✨ 30 Second Animated Short – Hubris ✨
After getting ourselves into a group the first thing we did was jump right into a miro board so we could start brainstorming ideas for our 30 second animation! Below you can see our journey of tring to whittle down what it was we wanted to animate!
We had a bunch of really fun ideas at the start, it was actually pretty hard narrowing down what we actually wanted to animate. We knew for sure we wanted to keep it simple, so we came up with as many ideas as we could for simple shaped characters, or things without arms or legs that were still kinda cute. I really liked the snow bunny idea and worm on a string! However, in the end we stuck with doing a slime as we seemed to get the most mileage out of the idea in terms of telling a story.
It was easy enough coming up with a rough story, we even came up with a name, Hubris! Though, we weren’t 100% settled on a setting just yet, we really liked the campfire and the wizard workshop ideas though, so we decided to gather some references and inspiration before we decided fully on what direction we were going.
Also heres a little summary of the story we were going with!
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✨ Gathering References ✨
Our group began compiling a pinterest board of anything that could inspire our animation! This ranged from slime designs to the bottles and also different ideas for the setting. We also looked into a few different ideas for what sort of visual style we wanted while we were at this stage.
We all thought it’d be really cute to go with something low poly, but since we didn’t have much experience making things look intentionally low poly we decided against going in that direction. (Maybe next year >:D)
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✨ Conceptualising ✨
I volunteered to help sketch up some character concepts and the storyboards. In the beginning we had a bunch more ideas for slimes than what actually made it into the final animation, some of which you can see in my work below!
I designed the basic base slime before I moved on to designing the different types.
A huge point of reference for me was the game Slime Rancher. When designing my concepts art you can definitely see a lot of inspiration in my designs being drawn from that game! I think compared to my teammates my designs looked a little generic, which was kind of what I was going for as I wanted them to be as simple and cutesy as possible. I’m pretty happy with how they came out even if they arent super intricate!
Above, Slime Rancher. Below, Genshin Impact.
Another game that I drew ideas from was Genshin Impact, just because their slimes are so simple yet still very differentiated from each other, I thought keeping a simple base that would still look different from each transformation to the next would be super helpful in the modelling process!
I also decided to try and sketch up some titles for the animation! Mostly just for fun, I initially tried a blocky kinda messy style that was playful, but then tried a more fanciful magical style before kinda smushing them together in the final product.
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✨ Storyboards ✨
I was tasked with doing the storyboards for the animation! I had a really vivid idea for how I could see the animation going, so I did all the boards myself. In retrospect it would’ve been nicer to have some extra help with them as I began to burn out
Looking back I realise that my boards at a little weak, they start out a lot stronger than they finish and I think that comes down to me just getting kind of burned out working on them. However, I think they served their purpose of showcasing all the different slime transformations which was my main goal, so I’m still pretty happy with them! The beginning especially, I think its so awesome.
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✨ Previs ✨
Joseph made a rough animatic from my storyboards for the group to see and we realised that as it was, it was WAY too long. Once Neave finished the room, I set about doing the previs which I got done in a night or two! I used really rough stand-ins for the slimes, but used the little blobby semi circle base that I was modelling from for most of them!
Unfortunately, to save we had to cut the start way down and changed where the slime came from, as now he jumps in from an open window rather than escaping a jar. Even still, it was way too long! So we had to make a decision on what we could cut down to fix this.
After presenting our previs to the class and lecturers, a couple of awkward camera movements were pointed out to us, and we were encouraged to simplify the end with the devil slime as I admittedly did go a bit crazy with it heh! From here we had a good jumping off point for things to help save time, and after a group discussion we decided to cut the rock slime as well as it’d be the most difficult to model.
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✨ Modelling Slimes ✨
Modelling was a lot easier than I thought, although it really was just a case of making some little blobs with eyes. I also modelled the blendshapes for expressions, using the tutorials and things we learned in class this semester!
Here’s the basic slime model before any transformations.
From here, I moved onto the cat slime, which was just a copy of the basic slime with a little tail and ears! Wren drew up some turn arounds to reference for modelling, but they weren’t very consistent and I found them kind of awkward to use so I just kind of winged it on my own without a reference, after all I was just adding two elements to my original model.
Again I drew inspiration from Slime Rancher during the modelling process for the ears and tail, however I went with a longer tail and rounder ear shape.
The ears on the cat slime were also supposed to rotate, but we decided against this in the end as there wasn’t much of a need for it.
Here’s a shot showcasing the slime doing it’s little sippy mouth as well!
Initially, I wasn’t supposed to be modelling the devil slime, but after another presentation, our lecturers noted that the devil slime we had modelled looked like it’d be hard to animate as it was a more spherical shape and didnt have a flat bottom. The horns also looked a little bit off. Since I already had the slime base and had done this process with the cat already, I spent an afternoon making up a new devil slime that’d be a little easier to animate!
I referenced the horns on the pyro slime from Genshin Impact, but I admittedly got a little carried away and fancied them up a lot as I was modelling. I also really loved the angry sort of scowling expression Neave’s slimes had in their concept art, so I changed the base slime model to include a little angry brow shape for this one!
