with them focusing on the gameplay and development and us focusing on the visuals.  I decided to go with a 2D game as I am much more confident in 2D animation.

On the day of the initial group selection and planning I was sick, so I wasn’t able to have much input on the very first initial plans, but the idea my group conceived was a side scrolling platformer game, focusing on a rock statue, where the main challenge is that he slowly crumbles with every move. We gave out roles for each other, and I decided to focus on character design, specifically of the main character.

Designing Pebble

For Pebbles design, I looked towards many of the platforms that were the main inspirations for our project, such as the Mario and Rayman series. Due to these games often having very simple designs for the main protagonist and being for a younger target demographic, I decided to go for a simple but somewhat iconic looking design, as the protagonists of these games often have simple designs with a defined silhouette and colour scheme, making them not only memorable to the audience but also easy to identify from the distance. I took a look at a lot of different inspirations for Pebble’s character design, as I wanted to encapsulate these traits, as well as making sure his design will have a universal appeal, trying to make him look both cute and cool, as well as not leaning too hard into any gendered features as so anyone can easily connect and emphasise with him. My initial sketch of Pebble majorly inspired by the Pokémon Golett for its round and friendly design despite being a golem, and Skylanders characters for their short proportions but slightly monstrous designs. I also used a lot of reference images I could find from various actual statues and golem character designs on Pinterest. These characters often have small and more exaggerated proportions, so I made sure to keep Pebbles design like that. My goal was for his design to both fit nicely with popular platformer protagonists but also stand on his own.

My group liked this design, so I coloured and refined him a bit more, however with the art style planning changes and as well as for convenience’s sake down the line, I had to change some aspects of his design, mostly changing his legs to something with more versatility, and making them more similar to his arms, as well as having to omit the texture due to constraints and worries that it may not be done on time.

Art style development

The art style development was a bit of a lengthy process for us as we had many different ideas. Originally, we had wanted to go for a more shaded and lineless style, inspired by Rayman legends and Roki. My first concept art of Pebble reflects this style. I had planned to do rigged animation in this style, but I ran into an issue when I realised both me and Scott didn’t have programs suited for rigged animation, instead our software being better with frame by frame. Due to this, we had to take a shift with the art style, our goal being to still keep it very colourful and pretty looking, but also make sure it is a style that would be suited for hand drawn animation. I realised that a style with line art would be much easier for animating hand drawn rather than lineless, as well as the line art helping Pebbles features not accidentally blend into one another, as he has a limited colour palette. I still wanted the style to look colourful, while also having line art, so I decided we should go with blue line art for the characters, and coloured line art for the background and assets, corresponding to its colour. I went with this design choice for a few reasons, the first being that it will both have line art but also means the line art will still be as colourful as the character, making them look more bright than if the standard black line art was used. We also went for blue line art for specifically the characters because it would help the characters stand out from the background and assets, which have brighter line art that matches the colour more closely. The line art also allowed me to have more details on Pebble’s design. Scott made sure we used the same specific line art colour for all the characters so it would be consistent throughout. We put together a style guide for this style, mine not only focusing on the style, but also the general rules for Pebble’s design

The main inspiration I used for the style was the colourful aesthetic of other platformer games, specifically, Cookie Run Ovenbreak, as the style also uses colourful line art and brightly coloured character designs. I also looked to other platformers for inspiration such as Rayman, Sonic, a Hat in Time and Mario. These games often have simplistic designs for the main characters and colourful designs, so I wanted to incorporate this into Pebbles own design.

Animation references and processes

For the animation, I took a look at references from the other previously mentioned platformer games for an idea of what to do. First of all, for the Idle animation, I looked at the idles in I commonly see in other video games, which often involve a character slowly moving in place. I went for this type of movement, making him rock bath and forth in place and swing his arms. I made sure to not go for too much movement to make sure he would still stay in place. Looking at the gameplay, I think this works well for the idle animation. To help keep the proportions consistent too, I used a pureref image of Pebble’s reference images, as well as some general online reference images I found to help me with the animations. I also used the line tool in Toom Boom to keep the length of Pebble persistent, as well as his head, body, and limb proportions. Toon Boom is an ideal program for me to animate in, as it is a vector based animation software, so there will be no loss to the quality when the animation is resized, which gives the game students much more versatility to work with it.

