Final Major Project

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Week 1

To begin with for my final major project I wanted to tie in my dissertation with my project. As I had previously created a planar 2D animation in Maya for the preceding unit, I decided that investigating the merging of different animation styles could be a good starting point – combining multiple different stylistic characters into one cohesive project. There have been several pieces of recent animation media that I enjoyed that utilised this practise such as “Into The Spiderverse”, “Klaus”, and “Chainsaw Man” that inspired the project.

Later, I decided that the project would probably be a bit too much work, so I started looking for other sources of inspiration for a project. As I have already written an essay looking into stop-motion, I considered it an interesting prospect to create a project with some relation to stop-motion in a 3D based workflow. I settled on framerate, as I feel like that is one of the key features of stop-motion animation, setting it apart from other animated mediums. I thought that I could use different frame rates in my project, similar to “Into the Spiderverse”, using the frame rate changing to portray how a character feels or how good they are at something.

I also thought that skateboarding would be a good way to show this – showing skateboarding at different framerates to show different mastery levels. I decided to then write a storyboard with a basic story idea which slowly evolved over a couple iterations.

Week 2

During this week I considered what I would want the characters to look like and whether I wanted to create my own characters and rigs or use premade ones. I decided that I would rather use someone else’s rig – though I can rig characters, I cannot rig to the same standard that a professional rigger can and this can make the animation worse as I previously found on another project I made, the rig would sometimes deform strangely and there was little I could do to fix it.

Also, this meant that I would have more time for animation, which I thought was useful as the job that I would like in the future is in character animation, not rigging. Therefore, I didn’t think rigging was a good use of my time as though it could make my character more visually different and interesting than a fairly basic rig character that many people have access to, it would not be a good idea when the idea of my project is partly to showcase animation ability.

I began searching for good rigs, and found the David rig made by Gabriel Salas. I had tried a few different rigs before this one, but found this rig most suitable and nice to use and animate with, with good functionality and a lot of potential for expression.

Week 3

I decided to begin thinking about the environment and what I could use for this. Obviously it would be set in a skate park, but there are a lot of different types. Often skate parks are either indoor skateparks that are paid to go to, or outdoor skate parks that are free. Due to the story having the main character go to the skatepark late in the evening when an indoor park might not be open, I chose to use an outdoor skatepark. Skate parks are associated with suburban areas usually – though cities obviously have skate parks too I tend to in my head associate them with the suburbs.

I found an HDRI that I applied to a skydome that had an appropriate park setting that could realistically fit my skating project – the park has several buildings nearby and other park features, so it fits well with the project environment.

I also had to decide here what kind of objects I’d like in my skatepark. I decided to make the skatepark a square as I felt this was easier to build around and allowed for me to add different models modularly. The main model was the half pipe ramp that the main character spends a lot of time on, but I researched other skatepark objects such as ramps, bowls, rails, etc.

Week 4

I started the modelling environment process – with multiple ramps and reference images of different skateparks. I tried a few different iterations of my skate park, some with bowls, rails, ramps, etc in different areas but eventually settled on a more simplified design. I modelled the environment props in Maya as well as UV unwrapping them, and textured them using Substance Painter. For the graffiti on the ramps I used an AI image generator that works off prompts, inputting existing graffiti style images and giving the generator prompts of what I wanted the graffiti to include (such as the mouse and the elephant on the ramp).

Week 5

I was considering using Unreal Engine to render my project, as I had thought this might be a better way to quickly render in higher quality given the limitations I have of only being able to render on my own machine. However, when I followed a tutorial to export my animations from Maya to Unreal, I found issues that would break the rig for some reason. Therefore, I just decided that I would use Arnold as my renderer and render at 720p instead of 1080p to allow myself enough time for rendering. I began texturing the ramps and other objects in substance. I used Dream.ai to AI generate graffiti style art that I applied to my ramps, to avoid copyrighted material as well as gaining some control over the aesthetic of the art and the content (for example the animals generated below).

