Pre-Production:
This assignment required me to work in a team to create a short animation. I worked for team four who was made up of Alex, Daniel, Nathan and myself. We had a lot of ideas at the start of this assignment and we wrote them all down using an online whiteboard called Miro which you can have a look at below:
https://miro.com/login/
After a day or two, my team and I all decided that the best idea on that board was the ‘Cute Animal Running Through A Graveyard.’ This concept was later changed to just ‘Cute Grave Yard’ and the cute animal was replaced with a wisp.
Although we now narrowed down what we wanted to create, we still needed to know more about what colour pallet we would use, if the graveyard was beside a castle or in a field, how light or dark the sky would be and so on. To combat this my team and I created a series of mood boards which became vital in how we would shape our animation. The mood boards I created can be found below:
A good place to start was finding what graveyards in real life and in interactive media looked like to get a good idea of the terrain, flora and fauna found in and around graveyards. The image above shows a good indicator of the terrain and plant-life:
Early on in the project, we hadn’t decided weather we wanted enemies or not. But we later scrapped the idea of an enemy and replaced it with a spooky tombstone.
At one point during this project, it was suggested that a castle be present in the animation to make it more immersive. This idea was sadly scrapped due to time constraints. However the above mood board was still used heavily as it helped up to choose a colour pallet of neon/misted origin.
Production And Modelling:
After we had determined what theme we wanted, what colour pallet would best suit our chosen theme and figured out what assets we needed, we all started to create our own models. I was responsible for the creation of the environment. I started this by first creating the ground, screenshots of this process can be found below:
As seen from the images above, I added spheres to the ground to give it a hillside look. But in my eyes and in my teams eyes this looked far too cartoon-ish and didn’t quite give off the realism levels me and my team wanted, so I went back and changed the ground using a different method. This method can be found below via screenshots:
Not only did I begin to shape the ground using Maya’s terrain tool, I also expanded the space around the graveyard which would later make for a better, more believable horizon line.
As seen from the images above, I made the ground look a lot smoother and more realistic. However the ground would change one more time after this. I did so by replacing Maya’s terrain indicators (The little S’s on the terrain.), with manipulated vertexes and faces. This was very easily achieved as all I needed to do was select the history of the terrain and delete all the history up to that point. The only difference with the new terrain was that the little S’s were all gone and I could separate the terrain more easily, which I did by turning one big cube into six smaller ones so I could rotate the terrain to make it look different from all angles:
After I was happy with how the terrain looked and that I could edit it more easily, I moved on to improve the walls and fencing found around the environment:
After I was happy with the look and shape of the walls, fencing and terrain, I added them all together to see what they would look like:
After showing the two screenshots above to my team, they were happy with how the environment looked. However I struggled greatly with adding the textures to the scene but my team helped me out a lot and made sure that everyone had a copy of the textured environment I had modeled so that we all had a scene to animate in. The final look of the environment can be found below:
A raw view of the environment showing the sky box, lighting and un-rendered but still present textures.
A rendered view of the environment showing how all textures looked. Everyone’s work can be seen in this image, from the environment I had created, to the props Nathan and Dan modeled and the cute character (The Wisp.), which everyone helped to created along with candle stick it sits on which was modeled y Alex.
Rendering:
I had a lot of issues with the rendering but still leaned a lot about how to complete the process. I ended up losing 30 frames half way through my render but was still able to save 65-70 frames. The reason the 30 frames became corrupted is likely due to the fact I forgot to select a specific folder when rendering out the second scene of my animation. So while 65-70 frames from the first and third scenes (As they were the smallest in frames and so the quickest and easier first two to render.) were successfully saved, 30 frames from the second scene ended up unusable as they were not put into a specific directory. But I have learned from this mistake and shall not make the same error in the future.
The image above shows how I rendered my scenes which was just simply selecting which frames needed to be rendered, i.e: 1 – 59 or 49 – 100. Then selecting the resolution and then pressing render sequence.
After all my frames were rendered, I took all those frames and put them into Photoshop. I converted every file to a quick P.N.G. and renamed every frame from ‘CuteGraveYardScene001’ to simply ‘Frame1’ and I did that for all 72 frames.
Portfolio/Self Reflection:
Overall I am happy with how me and my team handled this project. We were always in constant communication with each other and always knew what progress everyone had made. I am a bit disappointed in myself that I lost 30 frames during my render but I still managed to get 4 seconds of screen-time. The original plan was to have everyone do two scenes each, each scene lasting between 3 – 4 seconds. Which is 6 – 7 seconds per person which is between 24 – 28 total seconds of animation.
But I am a lot happier to say that I rendered and completed 4 seconds of animation than none at all. I am very happy to have went through this assignment as I learned so much about Maya and vastly improved my team work skills, which is something I’ve been working on all throughout first year. The first time I worked in a team in first year was all the way back on the 2D animation assignment where I worked with Chloe, Rory and Tish to create an animation about Animal Hybrids, back then I was unorganized and was not in constant contact with my team. I still completed the 2D assignment but could have done it in a much more efficient way.
But with this assignment I have seen good improvements with my team working skills and have thoroughly enjoyed first year.
My part of the animation and the final animation can be found below:
My part of the animation:
The Final Animation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huNHL8pcryY&ab_channel=AlmsAni