I looked at multiple platformers for inspiration and booted up the platformer games I had just to look at the characters movement animation and study it. I ended up finding a really useful YouTube video comparing the animations from New Super Mario Bros. U to Super Mario Bros. Wonder. I wanted to combine both the more grounded older animations and the slightly more cartoony newer animations. I also used Little Big Planet animations to help me with the run cycle because the main character has slightly similar proportions to Pebble. I also referenced Richard Williams walk cycle images as they’ve been very useful guides for my walk cycles.

For the jump animation I used this very useful YouTube video as a reference, which helped guide me through the process, I also used what I had learned from making a jump animation last module and revisited some of my references from that module. I made sure not to make the jump too high, so the game design students could be flexible with the sprites. The throw and death animations were a bit more simple. I took a video of myself swinging my arm as reference for pebble and took certain screenshots as frames, to reference and translate onto Pebble. For the death animation, I left it until last, but I drew out the rubble first, and worked backwards from it. It was a bit tricky to do, as I had to keep track of Pebble’s body parts and make sure I didn’t get them mixed up, so I drew them in different colours at some points in the sketch.

Presentation, and application of feedback

During my project, I frequently showed my work to Aodhan for feedback. This feedback has been great help for me improving the quality of my animations and making them more consistent. I did struggle a lot throughout this semester dealing with bad anxiety from being in group settings and struggled to make it to class, but Aodhan kept in touch with me to give me feedback and advice on my animations.

For the idle animation, my final animation was fairly similar to my first draft, with the exception of me changing it to fit his redesign. I uploaded my idle onto sync sketch so Aodhan can give me feedback, and he told me hold certain poses for longer to make the animation feel more natural, and to emphasize the weight of the character as he’s made of rocks. Slowing the animation down made it so much more smooth.

For the original run cycle animation, I went with Pebbles original design of him having jointless legs. I quickly realised animating it, how difficult and restrictive it was, and that I couldn’t get dynamic movement with them, so I redesigned his legs to be more structurally similar to his arms. I am very glad I made this change because it works so much better with the animations of Pebble and gives him much more movement options. My main issue with my draft run animation, is that I did not have a clearly defined connecting point, and Aodhan mentioned he had trouble distinguishing the left and right legs because of this. I went back through the run to make sure the connecting point of the leg was consistent and didn’t jump around. This made the animation much more readable. I also was advised to make the characters body go down rather than tilting it forward.

For the jump, I was told to give more anticipation for the jump, and an extra pose where he’s more squatted to make the anticipation more clear. Aodhan said the secondary actions for the leaf was good but that I should also make the other arm more visible at some parts. I also sped up the fall speed from his advice.

For the throw animation, I got it down pretty quickly from my first draft, and the only critique I got was that it reset into the neutral animation a little too fast, so I added an extra in between. The death animation I did a bit later, so I didn’t have the time unfortunately to get as much feedback on it, but I brushed it over with my group to see if it was alright for them and they liked it.

Communication of teamwork, Organisation & self-reliance

One of the most important things we had to make sure to do was to all keep organised throughout the group, as well as good communication. We decided to have weekly meetings on discord in the planning stage to run our ideas all through each other. Isaac took initiate into planning these meetings, and the weekly meetings were very handy for brushing our ideas over with each other and brainstorming, as well as updating each other on our work.

The discord had multiple separate channels for animation and game design work, as well as for general planning and one channel for files, as our GitHub was having lots of issues, so the game students told us to send them directly onto discord. I also made sure to keep communicating often with the other animation students to make sure we had a consistent style. In the start, there was some miscommunication with the style, and we ended up having to change it, so we had a meeting in class to properly organise our art style and make sure everyone’s assets are consistent. I also tried to help with keeping the colour schemes bright and consistent. For the character animation, I made sure to communicate often with Scott, so we decided to make sure to use the exact same colour for the line art, which is something he suggested. We also all put all our assets together to make sure that they all line up with each other and work together with each other, like they all fit the same style.