Week 6

For the skateboard I decided I wanted to model and rig my own model as the available resources online did not have what I wanted – they didn’t seem suitable for my project. Therefore I modelled the skateboard in Maya and textured it in Substance, then followed a YouTube tutorial to rig the wheels to turn with the main body movement of the skateboard.

Week 7

I needed another rig for my child character in the project, so I found some initially on ProRigs.com. Unfortunately they were only useable on Maya 2020 and previous versions and my project was on Maya 2022, so I used a different rig called the Kayla rig that I found on Gumroad. I modelled a skate helmet for this character to make it more suitable for the project and parented it to the rig.

Week 8

I began positioning my cameras for each shot that I would make and considering where I would place my character in each shot. I animated the cameras that would have movement though this was not many – most of my shots were stationary.

Week 9

This week I was collecting references. I filmed several of the references myself for closeup body movements and emotions as I felt this was the best way to get the right reference for the camera angles I wanted and specific sequences I wanted to animate. For the skateboarding scenes I mostly used YouTube tutorials for learning to skate, including videos on dropping in off ramps, a failed drop in, and a kickflip. Converting these sequences from YouTube into image sequences and retiming them to 24fps allowed me to import the videos into Maya as image sequences that would play along with my animated rigs, and I could half screen my Maya viewport with half the screen being the reference, and half being the scene I was working on. This allowed for me to easily find the key poses of each shot and pose my character based on reference, giving me 90% of the positioning and timings for each shot, with the last 10% involving me tweaking the graph editor and slight timing and positioning adjustments to make the animations closer to what I had in mind.

Week 10

I started animating the scenes, blocking out larger movements with the COG controller initially and slowly focusing on more of the different body parts like the arms and legs. I tried to focus on the more important movements first such as the areas where the characters skated around, as I wanted to make sure these were animated smoothly.

Week 11

I tweaked the graph editor to fix the areas that were off, and fix any parts of the animation curve that were incorrect. This week was also useful to retime my animation to look more realistic, as some parts were too slow. Using reference helped to fix any animations that looked like they were the wrong speed.

Week 12

During this week I polished the final touches to the animations, and made sure that they were to a standard that I was happy with (though due to some time limitations I would’ve preferred to add more smaller secondary animations such as more advanced finger movement). I also added some effects to the cameras in this week such as setting the depth of field, creating measure objects to keep the focus of the camera as the distance between the camera and the focus object.

Week 13

I began this week by setting up render settings – making sure that I had the Optix Denoiser on and working for each shot. I decided to render at 720p due to time constraints (1080p would have been ideal but also would’ve taken too long). Some of the shots were rendered in 12 and 16 fps compared to the usual 24fps as this was a large part of my visual aesthetic (to have lower frame rates in parts of the animation).

Week 14

I started the video editing process, importing my footage as image sequences and interpreting them at 24 frames per second. As some of the footage was rendered at different frame rates (with some at 12, some at 16 and some at 24), when placing the image sequences into Premiere Pro, they needed to have their speed/duration edited. The 12 fps image sequences were at a multiplier of 200%, 16 fps at 150% and 24 at the standard 100%. Some interpolation was added by default in Premiere Pro, though I didn’t feel like this detracted anything from the project. I also created a title sequence and credits during this week, finding a tutorial on how to make text jitter on YouTube.

Week 15

In the final week I began adding sound effects and music to my animation. I used free sound websites to find my audio, and browsed music on the free stock music page. I needed to adjust several of the audio clips to play at the right volume compared to the music and other audio, and tried to roughly match the music to the timings of the animation. I adjusted some other settings on the audio too to match other clips such as pitch for some of the vocal sound effects.

I then rendered out my project as an MP4 and finished my work.

Project 2 – Hot Dogs

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Week 1

To begin this project I started later than the other project so I had less time to come up with an idea. I wanted this project to be shorter but less “standard” as a 3D project, meaning if I had to animate for less time then I would be able to be more experimental in my project than the other one. I began searching online for interesting 3D animation techniques, using Youtube, Reddit, Artstation, Instagram, etc for ideas.

