In the first session of animated narrative this week we were introduced to pipelines, the stages of phasing production, Pre-vis and Pre-vis SB animatic. It is like how I imagined with 2D production with the process with concept art, storyboarding and rough animation process before the product is done. For 3D it has pre-visualisation as it more about placement in the scene and camera.
For our exercise we had made an animated character to jump with an inputted sound into our animation video.
This week we were introduced to adobe substance painter and how it was used for textures and importing Maya models and exporting the textures to Maya in render. Our lecturer Mike talked about the layers applied to the model and presented us videos to follow to complete the substance hammer for our homework for this week.
It was a bit difficult as I was new to substance painter but watching Mike’s videos helped me out in the end.
The left is from substance painter and the right is from Maya on render mode.
Here is my work on assignment 1 this week.
This week on blackboard collaborate, Alec talks about 3D animation in Maya on the forwardΒ kinematics and inverse kinematics, blocking animation and rigs. He taught us the importance on time and spacing on frames and to treat it like 2D with pose to pose.
He presented us graph editor to edit out the speed and fix errors on our sequence of animation and the dope sheet to select and move our frames when too close or needs more spacing. He had given us an exercises to do this week with the ball to the curious character jump.
This week in class, we were taught on Texturing and UV mapping. We had learnt on how to import textures using Photoshop with UV mapping using the tutorial videos on blackboard. We had done it with three models which involved a six sided dice, coke can and a hammer while using UV mapping.
For homework I selected one of the images and made my model with UV mapping it was difficult at first but I was able to adapt to it.
For this week after finishing our assignment 1, we were presented to our second assignment on making a 20-30 second 3d animation in teams of 4 or 5. I am in group 2 with Dylan, Orna, Aveen and Odhran. Our project was nature themed so we came with a lot of ideas for this project.
We decided on the idea with the bees playing music while one other bee likes playing remixes of the music which the others don’t like.
For homework I had watched videos on ball animation using Maya and how the times and frames work using graph editor.
In week 2 of 3D Narrative, we were introduced to the animation analysis like the basics plot and structure, story arcs, conflict and theme of the story.
We even went back to the original colour theory back in semester 1 and why they were important and more explanation on camera shots such as close ups and angles. Lighting, sound and editing was also important to create the mood of the movie whether it was serious or family friendly. Even sound had diegetic and non-diegetic meaning if the character was singing or speaking it is diegetic and if there was background music or a simple score heard it was non-diegetic.
Into week 2, I had been introduced to 3D modelling. Talks about the hard surface (poly modelling) and soft surface (sculpting) and what made them so different. I was told about the pipelines and the different shapes used to create an object from squares and cylinders. I also about topology and the loops it holds the flow of the shape.
Even in class I made a milkshake model in Maya during class.
For the homework challenge I had modelled roller skates, snake on branch and a sword using the references from blackboard and watched tutorial videos on blackboard and YouTube to aid me.
Using these links:
Tutorial modelling cartoon π shoes π in Autodesk Maya – YouTube
Stick Twig Maya Tutorial – YouTube
Starting semester 2, I had attended the course Animated Narratives for the first time and was introduced to my lecturers this semester and what we would be doing this year. For this week everyone was told of our first assignment which is a group presentation analysis on a short film.
I am in Group 2 with with Cloe, Ben, Orna and Joe doing our presentation on a short film called ‘Negative Space’.
At the start of semester 2 I was introduced to the software program Maya and what we will be doing this course with 3D modelling. I am new to this Maya software and making 3D models but it was interesting to see how 3D is made. This week my lecturers gave the class models to work on:
I tried adding colours and making the glass objects smooth as possible as it was only my first time using Maya and adding colours but it was an interesting experience using Maya and creating these objects from references.
Here is my final version of my Space Zoo animation, after finishing the rough animation and colouring. This is the opening scene to the Space Zoo project which features no music or sound effects.