With the game students, I made sure to make my animations be as handy for them as possible, so I made sure the proportions and aspect ratio was the same for them all. The game students needed the images exported rather than a video, so I exported as a PNG sequence instead. I also made sure to ask them about stuff I was unsure on, such as jump physics and whether I directly animate the rock object that Pebble throws. To keep myself organised with the animations, I made a list on my phone to keep track of what animations I am on. My workflow was sketch, cleanup, lines, and colour. Once I was finished each animation, I made the crack variants by adding the cracks over the rest of the animation in a different layer, using a reference image on pureref to keep consistent.

Overall, I enjoyed working on this project even though it was very stressful at times. I find working with the game design students to be a very interesting process and they were all very friendly and made sure to work with us the best they can. My group all made sure to communicate and I enjoyed working with them. I feel like this module has prepared me more for industry work, working with people who have different expertise rather than animation, and having to communicate and figure things out accordingly.

Idle Animations

Run Animation

Jump Animation

Throw Animation

Death Animation

Gameplay

Character Design

2D Animation

 3D Modelling/Animation

For this assignment we had to work in groups of four to do a collaborative presentation on an article called Animation: An interdisciplinary study. The article we decided to do was “Carefully Constructed Yet Curiously Real: How Major American Animation Studios Generate Empathy Through a Shared Style of Character Design.” Reading through it, I found it made a good few interesting points such as explaining how character design from Pixar and Dreamworks specifically make audiences have more empathy for the characters, however there also was a good few flaws I found with the article itself, mainly the fact it repeated itself a lot, and also did not fact check nearly enough, as it called The Princess and the Frog a 3D movie, despite a simple google search being able to prove otherwise. To plan out our presentation, our group had a meeting during the week and segmented each other different slides to work on. The slides I wanted to focus on were based around the article’s discussion of Mori’s Uncanny valley theory, as well as how it brings a new theory into this uncanny valley theory, called the “Pixar Peak.” I also did a slide based around character design, as later into the line I realised it would be a good addition to the presentation.

Research for my slides was a little bit more difficult than I thought, as I asked one of my lecturers and he told me that scholarly articles are much more valuable references than just review sites and any video essays. Since I had not done any research this in depth before, I wanted to make sure my references were effective. I seeked out websites that were less biased, and listed their sources, using their reference lists to give myself further information to look at and references to have. I realised that the topic of the uncanny valley is a much less recent phenomenon than I thought and found there had been arguments towards it for years. I researched the references listed in the article itself as well, since the best references I could use were the same as the original article used. I also tried to use image examples to help prove my point, using baby characters from Pixar’s 1988 CGI film, Tin Toy, and 2004’s The Incredibles, showcasing the differences in character design and audience reception. I realised there was a bit of a hole in my argument, since the clear technological differences could be argued, as Tin Toy was over a decade older than The Incredibles, so I used another comparative character example from The Polar Express, a movie that came out the same year as the Incredibles. I also took a look at how Pixar’s character designs appeal to people and realised that many character mannerisms are based off what makes people feel empathy in real life, such as toddlers and animals, so I made an extra slide to further explain this point.

We all got our own slides into the presentation and prepared most of our points in script form, trying to keep the powerpoint fairly light on words so it would be more appealing to look at, since a large block of text is much less eye catching than more concise points with many image examples. We all made sure to rehearse beforehand, and make sure our time was okay, since I was nervous, we could accidentally go over the time limit, so we all recorded each of our times. As for the presentation itself, I found that even though I was nervous, I think I did okay, I generally stuck to the script but did also try to add my own extra thoughts to it too, so it wouldn’t feel too structured. I think I did manage to get all my points across that I wanted to with my script and am pretty satisfied with how the overall presentation turned out, although I did stumble over my words a bit.