Week 2

Online I found several videos (mostly using Blender) of experimental 3D effects that I could potentially use. I thought that building my project from a new technique that I had learned could be interesting – applying the technique to a theme that interested me. For example, the nanotech effect below being used in a project about environmental changes – reversing the effect to show models being slowly disintegrated that could represent the damage done to our eco-system. However, I didn’t think that I had a good enough idea to do this justice – there is often so much work that is relating to environmental issues that I feel that it isn’t worth creating something in that subject area unless you can make it especially poignant. I also thought that the fish animation could be interesting to use metaphorically, with multiple fish representing something else. However, I also didn’t think there was a good enough idea to use this, so I moved on and searched elsewhere.

Week 3

I had heard of a technique called the toon shader in Arnold and thought that you could get a nice looking effect with this that looks a lot different from the standard 3D animated look, giving more of a cartoony almost 2D look.

I tried to follow this tutorial with a test character model (not one that I had made), but was unable to get an effect that I liked with it. Therefore I decided that I would probably not be able to create a project in this style properly – it could potentially be a lot of time spent fixing bugs, and committing time to already create a character model and rig before I even knew if the project would work. Therefore I decided not to use this technique.

Week 4

In week 4 I began my actual creating work (I spend a lot of time trying to come up with good ideas which often allows less time for actual work. I decided that I would like to make something similar to this video, though due to how I had time constraints now that I would probably have to make something that didn’t deviate much from the basic tutorials. I thought that this kind of character fits a more comedic, childish themed project, so began thinking of ideas of what I could have happen.

Week 5

I began creating the character and rigging him, mostly keeping the same style as the video. I did deviate slightly, and went through different styles, sort of designing the character on-the go and thinking about how I could use him.

After a while I thought that I could use this character as a sausage, because this could lead to some interesting conflicts and stories.

I changed him to more red all over so he was more recognisable as a sausage.

I quickly animated a run cycle to make sure that the rig worked correctly and he would look fine when animated.

Week 6

This week I thought of a story to put the hot dog man in. The obvious one that sticks out is that he is going to be barbecued and he wants to prevent this somehow. Therefore I came up with an idea to have him run away from his fate of being barbecued, using different table top items as an obstacle course. During this time I also thought that mostly hotdogs come in packs of 6, so I could create 5 other hotdog characters with different textures that could add some visual interest to the project. I drafted a quick storyboard.

I textured a few different “characters” with defining characteristics. The frozen hotdog is shivering and cold, the smoker hotdog is slightly cooked, the old hotdog is discoloured from age and asleep, the angry hotdog is a more aggressive red, the distressed hotdog is pale from anxiety, and the protagonist hotdog is just standard.

These designs are also useful for storytelling – there are reasons why only the protagonist hotdog escapes. The angry hotdog is taken by the humans, the frozen hotdog is too cold to do anything but shiver, the old hotdog is asleep, the smoker hotdog is apathetic and technically slowly cooking himself anyway, the distressed hotdog is too overwhelmed to escape.

Week 7

I created the environment for this week – due to everything being planar this was a fairly quick process and my overall theme is very simple in terms of colour scheme so mostly the only difficult parts were the benches and the barbecue, though even these were fairly fast.

For texturing this week I also decided to experiment with different shaders – in my other projects I always used AiStandard Surface shaders for 3D models, but this creates a lot of shadows and effects I didn’t want for this 2D-like animation. Therefore, I experimented using surface shader materials as well as some lambert materials. As transparency does not seem to work on surface shader materials, I used lambert materials for glass objects. The surface shader is better for the style I was going for as it allows for two of the same colour objects to merge when passed over one another, as opposed to looking like a different shade for the “double thickness” version.

