This week in the collaborative unit I came up with ideas for several of the models to use in the project. I knew that we needed toy models to represent the main character’s children. After some research on what toys were available in medieval Japan, I came to the conclusion that I would model a doll, kendama (cup and ball toy), and a spinning top. As these were all fairly simple models I could model, UV and texture them very quickly. During this process I also considered where and how I’d want to use these models, and in the collaborative call we had weekly we decided that we would have a scene of all the toys falling to the ground, followed by a closeup of the doll model being animated splattered by blood.

During this week’s work I searched techniques for creating a tree growth animation. Initially I tried to use Blender following an online tutorial, but I quickly found that the result was not something suitable for what I wanted to create. I found a third party software called “SpeedTree”, that allowed the user to build their own custom trees and then automatically “grow” them over time if the user wanted that as part of the exported file. I used the nodes inside SpeedTree to create a Japanese sakura tree, helping this process feel a lot more unique than if I had just grabbed one of the free preset trees.

I talked to my flatmate, Kame, who I had seen on Instagram and through talking in person had experience creating and painting masks. I thought that it would be interesting for him to create a mask for us that the main character in our project could then wear, and we could scan the object into a 3D space and light it with camera angles in a way that we wanted. Pictured below are the masks that Kame has created before that we noticed and were impressed by.