Overall I think, I did enjoy this assignment, mostly because I enjoyed working with my group, as I think we were well organized and most our ideas bounced off each other pretty well, offering many new arguments and outlooks to each other. We made sure to have weekly meetings outside of class just to help us stay on track, and also shared any useful resources that we could, so it definitely made it a much more fun experience. I hope that this has prepared me well for any assignments in the future that involve reading through scholarly articles like this.

Reference List

• Mori M (1970) The Uncanny Valley, trans. MacDorman KF, Kageki N. Energy 7(4): 33–35.​
• Chismar, D. (1988) ‘Empathy and sympathy: The important difference,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry, 22(4), pp. 257–266. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00136928.​
• Bates , J. 1994 . The Role of Emotion in Believable Agents. Technical Report CMU–CS-94-13 , Carnegie Mellon University.​
• Ana Paiva , João Dias , Daniel Sobral , Ruth Aylett , Sarah Woods , Lynne Hall & Carsten Zoll (2005) LEARNING BY FEELING: EVOKING EMPATHY WITH SYNTHETIC CHARACTERS, Applied Artificial Intelligence, 19:3-4, 235-266, DOI: 10.1080/08839510590910165​
• Perera, A. (2023). Uncanny Valley: Examples, Effects, and Theory. Available at: https://www.simplypsychology.org/uncanny-valley.html​

For the project so far, we all had our own ideas of how we wanted it to look, so for consistency, we needed to plan a consistent art style. The style prompt we went for from the list, was the Saturday morning cartoon style prompt, following the style of games such as the Mario and Rayman series, which were some of our main inspirations for conceptualising the game.

The styles common features include bright colours, simple characters with limited colour palettes, and simple but recognisable looking characters. The games are often for a younger target demographic, which is the demographic we are aiming for too, so we aimed to reach that goal. Looking at some recent games and characters for inspiration helped me decide on what to do for the main protagonist, Pebble’s, design. Originally, I went with a Moai statue inspired design as my group had requested it, but I also did another design draft with a more golem inspired design, mainly inspired by the Pokémon Golett and any golem characters.

I think this design works well for the main protagonist of a platformer game inspired by games such as Mario, Sonic, and Rayman. The protagonists of the games that inspired me commonly have simple designs with bright colours, as well as keeping a general friendly look to the character. It is important that the character is clear to see, even from further away as platformers focus on the levels too, so this was something I had to consider with Pebble. I made sure to give him a small and simple design, with details on him such as the structure of the rocks he’s made up of. I used blue greys for most of his design, with green for the moss, generally keeping a colder colour palette. I also gave him blue eyes that can glow, the light blue colour meant to be signifying the magic used to keep this stone golem alive. His design was also inspired by Skylanders as I wanted to make him a character who could be imagined in combat too, and not just to be cute. I think I did well with making pebble into a character people can emphasise with.

Once I got to the colours of the design and how the general style will look, I started with a shaded lineless style, mainly inspired by Rayman Legends and Roki. However, I realised an issue with the style, since Pebble is mostly the same grey, specifically on his arms and body, some of his body may blend together with his animations. I wanted to keep the character clear and his actions be defined, so I decided to incorporate lineart into the style. I also simplified the shading, to make it more animation friendly. I decided to use Cookie Run Kingdom as an inspiration style wise, with the colours and lines.

It has coloured lineart, which strikes a healthy medium between the natural feel of lineless and the more defined structure of lineart.

My art style guide was fairly simple, just focusing on the general style of the character and his colour palette. I included a section where the texture for Pebble is, as textures are an easy and handy way to give something simple more detail. I also included some light gradient shading to give him more volume. Finally, I just added general design notes, such as how he looks in the stages of crumbling and how his joints work, since I designed him in a bit of a specific way. I have summarised this information in the PowerPoint slides I have worked on.

Body Mechanics Reflection

This module was like an extension of our previous model, taking the strategies learned from creating the walk cycles to the test. I once again primarily focused on 2D since it is an area, I am more confident with animation wise. For this module we had 3 focused animation tasks that tested our abilities with body mechanics.