Week 8

In this week I began animating my characters to move. I decided to give all the characters idle animations that matched how they looked and their archetypes so as an example I animated the smoker character on 60 frames so that I could loop his animations over z longer time period until the “action” of the scene happens, when the angry hotdog gets taken away. Then once this hotdog gets taken away the other hotdogs react such as the sad hotdog rocking back and forth faster than he was previously, to show that he is now more stressed. After this, the main protagonist hotdog begins to act, leaping out of the jar by first leaping against the side of the jar, and then rolling onto the table on his way to safety. I continued to animate the main protagonist hotdog running away until eventually he jumps off the table into a waiting dogs mouth.

Week 9

I composited during this weeks work, rendering all the scenes that I had created and putting them together in adobe premiere pro and began the process of post-processing. For this I started by putting the image sequences in, then recording suitable audio with some different voices. I decided I would use sims-like audio with almost understandable language but not quite realistic audio – for example having the sad hotdog have quite distorted crying noises. I wanted a fairly cartoonish feel for the animation so I didn’t mind using sound effects that are more stylised – like the bouncing noise the hotdog makes when he jumps on the burger.

Wild West – Rigging

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I began the process of rigging my cowboy character, and I decided to use the advanced skeleton 5 tool instead of rigging from scratch to make the process faster. To prepare the model I followed the steps, grouping my geometry and deleting history. I merged the basic beneath areas of the body into one mesh, and kept accessories like the hat, belt, gun, etc. separate. Building the skeleton I ran into a few issues such as the gun making Maya crash, so I decided to just parent constrain it later. Once I had the skeleton in around the right place I built the skeleton and assigned weights automatically. I did a quick test of the rig, and adjusted the position of some of the joints such as in the hands and the elbows. I also added extra edge loops to the model in areas where there would be large amounts of deformation taking place – in the knees, elbows and fingers.

After this I started testing the rig, by rotating different controllers to make sure that it was deforming properly. It wasn’t that great, so I started flooding areas with 1.0 weight values, so that only one handle would affect that area. This did make it temporarily worse, but adjusting border edge loops of what I had already weight painted made it so that I could have nicer transitions from each weight painted areas. Moving the rig in all the ways it potentially would move in my animation was useful to make sure that all of the rig would deform properly and not break too much during my animation.

Eventually I was happy with this, and I started copying weight values onto the extra mesh shells on top of the base mesh, so that they would move with the rest of the mesh (for example the hat moving with the head, the boot spurs moving with the feet, the belt moving with the waist, etc.). This also required some fixing by flooding certain values to make sure that the accessories would not bend oddly when moving handles.

Wild West Project – Character Modelling

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The first thing I thought would be important would be to create a character model for my cowboy character and create the rest of the project around him and how he looked. I decided to work from an existing model so that I would have less work in not having to retopologise the character, and as long as I modified the character enough it would be ok.

I found the Ray rig online and saved the mesh as an obj, and then brought it into ZBrush to change the proportions as well as the face. I brought the model back and forth from Maya and ZBrush several times until I was happy with the proportions. Then I began modelling different props for the character, such as a gun, canteen, belt, etc.

I also began modelling the cactus model, and this was a very simple model to complete as it is so simple. To add spikes to the model

Project 1 – Wild West

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Week 1

To begin thinking of a project I started with thinking of themes that I liked and would be simple enough to pull off – in previous projects I have given myself too much scope and this leads to me trying to create a more interesting project, however the work itself suffers as I give myself too many challenges to complete by the deadline. I decided that I quite liked the Wild West theme and it is fairly easy to dissect – for example referencing popular elements that are found in Wild West themes such as gunslinging, certain camera shots, environment type, background objects (eg; cacti, tumbleweed, cattle) is fairly easy to replicate. However I haven’t seen too many Wild Western inspired short animated films that are light-hearted, so I thought that even though it is a more well-known and possibly more played-out theme, that I could create something fairly unique whilst not having the difficulties of establishing things to the audience, as most audiences will already be acquainted with the tropes that take place in Wild-Western media.

