December 23

3D Character Development – Reflection

This assignment was challenging but I enjoyed learning how to model a character. I enjoyed looking into Genndy Tartakovsky as his work was something I grew up watching. He has a very distinct and unique style, but it differs between the shows he has done and due to this I felt I struggled to stylise my own design. After researching more into Genndy I did see one thing he keeps consistent throughout, and that is big shapes and out of proportion styles. I tried to adapt my own designs to reflect this.

I found the modelling of the character body easy to do as I followed the class tutorials and tweaked them to suit the style of my character. The issues started when I began to create the clothing. The first issue I came across was that the duplicated torso I was using for the coat was also duplicating the mirror from the torso which I didn’t really want, however I was able to work with this and just continue on with the rest of the model. The next issue was when I started to seam and UV map, when selecting the edges for creating seams it was looping through a lot of the model and I didn’t want that as I was only wanting to mark seams on a selected section of a body part. My way around this was to select each edge individually, which ended up being very time consuming! Once I was happy with each components UV map, I started the process of getting each one into Substance and texturing it. I started with the moth body but found that when I had the texture applied and imported it back into blender that it was covering the whole model and not that specific part.  I continued with joining all the parts together, bar the prop and importing it into Substance Painter as a whole model UV map. After texturing in Substance I baked them and found that there was an issue with overlapping vertex/facing issues on the models wings. I ended up having to message into our discord to see if I could get some assistance in resolving this and managed to get a response that was accurate and therefore allowed me to get this issue resolved. I found that the finalising stages of this model where the most challenging but it seemed to stem from a lack of knowledge in the modelling stages that caused small mistakes within the model. I feel like this all comes down to a lack of knowledge and confidence in the software and as this was my first character model it was expected for it not to go smoothly. I feel like I need to spend more time on personal projects on Blender and watch Youtube tutorials to build up my confidence in using it.

Even with all these issues I’m happy with how the model turned out even with all the flaws it may have. I feel like this has been a big learning curve for me and that as time goes on I should grasp a better understanding of the software and start to become quicker in the processes, this will mean that I don’t get as stressed up to the deadline as all these issues have delayed getting the project complete in a comfortable timeframe.

 

 

December 23

Week Eleven – Posing the character and exporting to Sketchfab

I initially wanted to try and texture all the individual components of my model separately so firstly I focused on getting the coat seamed and UV mapped.

 

I used a face checker to make sure that the coat didn’t have any n-gons and that there was little to no triangles.

I then exported the UV map as an FBX and then imported it into Substance Painter. I started to look at getting a nice shiny look to the coat as it was going to have a “wet” look.

How To Style A Yellow Raincoat for Rainy Day | Whit WandersA Man Wearing a Yellow Raincoat Running on Wet Pavement · Free Stock PhotoWomen's Coats, Jackets & Waistcoats for sale | eBay | Yellow raincoat, Raincoat, Vinyl raincoat

I looked into different images of a yellow raincoat to get an idea for what kind of shine from the texture I was looking to achieve.

 

I then started to UV map the rest of the components of the model.

 

Once I had all my UV maps done I then started to texture. However, when I baked the mesh maps I realised something was seriously wrong with the wings of my character as I was getting blotches on the textures I had made. I did try searching on google but couldn’t find a resolution to this problem so I asked in our discord and thankfully got a really helpful response about how to check that the faces are the correct way.

When I checked my model I realised this was the culprit to my issue and spent quite a bit of time fixing it but eventually managed to get my model entire blue… which is what I wanted!

When I applied the armature to my model I realised that something wasn’t quite right as certain parts just were not moving the way they should be. Charlie in the class had been having the same issue so I was able to use the tutorial on YouTube that he did and rectify this.

 

 

 

 

I knew the pose I wanted my character to have but without learning weight painting it made it very difficult to move into the proper style I had envisioned. I improvised though and after playing around with it for quite some time I managed to move the arms into somewhat of the correct position.

 

I wanted the candle to glow in my scene but wasn’t too sure on how to carry over an emission setting. So I looked up a tutorial on YouTube on how to create emissions in Sketchfab itself and I found it very useful! I had issues with getting the candle texture to import as I was either able to get the eye textures or get the candle textures but not both. I worked for quite a few hours on this but unfortunately I just couldn’t resolve it myself. So, instead of the candle being textured in substance I just used blender colours to add a colour to it as I knew that I was going to add the emissions to the flame anyway and felt that it would work out okay.