Weight lift

The first of these three was the weight lift, I used the deadlift video as reference. Sync sketch was a very useful asset to me because I marked down the key poses and simplified the main structure of the body. To challenge myself a bit more, I wanted to make it in a slightly different angle from the reference so it wouldn’t be too similar. I also looked at a multitude of different animations and reference videos on YouTube, to help me get a bit of a better understanding.

I decided to put in a few details in my animation to give it more visual appeal and make it look more interesting than if I just did a completely straight following of the reference. Before the character lifts up the deadlift, I wanted to give him some more personality, a bit of an overly confident character, so I made him do an action of flexing and kissing his muscles to give a little bit more personality. I also considered the weight of the deadlift, and exaggerated that, making the bar curve as the character lifts it to emphasise the struggle he is facing trying to lift it, as well as putting in some expressions of struggle, despite me not having the time to fully add more secondary actions and expressions. Something in particular I also took focus on, is the position and curve of the spine, especially when he first bends over to lift the weight, and one of the main things other than his hands, that he is using to bend up his body. I attempted adding more movement to the weight, to further exaggerate it, but it ended up looking too “rubber”, as if it was not made from metal, so I kept it mostly stiff to make it clear that the weight is heavy and metallic.

I was decently happy with this, and fixing up the timing helped me to clear up the action, making the lift very slow and gradual to emphasise how heavy the weight is. I wish I could’ve had a bit more time to cleanup, due to external factors it was hard for me to get the everything I wanted to complete.

Jump

For the jump animation, I decided to use a simple character design to focus better on the body movements. I did a similar technique to my walk cycles, of putting both legs on different layers, so I can focus on the movements of one at a time. I also did the floor lines at the bottom, to make sure I am consistent with where the feet touch the ground. I also did this in my weight lift, but it is especially important here. I also once again put my reference video into syncsketch to study the positions of the body and how it moves. I looked through multiple reference videos but decided to go with the provided one since the body movements are very clear and well telegraphed, which makes it a good and emotive reference.

I am very glad I decided to go with a simple nonhuman character, as I found it easier to fully focus on the body movements, without having to worry about too realistic anatomy, which can wind up being much harder to exaggerate and make more emotive. I animated this in a mix of straight ahead and pose to pose, one of the first drawings being the end pose, so I have an idea of where the character will be when they land. It wound up being very beneficial to making sure the movement looks natural and I don’t accidentally make the character land too close/far, making the composition and framing look weird. I used anticipation poses at the start, and made sure the timing for them was slow, to show the wind up of the character getting prepared to jump, an important technique because movement in animation that hasn’t been telegraphed at all tends to look very sudden and unnatural. I utilised arcs with the movement of the character’s body, legs, and arms, since they were moving alongside the jump, and found it very helpful to keeping the movement feeling natural. Getting the timing right was a very important component of the animation, I found my movement to be really slow without adjusting the timing, so I kept the in-between movements actually during the jump fast, and the anticipation and landing slow, this is a very common animation principle to help give smoother and more natural movement. I also had to go back and edit proportions, since I unintentionally made the character’s body much bigger during the jump, so I had to go back and increase the size of the idle pose to make sure it is consistent.

I’m fairly happy with the movement of this animation exercise, I think the movement is pretty nice and smooth and despite being simple, the character works well for this movement. I’m especially happy with the arm movement, as they really help emphasise the jump and have a slight drag, giving the movement more depth. Personality wise, I think I could’ve done better with this, since I wanted to add more secondary actions and expressions but didn’t have the time to. I also think I accidentally made the landing a little too fast, even when I tried to make the movement slow. Despite all this, I will definitely try to use simple characters like this more often in animation focusing on body mechanics, as I found the simple body type both fun, and easier to get creative with and pose.

Lip sync

My lip sync animation was definitely the one I was looking forward to the most, having already had experience a good few times animating lip syncing, and expressions in characters is something I really enjoy animating. I made the decision to use two characters in this animation, since the audio I used had a lot of potential for some good expressions and character. I wanted to challenge myself a bit more for this, so I used a wider array of poses, trying to make sure the character interactions were fun. The audio I used for this animation is the song “Don’t Listen”, by Jake Neutron on YouTube. The animation has its own music video, so I took a bit of inspiration from it, mostly my ending scene, but I still made sure the poses and expressions in other scenes were differentiated enough to be its own thing. The lyrics to the song were also luckily readily available so it was very useful to use for the lip sync.