In the American 'Wild West', if a dispute was being settled by a duel, could the challenged party choose the weapons? - Quora

Week 2

To begin the draft for my storyboard, I initially had the idea of a man riding into a town, eventually coming across the sheriff, and the main interesting part of the story would be their duel. However, this didn’t seem very interesting to me and has very much already been done before a million times. I thought about changing the characters to make the story a bit more interesting, and instead decided to make it a living cactus that a cowboy would be duelling. Later, I continued to develop this and changed the environment at the suggestion of outside feedback to more of a wild-west plains design, instead of giving myself the extra work of modelling a whole town. During my research of different Western media, I came across “Rango”, a film with a Western theme that follows the story of a chameleon who becomes embroiled in a towns’ problem of a lack of water, the water being limited by the mayor. I thought that I could also use water as the conflict point in my story – two characters both need water and race each other to a limited supply of water (one of the characters being a cactus still and the other being a cowboy). Eventually they both reach the water after tripping each other up/preventing each other from getting to the water first, only to knock it over/find the water butt empty. If I have time I might make it begin raining after, showing that their battle was pointless, or maybe just have them look at each other and narrow their eyes, ready to duel each other.

Week 3

I began the process of modelling the cowboy, first I tried using a sculpt in ZBrush and retopologising it but I thought that this way would not be ideal as I have not got that much experience making good topology for animation.

Therefore I started again, using a base mesh to begin from and tweaking him inside of ZBrush and Maya, sending him back and forth until I got something close to what I wanted. I didn’t want him to be too complex, but have some visual interest, so I began making him a sort of Ace of Spades theme, with his backstory for the project that he had been kicked out of the nearest town for cheating at cards, and so he was looking for a water source after wandering the plains.

Adding props to him helped to develop him into a bit more of a unique looking character instead of a generic cowboy. I modelled a belt initially, to allow for more areas to include his “Spades” motif. After this, I decided to model gun as well as a water canteen that he could have attached to the belt, and a holster to hold the gun. I wanted the model to be fairly low poly for this project so I kept this in mind whilst modelling the props as well.

Week 4

I started modelling the cactus, first trying to be efficient by morphing my cowboy character into a cactus. However this looked pretty creepy and I quickly realised the cactus would not look normal with a morphed human face, and instead would be better to go entirely simplified. This modelling process was a lot simpler than for the cowboy as the cactus was just a simple cylinder with arms basically. I found a tutorial for simple stylized eye rigs after realising that a living cactus with human eyes looks very wrong and creepy. Instead, having black rectangles for eyes felt a lot more natural, and allowed for the cactus to not fall into uncanny valley.

I found a rig tutorial online for the eyes and rigged them to be able to deform into different shapes using set driven keys – for example he has blink, anger, sad, joy, water, spades, etc shapes for his eyes that can be animated quickly. I set this up using Set Driven Keys, using the Attribute editor and the connection editor to link the controls with the different shaped eye geometry.

Week 5

During this week I started working with a collaborator to create a rocky landscape. I also began modelling and texturing environmental props. Deciding that the characters would be wandering the desert looking for water made me think that a grand canyon type environment would be visually interesting and also funnel both characters towards each other, making the story more logical. I knew that I would need multiple scenes – one scene to get the characters interested in the water source, and then one scene of the water source itself. The first scene was intended to be a very open space that had a sign that motivates the characters to find the water source, heading down the narrower passage.

I also worked with my collaborator on the second scene, deciding that the space would be mostly open with the water source right in the middle, obviously as the main objective of both characters.

Week 6

I began the rigging process for both characters. I used Advanced Skeleton 5 for the cowboy character as I wanted the rig to be done more quickly, though I spent time to adjust the joint positioning and spent a lot more time after painting the weights so that the rig would deform correctly. For the cactus, I first attempted to rig him using the default Advanced Skeleton setup with some joints deleted, but realised this didn’t work and instead decided to manually rig him.