 

Once in Sketchfab I looked into that Youtube tutorial however, I found that it doesn’t create and emissions as I had hoped. I played around with the Sketchfab editing settings and found a spot light, so I positioned this at the candle flame and played around with the softness, brightness and angle until I was happy.

When the character was in Sketchfab I noticed this flaw on the inside on the sleeve. I went into edit and scuplt mode on my model in Blender but was unable to work out how this had happened. Due to it being on the inside on the arm, and me not having any time left to rectify it, I felt like it would just have to do!

Upon uploading my Sketchfab model I rotated around to inspect it… I notice I’ve made a bit of an oopsie!  The hand holding the candle is the wrong way and the thumb should be point outwards. I tried to see if I’d a Blender file with the pose done without the armature joined, unfortunately, I didn’t!  Although this maybe isn’t too noticeable, it’s been another BIG learning curve for me, to make sure that I save my Blender file separately  before I apply the armature so that if I notice any small flaws they should be easier rectified. I’m annoyed at myself as I’m a bit of a perfectionist and this minor mistake is a lot bigger in my eyes now that I’ve noticed it!  We live and we learn… I move on this time!

And with that…. this horrible ordeal was over! A great learning curve for the future as almost every step I had issues that weren’t easily rectified (my inexperience likely didn’t help the matter)

But… “Protect the Light” is complete!

https://skfb.ly/oPnKP

December 23

Week Ten – Adding detail and baking normal maps

Once I had modelled all the individual parts of the character, I started to work on joining them together into one object.  I had the torso, waist/legs, hands and head all separate. Firstly I grabbed my edges and made sure they were level by doing “Shift+S”. I then joined the two parts I wanted to join together, after that I selected the edge on the free part and the main part and selected bridge edge loops. I had to do this a couple of times as I was some parts had more edges than others and this caused a few mistakes but I was able to resolve. I then made sure to go around the newly created faces and dissolve some edges to make sure I was working with quads and not triangles.

After modelling the characters body I started looking at modelling the clothing and adding the details to it.

 

 

My character was designed to wear a yellow raincoat so I duplicated the torso and then added solidify to it. Initially when creating the hood I used a sphere and cut loops for the moths ears, deleted the faces at the top and the bottom to create the hooded shape and then joined the hood and coat together by connecting edge loops. When in class and talking to Mike, he discussed about the triangles and n-gons in my model, so I spent a lot of class rectifying these and making sure that everything was made up of quads and as little triangles as possible. We also discussed how I created the hood and that if using a sphere I should have tilted the top faces forward and deleted off, or used a cube and applied a subdivision to round it off into a more spherical shape. When discussing this I realised that I had made the model more complicated by creating it as I had and therefore I deleted the hood and remodelled it as a cube with a subdivision. I did attempt to use multires on the coat to add in crease details, however I kept running into issues with this and no matter how much I tried to rectify them I was never able to resolve so I decided to just move on and proceed without using multires on this model. I will start looking into more tutorials and practice with using multires as its something that is completely new to me and I obviously don’t have the confidence to successfully apply it yet.

 

By doing this I reduced my use of triangles in the model and made the next processes easier.

When bridging the edge loops to the coat this time I came across another issue where there was a bulge that I couldn’t smooth.

I researched into what could cause this and found a blog that someone had made about having the same issue. This stated about interior flipped faces, so I used the “shift+n” and then tried to bridge edge loops again and this seemed to resolve the issue.

  

I spent time this week focusing on my UV maps and making sure I placed seams accordingly. I struggle with this process quite a lot so I made sure to allocate the time into making sure they were done to the best of my ability and understanding. When looking over some UV maps I had done I realised that the sleeves weren’t seamed enough and the UV map lost details in the texturing process so I made more seams and adjusted accordingly. I then joined all the parts together and created one UV map for texturing.

December 23

Week Nine – Constructing a humanoid character

Class Workshop

 

 

Coursework

 

When modelling my characters head I followed the class tutorial and due to this I decided to re-do it as I felt it was too human like and it was not the design I wanted.

 

On my second design, I really focused on making sure that I got the correct head shape before continuing on with the details on the face. I wanted to follow Genndy’s design within the facial features and create something that wasn’t fully proportional and more cartoon-like.