The characters I used for this are two pre existing characters of mine, and I wanted to display their personalities across, with both their expressions and their poses. The left character intended to have a petty, cunning personality, and intentionally antagonising the right character, who has much more of a cowardly personality. I also used both the face and bodies to show the rising tension and frustration in the characters throughout the animation, with them slowly getting more angry at each other. I tried to make sure there was a lot of movement to compliment the facial expressions, and to make it more interesting than them just standing there.

The lip syncing wasn’t something I found too difficult, since I’ve animated it before and I really enjoy it, since I find it fun to explore how expressive characters can be through just lip syncing. I made sure to consider the mouth movements depending on the emotion of the character, as well as how loud they are speaking. I ended up repeating a lot of the lyrics of the song to myself just to get a good grasp on the shapes the mouth makes when making certain sounds. My desk actually has a small mirror on it so I had it beside me the entire time, looking at it and referencing my own mouth shapes from certain sounds, as well as using online reference images. Something that did get a bit annoying was the music being louder than the voices at times, so what I mentioned previously did really help with this issue. The characters talking fast at certain points too also got a bit challenging to make look natural. I also had the characters heads turn at some points, so I factored in the movement of the jaw in the side profile lip syncing I did to keep it natural and the movement clear. I did start to run out of time around the end, so the ending scene of them yelling at each other isn’t nearly as exaggerated as I had hoped it would be unfortunately and was definitely the most challenging part of this.

I am actually pretty happy with most of this animation, and it was my favourite of the three both because I really enjoy exploring characters expressions, but also because it is the final result, I am most proud of. I think what I did best was managing to get the characters personalities clearly through, with my posing and expressions. There is still things I could improve on, I had a bigger scope of this than I had realised, so some of the movements are very snappy just due to time constraints, as well as the ending previously mentioned. I also think I did make the mistake of focusing on this animation a little too much compared to my other two, when I should’ve given them a more even amount of my time. Despite all this I still am proud of how this is, and think it really ended up working well with the song.

Overall, I did enjoy this module, despite finding it pretty challenging at times. I wish we had a bit more time to fully refine our animations, because I would’ve loved to see what they could look like if I had more time to work on it. I also wish I asked for a bit more feedback more often as it would’ve been handy in clearing out errors. The stuff we focused on this module will definitely be useful reference points in he future, especially the lip syncing, since so much animation involves that, as well as just learning to animate the body more effectively, which is out of my comfort zone but something I have much more confidence with now after these past modules. I hope I can apply these skills to an industry setting and use my examples to build up my portfolio.

https://syncsketch.com/sketch/YzExMDFmNjI4/

This module was focused on character creation. Designing a character, translating the design into 3D, and making an environment for it to fit in. Starting off I had many inspirations and went through a few different design drafts. Initially I wanted to do a zombie shark design to delve into some body horror, but while doodling potential concepts, I doodled a kitsune character and got a bit attached to the design. I then started to flesh out this concept more in more sketches. I went through many other designs while brainstorming. My initial idea of the zombie shark was tempting but modelling the inside and out of this character would be a very complicated task, so I wanted something slightly more approachable. Another one of the concepts was a pre existing character of mine, but I decided against it when I found out the designs do have to be anatomically correct, as his design was pretty exaggerated and cartoony. Another design I did was a reaper bison, and while I liked this design, the dog kitsune somehow won me over.

I touched up on the sketch of the character digitally, adding more detail and using more references and planning. I made a Pinterest board to save all of my primary inspirations, and any art I find that also helps inspire me. My primary inspiration was Amaterasu, the title character from Okami, a white kitsune with red markings, which I used as inspiration for the textures of the animal, the style of the character also inspired me, with the black brushstroke line art. I also was inspired by some Pokémon, primarily arcanine and ninetales.

