This week we had an introductory workshop on the unreal engine, and in particular how to create particle effects. The main goal was to create a ‘health’ spawn point. Due to this, the first step was to create a cross within photoshop, that had a black background and a white foreground to mimic an alpha channel.
After this, we created a material that this x channel would be applied to, and from there we applied this material to an NB Particle system, which gave the appearance of ‘floating crosses’. We then manipulated different aspects of these such as the gravity and particle spawn to create a softer more inviting look (To engage potential players that is it safe to approach) and created a ‘glow’ effect in the material colour area to make them stand out.
NB Particle System
After this NB system is created, It can be linked to an NB particle emitter within unreal, and placed in the scene where it can be transformed and manipulated and potentially animated.
Progressing onto the next few months of work, below highlights the final major project I wish to produce. Within this, I really wish to explore the animated documentary genre and push for an aesthetic uniqueness that helps me shape and adopt a personal style that compliments my drawn works.
https://vimeo.com/725841618/066fdeca6d
Aesthetic Contrasts
During the development and production of my premise project, I explored two visual ideas that derived from different aesthetic inspirations, during the next few weeks I intend to merge my research into the two into one visual identity in which I can adapt the entire piece of work by. As stated earlier in my blog, there are mentions of virtual worlds such as video games within my recorded footage, which I will explore integrating within the film. This may include clips of recorded video game footage that are displayed through a modelled and rendered television screen within my documentary.
Within the next month, I aim to have completed all of my interviews so that I can start to adapt my work into its pre-production stage.
Today’s workshop covered the topic of staging and designing cinematic animation for action movies, and the task at hand was to block out key essential poses that highlight and push clarity in performance. Taking into account methods learned in previous animation workshops, I used silhouettes to truly clarify and understand if the pose is working in its most effective manner considering aspects such as limb visibility. It is important to be able to clearly identify each part of the body within a pose for the best and most effective audience understanding.
For this task, we blocked out a Deadpool rig coming towards the camera and swinging a sword for dramatic effect. We also had to ensure that the camera was animated, to assist in selling the action-charged shot, as the more dynamic it appears, the more successful it proves to be.
This week during we class, we learned how to utilise unity in order to create an Augmented Reality three-dimensional object appear via photo recognition.
The initial step requires using a website called Vuforia Engine (https://developer.vuforia.com/), finding an image online and saving the same image to a mobile device. Then log into the Vuforia engine and upload the chosen image with the correct aspect ratio and size for the device you intend to utilise with the AR camera.
The downloaded files from vuforia can then be imported into unity as a package, that can be attached to an AR camera as a database. This then displays the previously saved image in unity that a 3D object can be placed onto (I have created a cube), which then appears once the AR camera viewpoint is opened.
In this week’s workshop, we started expanding on the rigging from last week and began to skin weight joints to the mesh.
Skin Weighting in Blocks
The first step was to block the skin weighting to key sections of the mesh and use a flooding technique to feather out the weight at the edges in a way that is controlled, particularly by the vertices you select.
The fingers were the most tricky area to flood, because of the sheer amount of vertices and the distance between each other. The important aspect of this selecting the influence of the correct joint and then using this flooding technique (ensuring that the influence is low) to create a somewhat seamless crease between the different parts of the finger.
Skin Weighting in Blocks
One of the issues I encountered with this process early on was during the skin bind, I selected the hierarchy of the mesh in the incorrect order, which led to the following issues. In order to fix this, I deleted the skin binding history and started again selecting everything correctly.
Issues with Hierarchy selected in Skin Bind
Starting again, I decided to tackle the skin weighting within the fingers, as this proved to be the most ‘fiddly’ and vertex dense area to consider. The main thing that helped during this process was flooding the weighting 100% to their respective joint, and then selecting the vertices in the mesh that were added with the design of deformation. This is highlighted in our own hands in the areas where lines appear between the skeletal joints of our hands and fingers. By adding a slight percentage of flooding, the two areas blend into one another, creating less mesh collision. However it its a careful process as too little weight consideration can lead to volume inconsistencies upon rotation.
One of the trickier areas of skin weighting was the centre of the body, as the if the skin weigh is not somewhat evenly distributed between the different spinal joints, the deformation would appear blocky and entirely inaccurate to human anatomy.
Blocked Skin Weights
As seen below, I was initially having a few issues getting the chest/ armpit and stomach areas to rotate side to side without mesh collisions, and using the same technique as the fingers I was eventually able to create an even spread between the different joints, getting a more accurate skin weight than by painting it unevenly myself.
