Introduction
This is the third assignment for the Animation Narrative Module for the 1st Year Animation Course. In this assignment as a class we had to group ourselves into teams and create a 3D animation of around 15-30 seconds duration based on the theme of adventure. The final animation is to be uploaded at the end of the week ending Sunday 9th May. It will be accompanied by a Blog explaining my work throughout the task, a portfolio page with my pre-production and production side of the work, as well as a peer assessment form in which I review my team members and myself in relation to the project.
My team consisted of five people:
- Jordan Kearney
- Ben McCullough
- Cathair Kerrigan
- Darren Rafferty
- Rory E. Martin (me)
Pre-Production
As with all productions before we get into creating the environments and animating them in 3D we got ourselves into a discussion group to brainstorm the project with the parameters of the guidelines. Because we are still within the lockdown of the pandemic we used the Blackboard Video Meetings for class time and Discord for all communications. I will also mention here that along with Discord we would be using OneDrive Online to shore our work with the others in the group. This is because the Maya files and Substance Painter files would be too large to share using Discord Lite and e-mails. While we were coming up with ideas I suggested we used cute shapes in costumes as our character designs, even drawing up some rough sketches as how they would appear. The reasons I suggested this approach were because these models would give us a range of expressions and motions due to features such as floating eyebrows and malleable eye movement. This means we can achieve a good range of emotions without having to create more intimidating rigs with difficult to do features such as mouths and flowing hair styles. I also suggested the project be lighter in tone, with more child friendly designs and humour, as in our first assignment in this course we concentrated on darker themes and designs. This would demonstrate a greater range of designs and narrative creation within the group dynamic. These ideas were picked up by the team until we refined an idea for the finished animation, ie: a group of explorers racing to see who could get to a mysterious location first, similar to Indiana Jones movies. We further reviewed this idea, and after more discussion settled on another theme: which was a prison escape type scenario. This would be done tongue in cheek to generate some humorous aspects into the animation. Additionally we decided to cut the number of protagonists from a group of four down to one, as it would be both easier for the team in the short space of time allocated to the project and also be more coherent in terms of the story. After a few days of pre-production work the group included the concept rt, storyboards and animation ideas into a Powerpoint presentation that was delivered to the tutors and the other members of the class. This presentation went down quite well and as the tutors were satisfied with our work to date we then allocated out the roles within the group.
My Hand Drawings:
- Character Design
- Animation Physic test
- Pre-production storyboard
My Digital Concept Art
- Character Design
Colour Prison References and My half of the Powerpoint.
(My Side of the PowerPoint Assignments 3)
The Beach Model
Modelling
One thing I noticed about this year at university due to the pandemic, was that all teaching was necessarily carried out online, using Blackboard and Discord. While communication was working at most times, on other occasions it was difficult for the group to interact with each other. This was because various people operated at different times throughout the day dependent on their personal circumstances. This meant instead of handling a specific task like UVs I was tasked with completing the entire beach scene at the end of the short. With the help of one of the group, Cathair, I was able to find a tutorial and began in Blender to create the beach scene. At this point in time I knew most of Blender’s tools and thanks to learning how to set up a dual screen system on the computer I could make good progress within a limited timeframe. I even learned some new methods eg: warping to create the undulations of sand on beach which will come in useful for future projects.
However I began to run into problems as one of the shortcut commands n the tutorial no longer worked in Blender because of the difference in version from the tutorial to my version and I wasn’t as familiar with planting UVs in Blender as I was in Maya. Because I had already used the strengths of Blender i.e: organic modelling I saved the beach as an fbx file. and opened it in Maya. This enabled me to fix the boundaries of my beach so that there was a defined line between the sand and the water at the sides of the scene, making it easier to create materials for each of the objects. This assisted me in re-organising their individual UV maps.
UV Mapping
I did not have a problem with UV mapping due to the learning from my first assignment in the 3D literature mode. i.e: making a sword and shield. I would create a material type for each of the respective elements in the scene e.g: a binn material layer for plastic. Then I generated each UV as camera based, cutting a seam line through the models in the UV editor and then unfolded them so I could see all sides at the same time. Organising them all into one square of the UV editor before exporting the file as an fbx file. and importing it as a new Substance Painter project.