To differentiate this character from a usual kitsune design, I decided to give it a more doglike body type, specifically inspired by Alaskan malamute, while the ears and tails still being that of foxes. In contrast to kitsunes usual slender and thin designs, I decided to go with something more large and fluffy. I designed this animal to have a design that conveys a wise and friendly personality. The design of this kitsune dog also is made with the idea of it being a mystical type of creature, so I wanted to give it a fitting environment, and use some interesting lighting to make the atmosphere seem more whimsical and magical. The design originally had accessories such as the enchanted necklace and paper talisman stuck to the kitsune-dog’s fur coat. These details was my way of giving more character and mystique to it. I also included the talisman to not only also show the magical spirit of them, but also to show off a friendly and calm personality, as I had envisioned that the talisman stuck on the animal were given to them by children, sort of like a lucky charm. This was another way to contrast from how kitsunes are usually seen in Japanese folklore, as this one has a friendly personality in contrast to the usual cunning and sly personalities they have. I made the mistake of doing my initial concept sketch of the character in a sitting pose, so I redrew it and did a character turnaround to help as a reference for the modelling.

Starting off the blockout was intimidating, as I had to make sure it was anatomically correct, and my usual style is a more cartoonish style. I also had challenged myself by choosing an animal to sculpt, as I am much more used to drawing humans in general, so I had to use a lot of reference to work my head around drawing the reference of this character. I was very lucky that our first exercise for this blockout was a generic quadruped, as it was a very handy exercise to do since my character is quadrupedal. I ended up reusing the blocked out mesh I made for the final blockout, just editing a good few aspects of it to make sure it fits my character reference. During this process and the entire 3D modelling process, I used pureref which had both my concept art and some reference images of animals that inspired this design. The hardest thing about the blockout was definitely the fact that my character has a lot of fur, so the body definitely looked a bit strange during the blockout. I also had made many attempts for the coat fluff, but ended up making it on a separate mesh, as well as the tails. The tails were another issue at first, originally there was 9, but I had to cut them down to 5 as it was almost impossible to get them to fit together without them clipping, and I did not want to have to deal with issues down the line due to meshes clipping, so I had to reduce it down. I then sculpted it afterwards, but admittedly more detailed than I should’ve, putting detail into the fur which didn’t transfer so well to topology.

After doing this, I needed to retopologise. I felt a little bit lost on this part for multiple reasons, the first being that this was a bit of a different workflow from last year, where instead of topologizing over a detailed sculpt, this time it is a simple one. I also, not having previously really sculpted any animals, had no idea how to go about topologizing it as it has different anatomy to a human. I luckily had found a really useful reference online of retopology of a husky model, which even had versions with different subdivisions and an image with the mesh loops in colour which really helped me get an idea of how I should go about for looping mine. I was unsure of how detailed it needed to be too, so I consulted one of my lecturers about it and he told me to keep the forms general, which I tried keeping in mind.

Husky Puppy Topology – CG Cookie

Since I would be rigging this character, I wanted to make sure the topology worked well for the animal. My topology wasn’t the cleanest, but I made sure that there wasn’t any big glaring issues and after I subdivided it a few times the model was starting to come together more. Sculpting it once again was a bit challenging as I essentially had to redo all the fur spikes. Another challenge was making sure the fur coats didn’t clip into each other too much. The fur coats were 3 separate meshes I made, stacked on top of each other to create the effect of a large coat of fur around the chest (inspired from designs of pokemon like arcanine and eevee), so I had to switch through them a lot to make sure they didn’t clip too much. After sculpting all the shapes I wanted for the fur, as well as the details for the nose and eyes, I went over the fur parts with the clay strips brush to build up a texture of fur on the mesh, advice given to me by one of my lecturers.

Putting the model into substance paint, I luckily seemed to have fairly seamless UV maps so I didn’t have to go back and have to fix the maps like I did in the past. It feels really good finally starting to improve on UV maps, which is something I have struggled with for years. For the colours, I went with a white base coat with red accents. I used one of the paint textured brushes with a dirt texture added onto it to try get a watercolour effect. I think it turned out okay but I didn’t have enough time to do as much detailed painting as I went, and it also conflicted a bit with the fur, as I still wanted the texture of the fur to be clear. I was a big fan of how I did the eyes though, layering a good few brushes to give it more shading and dimension.