I found it fairly easy to follow along with the topology workshop and I understand the importance of using good topology in my models as this definitely helped further down the line when I was sculpting the face into expressions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 23

Week Eight – Blocking

I was absent from this week class and didn’t manage to get time to run through the class tutorial, however I did watch it whilst modelling my own character.

 

I started to finalise my ideas. I really liked the sketches I had done of moths so I focused on using that idea and tried a few different styles.

    

I drew out the pose I wanted my character to have and added colours so I had a fair idea to the colour palette I wanted to use when the time came to texture.

December 17

2D Animation Studio – My Development and Reflection

My Animation – A Brief Development

I did a character sheet for the Porg creature and looked into a rough sketchy style over a block colour. After doing this I realised I would have to take the rough sketchy look off as it would be too hard to animate the movements smoothly without a rough jarred look on the sketch lines. For my background I wanted to use very neutral natural colours and I looked into anime style backgrounds as I wanted to use a similar theme.  I designed everything in Procreate and for the grass I used pre-set stencils I had on the software.

I’ve been using Procreates animation mode to get the onion skins and be able to draw frame by frame and see how the movements look.

I kept the same style background in the scene with the main character but I wanted to add mountains into the background so that it made the world setting feel more complete. For the main character the design was created by Rebecca, so I focused on keeping all the features of that character but drew it in my style. I tried to use the similar shades and tones that the environment had in the character so that he wasn’t too out of place and standing out too much from the overall scene.

I looked into anime styles for my backgrounds and watched a few tutorials on the techniques of drawing rocks and clouds and this is something a didn’t have much skill in. I found these tutorials very useful and was able to apply my own style to the techniques to make them fit into my scenes. I used Whimsical to create quite a few reference mood boards looking into perspectives and lighting. I know with anime styles they can sometimes be a bit flat in their shading and its mainly created using block colour. I wanted to keep that anime style with a touch of realism so looked at photography scenes as well as hand drawn artworks.

Using After Effects I am able to retain layers which is very important to me in getting the details right on my backgrounds and allowing me to add subtle movement to make them feel less stagnant.

 

I had to re-do the storyboard due to getting the extra scene at the beginning of mine to get the main character to fall into the starting position of my initial storyline.

 

Reflection:

I have found this class easy enough to manage, the only thing that I didn’t quite like was focusing on worlds at the beginning and moving teams. I felt this stumped me a bit in wanting to put my all into each task at the start due to knowing I was going to be moving groups and this wasn’t going to be used in my final animation development. I think if we had of been in the same group from the start I would have been able to apply myself each week and develop everything more to have a better animation. I find that the timeframe I was left with in my final team/world was limiting my ability to fully develop my creative ideas in my animation. I had to go back to our previous tasks and re-do my character designs, storyboards etc to fit the new theme of the world of my group. This took up valuable time I could have been using to start applying to my animatic and cleaning up the animation. I did find this all quite stressful but I was persistent and I managed to get everything done that was required. I do feel my animation isn’t as smooth as it could be but that was due to not having enough time to really perfect the smoothness of each movement but I am still happy with what I was able to achieve in the time limit I was given. I was given additional things to animate the week after we pitched our Animatic to Aodhan as Sophie in my group had too much to animate and she was to animate our main guy falling so he arrived in my channel having already fallen. So I ended up having to animate the main character coming into my channel standing up scared, and falling to the ground as I had already animated from that point and would have had to redo the entire animation if he didn’t fall.

I feel like this class has allowed me to develop my skills in working as a team and planning an animation as a team. It was nice to build an animation in a group as we had loads of different views and ideas inputted. Although having animating experience, I have found this topic quite difficult and definitely felt a little out of my depth. The animating and processes was easy enough but I have struggled with trying to independently learn outside of class, manage my time and be prepared overall for the deadline. I definitely feel like due to swaying more into realism that I try to perfect my art too much and this ends up being time consuming and leaving me more limited on being able to animate more intimately and thoroughly. I need to focus more on simplifying down my art style and building a better understanding of frame by frame animating, because as I become more experienced in this I will be able to do it quicker and therefore allocate more time to the details within my artwork.

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 17

Week Ten – Line Clean up and Colouring

This weeks class was done remotely at home due to a public transport strike. The exercise was to use the flour sack animation we had done in the previous week and clean up the sketch lines and colour it. This was an easy enough task to complete.

