Week 4 – Workshop: UV Mapping Dice + Coke Can + Hammer Homework: Sword

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

UV mapping the dice and the Coke can were the workshop tasks. After watching the demonstration, I completed them rapidly. UV mapping a hammer was another workshop exercise. It had more details for me to complete, after making simple mistakes by forgetting a few processes, I had decided to count on the tutorial video’s guidance.

The assignment involved modelling a sword in 3D and applying UV map textures to it. I chose a Genshin Impact sword as the template. I’ve been experimenting with various techniques during the process to create the sword, developing the most simple and effective way to build the sword as well. Before UV mapping the sword’s texture, I coloured it to determine which design would appear best once it was constructed.

 

      

     

After UV mapping the textures, I discovered that I made a mistake in the sword’s structure. Making the most complicated area of the sword with just one plane was a mistake that caused me plenty of regret because I had to mark out seams and add textures. I chose to add just one texture because it’s quite difficult to correct the problem.

Having too many Ngons was another mistake I noticed would affect the sword’s animation. I believe I will have to start over to fix all the Ngon, but it’s too late. I chose to keep what I have and work on the ones that I could fix.

Week 3 – Workshop: Tone and Value

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

The lecture this week focused on tone and value. Throughout the presentation, we completed short exercises. Drawing items that I believe might exist in our world—Haunted House Storybook World—was the first task. Apply various tints and tones to the items once they have been sketched out. Lighting resources were given to many items from the front and right. The second activity involved using lines and crosshatchings to create tones and shades while still drawing out specific objects. For this activity, I have decided to sketch a few buildings.

 

We are switching groups for the first time this week. New members of Ella, Naomi, and Darian were switched into our group at the Haunted House Storybook World, while Gio and I remained in the same group. I gave the newcomers a general overview of our universe and the stages we were at after the group move, and we continued with our world discussion. This week, the following concepts were considered interesting:

  1. Every time when the character escape to the door and she steps out. She will automatically get transport back to the middle of the haunted house.
  2. Instead of just having creepy dolls ruling the haunted house, we can have more creatures.
  3. Instead of a house it could be a castle or a mansion.
  4. The rooms in the haunted house could be a place, when the door open it could be an endless forest or beachside with an invisible end.

The homework for this week, I sketched out some new thumbnails of our world based on the developed ideas. Also, two rough sketches with tones.

Week 3 – Workshop: Milkshake + Flower Vase Homework: Zubat

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

The workshop activities for this week included making a flower vase and building a milkshake cup. The milkshake engagement began the day, and using a cylinder to extrude and scale the cup and lid was a simple process. The elements that I found most challenging were creating the straw using the Bezier curve and the milkshake liquid within the cup. The liquid was difficult because it should have been a separate component from the cup, but I kept picking the incorrect cup edges to create the liquid’s shape, which I had to do several times to finish. To make it more realistic, I also had to struggle moving the vertex on top of the liquid. It was challenging for me to manage the curves in the straw, so it took me quite a while to get it going in the direction I wanted.

I had to use the Bezier curve to create the flower stem for the flower vase, which encountered the same challenges as building the milkshake. I believe that’s because I haven’t settled into using it. The leaf was another place where I had trouble. After applying the solidify modifier, I spent a lot of effort changing the vertices and edges to make it perform more naturally on the stem. I felt that using a sphere to make the flower was the easiest part. I experimented with the vase’s edges and came up with a zigzag pattern that evoked a crystal effect, so I decided to continue with it.

After watching the tutorial video, making a Zubat for the homework assignment appeared to be straightforward. Up until the wing section, which was the bone part of the wing as well as the area I found most challenging completing the Zubat. After asking Mike for help I had repeated the procedures a few times for each part, scaling it to the size I wanted.