During this week I also textured several props for my project in Substance Painter, using stencils and smart materials mostly.

Week 7

I finalised the rigging process and textured both the main characters using Substance Painter. During this time I was able to make the cowboy character more visually interesting by making him have a set colour scheme as well as make his outfit more appealing by adding spade designs on his clothing. I used semi realistic texturing for the cactus as I could not think of a midway point between flat colour and ultra realistic textures – flat colour was too simple and boring but ultra realistic would look strange next to the stylised cowboy man.

Week 8

I began animating on this week. To begin with, I divided the scenes into the two different environments I would be using, and started playing with camera positioning and movements. I used two large cubes as placeholders and tweaked the cameras until it looked reasonably good.

After this I began working on the first character animation scenes of my project, with multiple establishing shots of the cowboy. I rendered these on the off times whilst I slept.

Week 9

I continued animating on this week. Animating the second half involved making decisions on how the cactus moved as well as how the overall story would resolve. I had less time than I thought and so had to cut some corners in my animation unfortunately, but I managed to get what I wanted done.

For this project I also wanted to add water, with the barrel of water spilling at the end of the animation. This would be quite experimental as I have not created water yet. I had looked at some particle systems before that can be used to create water such as RealFlow, Houdini, and BiFrost as well as Blender, but all of my attempts at following tutorials were met with failure – most of the time resulting in crashes, as my computer hardware I think is too outdated to process complex simulations.

Week 10

I began the post-processing in premiere pro, finding appropriate sound effects for the project that I thought fitted the theme. Similarly to my other project, this project has more of a light hearted comedic theme, so I chose sound effects that would contribute to this feeling. I cut some areas of the project out as they didn’t fit or could be streamlined more for the project to be more simplified.

Week 8: Advanced and Experimental Animation

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For this week we looked at different work from Lucas Zanotto, an artist who uses simple geometric models animated with fairly basic motion paths in a way in which he creates faces out of the simple models at parts of the animation. I like this style as he is able to create a very stylistically pleasing animation in spite of the simplicity of his overall videos.

We worked in class to recreate an animation similar to this. Using the animation graph editor was useful to ensure that different animated parts matched – for example animating the height curves of the eyes and the ball to match each other so when the ball dropped in height, the eyes dropped with them. Playing with how sharp the curves were on the Y axis was interesting to try and get a good balance of showing the ball dropping and “hopping” back up, trying to make it not look jarring whilst still showing that it was falling off and going back onto the cylinders on the floor. Playing with the rotation animation curve of the eyes was also useful to attempt to get an effect that the eyes would start rolling slowly and then when the ball hits the ground, the force makes the eyes roll even faster. In the future it would maybe be better to show the eyes impacted by this force even further, possibly bouncing off the surface of the sphere before landing again.

Week 7: Advanced and Experimental Animation

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For this week we presented our ideas for our experimental animation projects that we would be beginning to make. My presentation was on my Wild West themed project. It was useful to gain feedback for this project and think about ways I could better optimise the project. I modified my project idea, instead of it being a sheriff that the entering cowboy fights, I thought that a living cactus could make the project a lot more interesting and different, as well as giving me avenues to show off my skills in creating and animating the cactus character. The style would lean more towards comedic and light-hearted with this updated story, as I was intending on making more of a serious animation before.

Week 10: Collaborative Unit

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We finalised rendering and compositing everything together. I created a title sequence for the project at the end of it, using After Effects. I used the Saber Plugin to create the fire on the kanji, and generated the smoke using animated fractal noise with a red tint. For the sparks I used particles inside of After Effects to create the effect of rising sparks with the orange smoke. I also decided that I would need a translation for the kanji as most people do not read it. Therefore I created text with a screen wipe effect and timed it with particle effects dissipating away to make it look like the text was turned into smoke.

However, after this I received feedback from others that the bottom translated text didn’t really fit with the rest of the overall look of the title text. Therefore I remade the bottom text to make the overall look more uniform. I think that it makes the shot look a lot more cohesive overall and fits the project well.