Substances Painter
Because of how I approached the UV layering in the Maya program Substance Painter proved much easier to work with, as I could paint on each texture by their individual elements without it showing up in areas of the model it was not meant to appear. For example, because sand was its own individual layer I could feely cover the entire beach with sand paint without it appearing n the leaves of the trees. The only problem I had with Substance Painter was I was missing a good colour for the ocean because the limited materials in the colour palette. I was able to get around this by using one of the other blue colours and adjusting its settings eg; using the fade option/control until I achieved the shade of blue I wanted. Once I had complete this the modelling for the beach was finished and I could move onto the animation.
Animating
Maya
I imported my beach model back into Maya and due to the way the programs work I had to export the model and substance painter textures separately and then reapply them within the program. Though this laborious, it was a simple operation as it was just like replacing the textured layers with their corresponding images. At this point in the project Cathair had finished the modelling a rigging the character for the scene and I could import it from him into my project. This let me create a table with a drink beside the character similar to someone on a beach holiday, using pre-existing materials to give them their colours. Another thing I could work on was the creation of a large square texture behind the scene as a skybox. Using a photo I took of the sky outside my house I imported it onto that texture giving the animation a realistic sky quality. After creating the light source I developed the camera tool and began to animate the project.
Animation in Maya works by creating key frames within the timeline and the computer then fills in the different actions between each of the frames making 3D animation a lot easier to work with than 2D animation. Because the previous assignment i.e: No2 was about animating a pre-made rig I could carry on the momentum from that task to assist me in animating this scene quickly and more effectively. I gave life to the character by making him take a drink from the glass beside him whilst pulling the camera back slowly from the subject. Initially I also had the sky moving, but upon reviewing it with my tutor and team we decided it was better static and did not move. The animation now being complete in Maya it was exported in to Premier Pro.
Premiere Pro
In Premiere Pro I added some elements that will enhance the animation. Importing some royalty free music to use as a background track, I also recorded myself drinking to be added into the scene. To end the animation I used the ‘fade to black’ method and finally the addition that was most time consuming to construct but satisfying was the Postcard Message fade in halfway through the animation. To finalise the project I tidied up all the elements of the animation before exporting the final result to my team members so that they could assemble the final cut. However, before the final cut was assembled, I got feedback to improve my video. These range from moving the stones, adding another tree and adjusting the textures colour value to be brighter. Then there was Arnold Render and it was a pain to fix.
The free music I used:
https://soundbible.com/2217-Heavy-Rain-Wind.html
Arnold Render
During the final days of the project one of my team members came back and asked me if I could render my 3D animations through Arnold in Maya. At first it seemed like a simple task however this turned out not to be the case, my first problem was that Arnold wasn’t even showing up in Maya, so I had to go and find a way to install it. Thanks to some help from both Alec and Cathair I was able to download the files and install them into Maya’s code. I thought that would be it but then problems started to show during the renders, some of my textures and lighting were not working at all, and some of the textures had way too much of a shine on them. I had to go through Substance Painter and add completely new texture types and layers to get around this problem it was a useful learning experience but still very frustrating. I also didn’t know which way to render this scene using Arnold but thanks to a youtube tutorial video I was able to render them out as individual images and merge them together into one video to replace the old copy in Premiere Pro. One final issue did come up apparently there was a texture in development for the man I was animating that I was not aware of. So three days before the end of the project it was brought to my attention I thought a first it was a straightforward fix of just replacing the old texture with the new one however it turned out that the man’s UV Shell was broken, he looked OK if he was just a single colour red, but when the Hawaiian shirt was added the UV’s become warped and flipped throughout the animation. Currently Cathair, Alec and myself are trying to fix this issue but if we can’t we shouldn’t worry as we have a good version of this scene already done. At this point in time we might have to stick with no clothes.
What I did Well
One thing I thought I did well was my individual part of the task as I was working on modelling the environment, texturing it, animating the character rig (except for the character model that was done by Cathair), rendering it out into a video format and adding post production effects like sounds, title text and transitions. This helped to show whilst sometimes I wasn’t a master of one skill I was a jack of all trades. I believe this showed that I was adaptable and able to do multiple tasks. I also enjoy working with 3D modelling and Substance Painter. I find 3D modelling more rewarding to work with as it develops more quickly without losing quality, this helps me feel like I am achieving something and getting the work done without over stressing myself.