Week 2 – Workshop: Composition and perspective

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

We began this week’s course with a lecture discussing perspective. and composition in animation when creating storyboards. We were also given quick exercises to complete during Sarah’s lecture to help us understand perspective and composition in various kinds of animation situations. Among the compositions we mostly studied were the Rule of Thirds and the Golden Ratio. The first task involved creating two thumbnail sketches of the scenes that I would see occurring in my world for each composition. The second task involved building cubes using both one- and two-point perspectives. I think I need to practice more to fully understand perspectives because I found this exercise to be very difficult to do correctly. The third task included choosing and identifying three composition scenes from three separate animations.

Our group discussed about our story narratives more this week, and we came up with a place that we felt would be useful for making the storyboard. According to our basic plot, a teenage girl was in the library when she opened a storybook and found herself inside. The storybook presented a story of a house haunted by eerie dolls. When the teenage girl tries to escape the haunted house, the dolls chase and attack her. She also gradually begins to transform into a doll throughout the escape. This week’s homework was sketch out six thumbnail drawings of the setting scenes and some backgrounds of our world.

 

Week 2 – Workshop: Skateboard + Pull Kart / Homework: Tie Fighter

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

This week, we concentrated on using Blender’s additional tools, such as switching to edit mode to extrude faces and using bevels to curve edges to create more intricate designs. I found this workshop slightly challenging. Since I’m not experienced with the tools, I did struggle to follow the instructions when watching the tutorial video while building the skateboard. I’ve made many of the same mistakes previously; for example, I tried to grab edges to bevel or extrude, but the edges always ended up maintaining everywhere, and the polygons tend to have strange shapes. I encountered this quite a few times, and the reason was discovered to be that I was grabbing unconnected edges, which led to the failure of extruding too many layers of invisible faces that are directly on top of one another. To create the best skateboard, I did restart to make few changes and to make the skateboard more realistic.

Building a pull kart was the second workshop task. The progress was straight forward due to the experience of creating the skateboard. I was very careful not to make the same mistakes, so this practical task was quicker than building the skateboard, even though the pull kart had more details.

 

Making a tie fighter was the assignment. The shapes required for building the tie fighter were straightforward; therefore, it seemed that the homework task was quicker than the workshop practices. Selecting the polygon faces on the sphere and then copying and pasting them to make a window for the tie fighter were the main modifications made to create the middle body of the tie fighter. Adding detail by extruding out the top, then inserting an extra loop and extruding in to increase depth. I centered it by using M on the keyboard after inserting faces to make the top round. Using the solidify modifier to make the window thicker was another new technique I learned and used when creating the window section. I completed the wings and areas connecting the wings to the body fast since they mainly involved extruding and beveling. After I finished making one wing, I applied the mirror modifier, and I mirrored them up next to the central body, which directly produced a second wing for me. This is the tie fighter build after coloured.

Week 1 – Workshop: Form and Shape + Icebreaker

weng-c1 / / Animation Studio

We began the first Animation Studio module workshop. with a quick talk regarding the module and mark schemes, as well as the workshop’s focus, shapes and forms. To fully understand the basic concepts and development of shapes and forms, we completed a few quick workshop exercises during the lecture. The warm-up came first. To get ourselves back into the habit of drawing, we drew some rough lines and shading. Sketching the side faces of some simple 2D forms and then shading them to convey depth was the second task. Playing around with the contour lines of basic shapes to generate 3D shapes was the third task. After completing the tasks, we had to combine various shapes to make a few basic characters.

After lunch, we were separated into different groups of 12. I was in group 10, along with Jameila, Katie, Hannah, and Gio. To start the group tasks, we completed an icebreaker exercise where we were given 10 sentences of prompts, and then we went around taking images that we thought best suited each of the prompts and uploaded them to the group chat on Discord. After finishing the icebreaker exercise as a warm-up, we begin to develop our views on the world. The creation approach begins with a 100-word list of several concepts that we believe the world should have. Then, among the 100 words, each of us selected one word that reflected our individual visions of the world. Storybook was Jameila’s pick, Little Nightmares was Katie’s, Hunted House was Hannah’s, Void was Gio’s, and Barbie was mine. We came up with two short descriptions of our world based on these five components. The first rough description was a Barbie doll got sucked into a haunted house inside a void storybook and setting is in the style of little nightmare. The second idea was Barbie as the main character and meets a bunch of creepy dolls in a hunted haunted.