In the afternoon we went into a voice chat on discord with our teams and Aodhan joined us to watch our animatic and give us feedback. On my part it was fairly good, the only critique was on the scene with the Porg creature I had drawn the rock over most of the scene and the Porg appearing to the left, Aodhan said it would be better to move the Porg creature into a central position on the screen. This would be easily rectified.

Our homework was to just focus on cleaning up our animations and starting to finalise it all to be ready for the hand-in deadline.

 

December 17

Week Nine – Animatic

For class this week we looked at using After Effects to set up a scene and animate it. I have used After Effects in the past and I found this exercise easy to follow and understand.

I was easily able to layer the images correctly and get the movement timing and speed set. I then pre-composed each scene when I was finished.

 

For homework we were tasked to create our own animatics and input sounds.

I wasn’t able to access After Effects from home so I actually put my animatic together in Cap-Cut and used the sounds on there. These are not the sounds I will use for the final animation but were just a basic generic sound that I was wanting to happen at each part of the animation.

We were also asked to piece all our animatics into one, so Charlie in our group offered to put it all together in the right order as one animatic.

 

December 16

Week Eight – Storyboarding

 

For the class this week we looked into animating forms and storyboards. For the workshop we looked at animating the jump of a flour sack.

I first did a rough sketch of how the sack would move and squash/stretch.

I then went in and looked at the sack tassles at the top and bottom and how they would move with the sack in motion.

I didn’t struggle too much with this exercise, the main bit was getting the sack twisting correctly before it launched itself into a jump.

After doing this exercise we looked into storyboarding a set described scene but we had to animated the scenes as we felt appropriate.

This exercise was fun to do and I learnt how to express a still image of a character with poses within the scene. I found it hard to show emotion through the flour sack as it has no face to show expression on. However, I felt like through the flour sack poses I portrayed very well the expressiveness of each scene.

For homework we were to look at storyboarding our own animations. Due to moving into my new team we had discussed about the storyline to our plot in the previous week and came up with the idea of each individual member animating their own TV show in their own style and a main character being glitched between our channels. I chose to base my channel off a star wars theme, but was unsure what exact storyline I wanted to go with. We discussed in our group about how we wanted our timeline to go and where we wanted to be placed in it. Our group now consists of Rebecca, Karl, Sophie, Charlie, Kennie and myself.

My initial idea was to do two Jedi in a lightsaber battle, when our main character glitches in he sees a void coming towards him so he gets up and runs through the lightsaber battle. This causes shock and confusion in the two Jedi, and they stop and watch the main character run on and glitch, eventually glitching to the next scene. The two Jedi then look around to see the void the main character was running from and they turn and run away from it only to be eventually consumed. The animation would then cut to the next members channel.

 

When I started to plan my animation and getting it finished within the timeframe given, I decided I had overloaded myself with too much to do and animate to the standard I would want in that given timeframe. Therefore, keeping within the theme of star wars I replanned the story of my animation to allow me to make it smoother and of a higher standard.

This storyline would show the main character glitching into a scene, dazed and confused, he would look around and spot a creature. The scene would cut to the creature looking at the main character in confusion. It would then cut back to the main character, who is terrified on the creature and starts to scream, cutting back to the character again which also begins to scream. The scene will finally cut back to the main character who is still lying there, screaming, he starts beginning to glitch and he glitches so much he disappears into the next persons channel.

 

 

December 16

Week Seven – Animation – Bouncing Ball

In week six we presented a pitch of our worlds to the class and then afterwards we were allowed to choose what world group we wanted to work with for the final animation. I chose to move into the TV-Multiverse world as I really liked the concept of porting a character between tv channels.

 

This week class exercise was focused on the 12 Principles of animating. We looked at timing and spacing and how this changes the animation flow.

For the first workshop we looked at animating a ball. We were doing the class workshop in Krita but as I’ve never used the software before and felt more comfortable working off my iPad, I asked could we use other softwares and got confirmation we could. Therefore, I used the animation feature in Procreate to do the frame by frame animation of the bouncing ball.

For the second animation we can to create a side profile of the ball and home gravity effects it as it continues to fall. I did this animation in 12fps.

As I had come from studying animation in college, I found this exercise extremely easy and I knew to add the squash and stretch to the ball to create the smooth bouncing to the animation. I create this with 24fps but usually work in 12fps depending on how i want the animation to feel with fluidity.