Following on from last week’s rigging session, in the lesson, Toby went over some rigs and gave constructive feedback which proved very useful in understanding the full implications of how the advanced skeleton plugin works. Some issues that arose when completing the rigging assignment were rotation axis issues in the fingers, so understanding that the rotation axis can be visualised to help directional alignment helped massively when achieving a more realistically moving advanced skeleton.
Rotation orientation
Animation Assignment: Pose to Pose Blocking
Starting this week’s assignment of creating a pose to pose block out between two key poses, I began to use plug-ins I was not previously hugely familiar with such as the tween machine. The Tween machine takes the key poses and creates an in-between that can be central or more influenced by either the latter or the former pose depending on the level selected.
Using Tween Machine to Pose the Character
A key element of the workshop that toby focused on was creating strong silhouettes in which the pose is clear with a good amount and well-controlled negative space. Taking this into consideration I wanted to ensure my beginning and end pose had clear and strong silhouettes in which the gun props were clearly outlined. This process helped me determine the strength of my poses going throughout the shot.
Silhouette
Another key element Toby mentioned was using editable motion trails to clearly track how clean and smooth your motion arcs are. Using these trails helped me understand and process how smooth my overall splined animation may appear. These motion trails can be reminiscent of the golden ratio in art theory that highlights a smooth perfect ‘shell’ shape that draws the viewer’s attention to a certain point. In some aspects, I attempted to recreate this ideal with the left hand and the gun to draw the viewer’s attention to it and the punisher rigs face towards the end of the shot.
Editable Motion TrailGolden Ratio Example
Finished Blocking
The overall blocking I feel has some good examples of arcs in the arms and upper body, however, may not have the same effect in the lower body. I also feel it could be retimed as it feels a bit slow and the weight distribution seems a bit off in certain areas. Receiving feedback for next Thursday’s session will help me understand exactly which improvements I could make and expand the shot in quality and overall movement.
Taking on applications involved in manual rigging, the importance of locators to allow for joint placement accuracy and rotation orientation is stressed. During the Process, locators are placed at key and central points of the rig so that when the joint placement takes place, the rotation is easier to aline in a cleaner and more efficient manner.
Placing Locators
When placing all of the locators in areas such as the hand, it is important that the rotation is accurate throughout all the hands and individual fingers so that it is clear which locator group is which and how the joint will align with the locator later on.
Placing and Rotating Locators Spatially
Once creating the joints it is important to line the joints up and rotate from the highest point in the joint hierarchy so that there is not any messy translation and rotation information that can cause containing and skin weighting issues later on in the rigging process.
Lining Joints up
After carefully placing each of the joints at the different locators on one half of the leg and upper body, it was important that the bend of the leg and the spine were considered, easily for IK placement in the leg later on so that it has a clear directional pivot.
Rotating and placing each of the skeletal joins into place in the fingers proved to be the trickiest part of this process as the hierarchal rotational alignment caused a lot of adjustment to get everything in order on each finger.
After completing the arm and the hand, I duplicated this on the YZ axis so that it would copy exactly to the left side of the body. While utilising the mirror joint options, I also changed the name of the copied joints to have L_ at the beginning of each join to distinguish the separate copy and keep the outliner clean and concise.
Initially, during duplication, I had an issue that would not allow me to safely mirror the copy over due to “too many arguments”, which after some research on the Autodesk website, clarified to me that there are too many selected joints to perform the mirror joint action. This meant that I had to select the beginning of the joint hierarchy, the clavicle, rather than each individual joint in the arm.
Following this week’s workshop in rigging, we talked through how to set up and use the advanced skeleton plug-in for Maya. The initial step is joint placement, which requires time to properly align each joint within the mesh as accurately as possible.
Assignment
Our assignment following this class was to apply the information learned in the advanced rigging workshop and applying it to a different rig. Taking the punisher rig, I followed the step process within the advanced skeleton plug-in and cleaned up the mesh in order to make it as even as possible, as that are the conditions that the skeleton functions best under.
Mesh CleanupControllers Size AdjustedError in Heatmap BindingGeodesic Voxel Applied
This week’s workshop detailed looking at and trying to remake ideas and techniques from the work of Lucca Zanotto, who creates simplistic looping animations that are effective in conveyance.
Following on from the useless box tutorial, this week we created a composite of the render and found sounds via free sound.org to create a comedically charged piece of work complete with sound. The main thing learned from this workshop was the ability to control and manipulate audio in post-production settings. For example, In the video below the introductory mechanic sound, is reversed towards the end to get an opening and closing ideal across audibly. I particularly wanted to cut off and create harsher sound effects, to convey a sense of violence within the character’s intentions.