Neaves art above!
Here’s a shot including the tail and the wire frame!
With that finally out of the way, I was done modelling and moved onto the rigging stage!
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✨ Rigging ✨
Me and Joseph split the rigging between us, he took care of blendshapes while I rigged the slime’s bodies. I knew this would be the most difficult part of the pipeline for me specifically, but I really wanted to try my best to force myself to get more comfortable with rigging.
My first challenge was rigging the tails on the cat and devil slimes. I’d never done anything like this so I consulted a few tutorials online, this one was the easiest and was the method I wound up using!
It took a few tries, but here’s the finished cat tail rig! I applied the same process to the devil tail when I was finished.
Next, I had to rig the squash and stretch. I really hadn’t done anything like this before, so once again I consulted a tutorial online!
Despite my best efforts to follow along with this one, however, I wound up so confused and the rig wouldn’t work no matter what I tried, I think I was messing up somewhere in the node editor as I really had no clue what I was doing.
This wasn’t working out for me at all, and so I decided to scrap it and start again with help from Alec instead. After recieving his tutorials it went a lot better and I was able to rig up the cat and basic slime models with squash and stretch! Here’s what the final rig looked like and how it worked.
And here’s a video Joseph took of the entire rig working!
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✨ Animation ✨
We split the animation into 5 parts and each member of my group took a section. I had the most experience animating the 2D slime and I knew how awkward it was from my work on the previs so I volunteered to animate this one!
I forgot to take progress shots as I worked, but essentially the process was me putting a small marker on the table where one corner would stay pivotted, then I would twist the plane around, ensuring the corner stayed in the same spot as exactly as possible, then I would have it rock onto the other corner. I move the marker to this second corner and rinse and repeat!
Once that was done, I have to go frame by frame to make sure the plane didnt clip inside the table or is floating off the ground weirdly. It’s a really finicky process so I didn’t mind taking over for my teammates since I actually knew sort of how it worked!
Here’s a playblast of my animation alone!
As well as animating the 2D slime, I was in charge of taking everyones animations and compiling them into one file and timing them up nicely. We had everyone working around the same time in separate copies of the room so we could get the animation done ASAP. (Then I went back and tidied up the outliner)
Generally they all lined up with little to no hassle! However, when it came to Wren’s animation, it didn’t fully line up with Una’s as they didn’t follow their instructions very clearly and their animation was really different. I had to use the graph editor to get them to line up perfectly so you couldn’t spot the transition while watching. It was really finicky but I think I made it pretty dman seamless!
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✨ Rendering ✨
I’m not entirely sure what to show for rendering other than the settings! I was in charge of setting this up so it looked nice, I basically just followed our lecturer’s reccomendations! I didn’t take any screenshots of the actual rendering process itself, but I think I rendered around 400 or so frames across my own PC and a uni Mac.
Once all the frames were rendered, we realised unfortunately that the macs rendered the scene slightly differently than PC’s did. It was a real shame as we split the frames between peoples Macs and PC’s to get done as soon as possible to leave enough time for editting and didn’t have enough to render another couple hundred frames to fix it.
I don’t think we had any other option other than simply starting the render process earlier, so the macs can handle it entirely to elliminate any chance of different settings. We’ll know for next time, however!
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✨ Communication ✨
Our main form of communication was on Discord, we made a server and a bunch of channels to keep everything organised. This is also where we held our weekly meeting to keep ourselves on track and up to date with eachother! A screenshot of one of our meetings is here below.
I also wrote up an excel spreadsheet with what we were aiming to achieve week by week, and to keep track of who was doing what! In later weeks we kind of abandoned it but it was incredibly useful during the first five or so week!
As well as the excel sheet, I had a special channel where we would keep weekly plans, organise meetings and where I would yell at people about deadlines and what we needed to have done by the end of the week basically haha!
Thanks to the discord server, keeping in contact with everyone was really simple and it was great to have a centralised place where we could keep track of everything! My group members were generally really great about responding quickly and making group meetings. Only one of my teammates seemed to struggle in this area, but we managed just fine regardless.
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✨ Evaluation ✨
Overall, this was a really fun project. There was a LOT of learning involved throughout the entire process and I admittedly didn’t see myself stepping up into the leader role I adopted throughout the project. There were a lot of hiccups and moments where I got super frustrated, but seeing everything come together in the end was so rewarding. I think looking back the only thing I’d do differently would be getting a faster headstart on the rendering as our animation was amazing up until that point when we realised the frames rendered out differently, it was a real disappointment.
Despite that, I can’t even pick a favourite part of the project, I think every part I took on was a challenging in a fun way and I really learned a lot, if I had to pick I’d have to say my cat model came out particularly great, I’m super proud of the models!
This past year in the course was both really difficult and also probably the most fun and engaged I’ve ever been in a learning environment, even with the drawbacks of working through a pandemic. If I had only one criticism it’s that I think we had way too much of a workload considering circumstances going on in the world, as the thing that held me back the most was just hardware limitations and having to navigate an online learning environment and keeping everything organised to accomodate that.
Either way, I’m so happy with my first year learning animation and I’m so excited for 2nd year!
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✨ Final Animation ✨