The homework task for this week was to Investigate the underlying forms of three of my favourite animation characters. Shoyo Hinata from Haikyu was the character I first picked. Ovals that matched His muscle lines made up most of his body. He also has a square chest. with rounded sides. I think that the blocky, smooth contours of Shoyo’s arms and legs demonstrate his flexibility. Lucia Nanami from Mermaid Melody is the second choice. She had an extremely toned and slender figure, with rounded features. that had straight contour lines, such as her arms and legs. To give her a less muscular appearance. Conan from Case Closed/Detective Conan was chosen as the third character. Conan’s body, in my opinion, was more like a combination of Lucia and Shoyo. His body shape was blocky for a male. and his arms and legs were all very straight as a child to avoid having too many muscles.

 

Week 1 – Workshop: Table + Chairs / Homework: Snowman

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

We began the 3D Animation module with a lecture that covered the basic principles of Blender. Mike then gave an overview of Blender by showing us how to use its features and several useful shortcuts. Following the presentation and demonstration, the first workshop task we were given was to make a table and chairs. Since I’m a beginner and have never used Blender or any equivalent software, creating the table and chairs was much more difficult than I had anticipated and slightly chaotic. It was challenging for me to scale the cubes and then arrange them to resemble tables and chairs due to the fresh knowledge that had been presented to me in the morning. In addition, I’m having a lot of trouble getting used to using the mouse to move Blender objects smoothly. As I saw the demonstration, I did not anticipate the amount of time the first section of this activity would take. The second section of the task was adding colours to the table and chairs which I’ve simply applied brown to the table and red to the chairs.

After lunch, we received the assignment to create an animated snowman. A quick demonstration was presented. The snowman completed effectively. I then scaled everything to maintain its proportions so the shapes wouldn’t act weird when animated. I noticed having to parent the snowman’s body was the most difficult aspect of completing it. To get everything moving in the proper positions, I repeated it a few times, making sure there were no mistakes made.

To make the animation more engaging, I chose to give my snowman a friend and attractive surroundings. To create the snowman friend, I copied and pasted the original snowman by selecting every aspect of it and then clicking Shift D to create a second snowman. Afterward, I decorated them in different ways. In the background, I used a cylinder and cones to create a tree, then I applied the same copy and paste method. I used a sphere to create an igloo as well. I experimented with the lighting a little before animating. Applying lighting had given the snowmen depth and a lively atmosphere. Animating the snowman wasn’t as challenging as creating it, it was straight forward with the demonstration video, so I completed it smoothly with no chaos.

Induction Day – Icebreaker

weng-c1 / / 3D Digital Literacy

For our induction day on the 17th of September, the induction talk began with the lecturers introducing themselves and the areas that they will participate in animation. During the talk, we were also briefly explained about the course modules and the expectations from the lecturers of our work to receive certain grades on the mark scheme. After lunch, we completed a mini teambuilding project to get to know each other in the course. The project task was taking interesting photographs in our surroundings, then simply animating the pictures by giving them some facial features or designing a character of the object in the pictures. To start the project, we’ve been put into separate groups. I was in Group 4, which also included Jamayne, Naomi, Leon, and Peter. To find places where we could take interesting photos, we’ve decided to walk around the city.

I’ve decided to use a picture of a tree that was taken outside a restaurant. I chose this image based on my initial impression. I imagined the tree as a cheerful and welcoming doorman as I looked at it. I’ve given the tree eyes and a mouth as part of the appeal. I chose to add moving stick arms and legs to give it more characteristics and atmosphere, which gave it a very energetic appearance. This is my outcome of the mini project.