Rigging and posing the model proved difficult at first, but I luckily found a really handy tutorial on YouTube for it which I followed to help me.

The tails were a really fun part of the model to pose, the armature I made helped me have a lot of control over them and they really added to the silhouette to the character, making it much more interesting once they were finally posed. I posed the tails to be sticking up in a loop formation to show off a powerful side to this character. For the body pose I wasn’t as sure, and also had a bit of an annoying downside with the fur coat, as it moved with the head and clipped easily, limiting the posed I could go with. I then had the idea of going with a playful crouching pose, I originally wanted to do a more graceful pose, but I wanted to add to the doglike qualities of the character, so I gave it that adorable playful crouch that dogs do. Something slightly unrelated to the main project that I also did was add lineart in blender using the grease pencil, as I had really wanted to see what this model would look like with it, considering the art style of the game that was my main inspiration uses black lineart too. I really liked how it looked but unfortunately could only use it in blender for now as I didn’t have the time to figure out how to get lineart fully compatible to be imported into unreal engine.

For the environment, I thoughts somewhere mysterious and serene, but a bit magical would work perfectly. Originally, I had wanted to do a snowy garden, but decided to do a mysterious forest instead, inspired by areas from video games, like Kakariko village from Breath of the Wild and Inazuma from Genshin impact. The colours of lots of the props and grass textures I had didn’t really suit super well with my initial vision but I was able to get it to look like something I had more in mind by using lighting. Unreal Engine was a bit daunting to use as it was a very complex software to me and left me feeling a bit overwhelmed by it all, although it was very interesting using industry standard software and seeing what’s possible with it. My laptop also was not a huge fan of trying to run it, so it did suffer from sort of frequent crashes. Unfortunately, because of this I did have to limit myself a bit with the environment design, as I originally wanted to add some more effects like fog and more things to the scene like a rock bath, but I couldn’t be due to time constraints and the looming risk of my laptop exploding. To try make up for what it lacked in super unique environment design, I decided to make more interesting with colourful lighting, as well as framing. I made the scene lights a deep blue colour, while the light source was more of a golden colour to contrast, though I tried not to make the lighting too intense, as I didn’t want to drown out the red colours from the kitsune. For the lighting also, I downloaded Good Sky, which is a free downloaded set of skybox assets which was really interesting to use and had a lot of settings.

GOOD SKY in Blueprints – UE Marketplace (unrealengine.com)

I put the camera close to the ground and made the light of the scene centre around the kitsune dog, putting it into primary focus. I kept the camera close to the ground to invoke a bit of a narrative, to the best I could with just the framing. I wanted to frame it like it’s from the point of view of a person who has stumbled apon a rare mythological creature, as if they’re sneaking up to get a closer look at it. I put lighting around the kitsune dogs head and tails to showcase a sort of magic, but I’m not huge on how they turned out, as I’m still not entirely used to the lighting system on this program. The fire was something that was not planned, but I saw it in the starter pack and thought it would work perfectly with the scene, the pose even luckily also fitting it perfectly too. Despite my confusion around the program and the frequent crashes, I found this part of the module to be really fun, my favourite part definitely being creating the environment, as I found the foliage tools really fun to use.

Looking back on it, I’m actually pretty satisfied with how my project had turned out. I think I did what I set out to accomplish with this character design and conveyed what I wanted to get across with it. I do however wish that I could’ve kept more details from the initial design, as I unfortunately was unable to as this model was already pretty intensive for my laptop to handle. I also wish I had a little more time to really make my environment more unique and learn a bit more about unreal engine, as while I’m satisfied with it, I definitely think it could’ve stood out more with the environment and lighting, and I feel like I could’ve done more with it.

Initial character concept art

Model renders and turnaround

Unreal Engine Renders – character in environment