During this week we also scanned in the model of my collaborative partner wearing the outfit with the mask that our collaborator made and painted. The scanning process was fairly easy as the technician did most of it for us, and sent us the models with textures attached (though I remade the texture with an AIstandard material and the colour map as the attached texture was a lambert).

I also lit and rendered the scanned model inside of Maya, trying several different lighting setups and camera angles. The model had some issues, with a few parts of the mesh having double thickness geometry, but this was not super noticeable. Ideally I would clean up the mesh and delete the extra parts, but with the time constraints I left the model as is. I wanted to light the model with a fairly dark scene with red highlights as I thought this would help to give more of a sinister feel to the render. I also wanted to keep some distance between the render and mask, as the scan for some parts of the model such as for the mask were not very high resolution so close-ups tend to look bad. Using lighting to hide imperfections in the model with the extra geometry looking like extra shadows was useful to effectively make the model look cleaner. I tried a few different camera angles and shots as shown below, and eventually used the third one.

I also lit and rendered this scene with a seated pose, and I wanted the figures face to be mostly in darkness to give mystery on who he is. I wanted the baby and the general outline of the father to be lit to show people what is happening (a man cradling a baby). However due to the baby not being a real baby and just a blanket, not getting it’s “face” in shot was a good idea. I tried several different lighting setups and camera angles as shown below for this shot too. I chose to use the third shot.

I also lit the axe scene buried in a wooden stump. I found the stump on Quixel Bridge and used the axe that was modelled by my collaborator. As this is meant to be in the first half of the project I wanted it to not be super dark or red, and instead be as if lit in evening or late afternoon. I also tested a few different lighting scenarios, with different camera angles.

The downloaded assets that I used were mostly from Quixel Bridge, and are listed below with screenshots of their download pages. All other models were created and textured by me and Antonio.

I also used the following HDRI’s:

Week 9: Collaborative Unit

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During this week we scanned in images of a model wearing Japanese attire including a hat and robes. We could use these as the only character in our project to show that the story is attached to a real person and isn’t completely abstract, whilst still mostly only having objects for the majority of the project.

During this week I also finalised the rendering of the Torii gate scene, to establish location in the project. I used a few different tests.

Although I don’t think there is anything wrong with the render, it was difficult to keep a cohesive theme around our project in terms of style as we have a variety of different shots – some greyscale, some low lit, some full environments etc. This can lead to the project feeling a bit less connected and potentially in the future it would be better to decide on a specific colour palette, lighting scenarios, camera angles etc to better keep the project connected. I tried a lot of different lighting setups for this scene, but settled on this one.

I also rendered the tree growth shots in this week.

I think that I could have spent more time here with different lighting shots, as well as potentially previously in SpeedTree I could’ve given the tree bark more detail and attempted to use flower objects for leaves instead of the default flowers. However with the time constraints I could not have time to experiment with this. The model could’ve also been subdivided to give a smoother model though I ran into issues as the model was an alembic cache.

During this week I also thought about how I wanted to create the title text. I decided I would create this in After Effects, as the industry standard software for creating work like this. I had a few ideas, mostly to use blood or fire effects to show the title. As we were not completely sure on the title of our project yet, I thought that I could potentially think of ideas. I thought that flames would be better eventually, as blood posed technical difficulties and was harder to make look good. The main story of the “show” would be of vengeance, but I thought that this would be fairly empty if the entire show was just the main character enacting revenge and that was it. Instead, I thought that the word “grief” was apt, as the grieving process is one that often changes and evolves over time, similar to how a character can evolve and change over time in TV series. I searched the kanji for this to really push the theme of Japan, and also I thought that the flaming symbols would look very impactful and leave an impression on the audience. I also thought that the symbols would need a translated element beneath. After this I continued to build an idea for the scene with different elements associated with flames and destruction such as red smoke and sparks. Below is a title I took some inspiration from.