Beach Animation
Bonus Animation (Guards in the Hallway)
Near the end of the project development timeline, I was ask by my team member Cathair that if I had some time could I complete the animation for the two guards in the Maya file for the hallway scene. I was happy to lend a hand. I imported the file from the team’s OneDrive and got to work. It took me a while to understand how the rigs work, but onces I did, It was no problem to animate them chasing the Ball. I also when ahead and gave them each a tweet of extra animation each to show off the different personality (for example, the right Guard looks angry with his eyebrows than the right). Once I was done and happy with the results, I saved the file and send it to Ben and Darren for texturing and lighting.
Hallway Animation
What I falter at (could be improved)
The biggest issue that hit me with the Pandemic was team coordination whilst we were able to talk to each team member during class times it had its problems. One of the biggest hurdles in the way was how only two of us (one of them being me) were using microphones on a regular basis, I know not everyone likes to talk on online classes and I myself have speech and language difficulties, but communicating only through text boxing can lead to issues like some people being left out or ignored. I also have Dyslexia and this leads to me to have slower reading and writing skills than other people. There were misunderstandings over particular tasks and I think that this was down to lack of communication and working remotely, I believe this will be improved when we are all physically in the same space and team working face to face. I was able to solve most problems I came across but some did elude me, for example one of my shortcut commands in Blender didn’t work but I was able to use the modelling tools to make a rough fix of that scenario, another problem I came into contact with was integrating Arnold Rendering into Maya but thanks to both Cathair and Alec I was able to work around in the code and get it installed. Perhaps one of the most irritating issues I have encountered is applying a texture to my pre-made animation because it turns out my models UV shells became broken, I am currently working with Cathair to fix this problem but if we can’t our character just being red will do fine.
Over the course of the summer I will be reading more 3D modelling and animation manuals to try to understand more about the processes and work around any technical problems that can pop up as well as practising how to do manual programming should shortcuts not work.
My Team
- (Jordan Kearney) -Jordan acted as our team leader and worked on storyboard and design revisions. Jordan also lent a hand with modelling and animating. Outside of a few discord messages and class time, we did not communicate a lot with each other. However, she keeps everyone inline and made sure none of us were falling behind. She also kept the projects scope from getting to big or out of hand and refined some of the more problematic areas of the overall animation.
- (Ben McCullough) -Ben worked on modelling and texturing for both characters and environments as well as animating. Ben and I did not interact much but his work on modelling was amazing. He did a fantastic job with the prison, making it colourful while keeping it as a building designed to keep people locked up. He also was great at keeping people up to date with his side of the work, even reporting on problems and delays like when his Computer crashed rendering a scene.
- (Cathair Kerrigan) – Cathair created the rigging system for the character modals. On top of that he also animated some of the scenes. He communicates and help me the most out of the team, which I am grateful for. It saves me time on figuring out my Arnold Render problems and making me feel like I was part of the team during production. He also helps others who needed his aid and work on rigging, the hardest tasks of the whole animation process. Not to mention representing the whole class when they needed a deadline pushed back.
- (Darren Rafferty) -Darren was assigned to work with the UV, texturing, and lighting for all scenes except for the beach scene. He also assisted with modelling for the prison environment as well. His work helped add more life to the scenes, especially with the lighting. We did not talk much due to a huge time gap between our communication. We also did butt heads a bit because of some late feedback and the fact that I wanted to do the postproduction work on my beach to ensure that I was of value to the team, but we worked things out.
Conclusion and Final Reflection
In conclusion, we were able to get the work done as a team. I was able to show the skills I had as well as develop more skills in those same areas especially for 3D Modelling and Animating. I’m also quite pleased with the quality of the final work and that my concept ideas for our characters being “shapes” with eyes and costumes made it into the results. We did run into our own individual problems but that was mostly down to communication issues, however whilst they did not stop us from completing the work overall, they might have affected the quality of some of our scenes. Ultimately, I enjoyed this semester, I have learned a lot such as organic modelling and using Substance Painter. I also found it nice to learn about sites like Sketchfab to show off my work and being able to communicate with my team outside of class times using Discord and Blackboard, I did have my issues, but they were never enough to bring down this year that has helped me to learn that I can overcome problems. My hope for the coming year is that we can all get together in the University itself.
Final Animation