Premium PSD | Cinematic title with fire text effect template

I also began to think about what effects would look good in our final compositing pass. I thought that having cherry blossom petals flying over the tree scene would make it feel a lot more dynamic and visually interesting than simply looking at a slightly swaying tree for 6 seconds.

I thought we should cut down some elements of the project, like making the doll blood splatter scene faster so that it is more impactful. I think potentially we could’ve used more short clips to be impactful in the second half of the project, as lots of media uses quickly sequenced changing imagery to push a feeling, especially of horror or negative events.

We met with our sound collaborators again this week with their draft. We eventually had to use this unfinished draft as they had joined our project late enough that it was quite difficult to get the animation to them on time, so they mostly had to create the audio without knowledge of what the final result would look like exactly – which must have been quite a difficult task for them. Nonetheless, I think that they did well to create something that fit the theme of our project with the little time that they had, though in the future it could possibly be refined a bit more.

Week 8: Collaborative Project

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During this week I did a lot of test rendering and tweaking lighting of scenes that were already created to adjust how they looked. Trying different lighting setups and camera angles to think about what mood was being achieved with the different shots.

I animated the tree being set on fire this week too. I tried several different methods for this, including Blender, Maya BiFrost and Maya fluids. In Blender I did not get the results I wanted, as the fire was emitting from all over the tree, making too much fire. I had similar difficulties when using Maya fluids, however I was able to overcome this by creating a density map for the fluid simulation, allowing me to control which areas of the tree would be emitting fire (this looked a lot more natural as realistic fire does not emit from all around the object it is burning, and is instead a bit less uniform and dense). Tweaking settings to change the look of the fire, especially in the shading area of the fluid was useful to achieve a fire look that I wanted.

After creating this, I built the scene with the tree a bit better with more visual interest and more objects to help to scene feel more natural and interesting. I tested different lighting setups for both scenes but eventually found the lighting I wanted – I wanted to have the first half of the animation more colourful and vibrant with the second half being a lot darker and less light, so I lit the scenes according to this.

I also further worked on my gate scene, and I thought that I should add some hanging banners or flags from the gate with animation. I had found a tutorial online for Blender where you could quickly make banners affected by wind, and although I wasn’t very familiar with Blender I was able to create this, with a little wind animation on planes with a temple banner texture applied to them. I exported this as an Alembic to Maya, and fixed the UV sets being incorrectly assigned.

I decided that an incense stick and burning it with smoke coming from the top would give more visual interest to the gravestone scene, and smoke helps to portray the overall fiery-burning theme of the second half of the project, representing destruction. First I needed to model an incense holder, which I chose a copper bowl for, as well as the incense stick. I modelled these fairly quickly and textured them as they are basic models.

To create the smoke I thought there would be four options for me – Blender, Houdini, Maya Bifrost and Maya fluids. Blender has the upside of having a lot of free online tutorials for beginners which was useful as I do not know Blender very well. However, I could not get the results that I wanted in Blender, and exporting them to work in Maya would also prove to be an issue. Houdini had a similar issue in my unfamiliarity with the software and lacking the knowledge in knowing how to export it, though I did find a very good tutorial (linked below).

I started using Maya BiFrost, attempting to follow tutorials roughly to get the kind of smoke that incense sticks normally emit, pictured below.

Burning Incense Stick with Smoke Stock Image - Image of abstract, blue: 169492069

However, Maya BiFrost seemed difficult to control and heavy on my computer, causing it to lag heavily. I gave up on BiFrost and instead tried using fluids. Initially I was not sure that I could replicate the above smoke and opted instead for more basic, less interesting smoke. This was not very good though and I eventually found a cigarette smoke preset in the BiFrost browser that with some tweaks looked fairly good. However, on export to the gravestone scene, there were issues in setting this up again and the smoke had to be scrapped altogether. Nonetheless, I thought it was interesting to think about how I could use fire and smoke simulations, especially as I had other experience this project with this on the burning tree.