CG Tool Kit 2017 n9715568

2. My original schedule was for the whole model to be complete but due to time constraints I couldn’t finish modeling the clothes but I did manage to make my first ever rig and sculpt for the first time. If I was to start again I think I had to be more realistic with the goals that I set out considering that I have never worked through this pipeline before but it was a good learning experience.

3. For the past couple of weeks I have been working in creating a character rig for a concept piece called ‘Zeal’.

My main goal was to make a good model over a good rig due to some problems with the IK rigging I tried making.

The model was sculpted in Zbrush which was a very different and difficult process in learning all the new hotkeys for the program.

Character Development: Rigging and Modeling Zeal

This week I trying to figure out how to model the clothes. So to test and experiment on the method of clothing modeling I started to block out some pants. I’m still fixing up the pants just to add more detail to them (seams, overlapping of materials and creases)

After blocking out the general shape of the pants by slowly con caving and molding the shape around the leg of the model. and then I just started making creases in areas where they are in the concept art. 

I did do some more face modeling like fixing certain muscles in the face and making ears for the character

This took me about 5 hours (face and pants modeling), The process will be quicker now that I know how I’m going to model the rest.

Week 11 I will be focusing on get the rest of the body done now that I know what process I will have to go through in order to get them done.

I have already blocked out most of the clothes in the following photos.

Now that I have blocked out most of the clothing I can immediately get into each component with out delay. 

This week I wanted to focus on learning how to use zbrush and molding a face for the rig 

I know I’m quite behind so I will have to change somethings to the schedule. I avoid any more set backs I’m going to avoid doing the little details like her bracelets and maybe some basic colouring. 

One of the problems that I had this week was that the mesh limbs wasn’t attaching properly to the joints so there were gaps being left behind. these gaps did pass over to the zbrush model but I think I can over those gaps with the clothing.

trying Zbrush for the first time I did find it a little annoying to get use to but what program isn’t. So I started forming the face this week on saturday and managed to get quite a lot of her face done

Though she isn’t finished I have gotten heaps of work done on her face. I knew that the face was going to be the more time consuming part but the face so far only took me around 3 hours to do. I will work on her face later during the week to do some touch ups but I’m planing on working on the torso and the arms this week coming. 

So for the past couple of week I have been creating a simple geometric form of the character ‘Zeal’. it was going fine at first until it got to the rigging

this is the progression of the geometric figures. I was pretty proud with I was was making. 

when setting up the rig I was following the instructions given to the class.After getting the simple rig I started painting the weights of the joints. I wanted to see if the weight painting looked like on the rig so I when back and started to bend the elbow and noticed that they were off. The limbs looked more like noodles than arms. I wanted to get back into the weight painter but it wouldn’t allow me to do so. I decided to continue with what did paint but then when it got to the IK joints my rig started to break. I think that the reason why it was breaking so much was because of the incomplete weight painting.

I tried fixing it and redoing it but I was running out of time.

I need to move on to the modeling so I will have to go with the really easy rig (on the left) because I don’t have much time and I know I can use the rest of my time to make a good looking model. 

1. the second assignment requires me to choose out the of the 3 streams given. For assignment 2 I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do the character development or the asset development stream. I have had experience with building assets but I want to try and learn a new skill. I chose to go with the character development.

2. During the next plan on making a basic rig with a detailed model. I am using this character concept of Zeal by Monte Miller. I have no experience with making rigs but I want to learn how to at least make a basic rig. Though I will only be doing a basic rig, I plan to focus the rest of my time sculpting a detailed model for the basic rig. When building the model I plan on blocking all the main features of the model such as the body proportions, clothes, and hair. The little details are only real minor assets for the model and can be refined later on. I plan on using Zbrush to sculpt the model. I haven’t used Zbrush before but have sculpted in real life I think it will be similar. I will be watching tutorials in order for me to understand the program and to learn some handy skills.

I plan on using Youtube as my main source of tutorials but I have found some helpful things on Pinterest.

(the following links may contain nudity)

http://zbrushtuts.com/2015/12/18/making-of-kingdom-death-minis/

https://au.pinterest.com/pin/525373112771742994/

3. This is the schedule for the next 6 weeks, I plan to use most of the time modelling with only 2 weeks of rigging. I will get a second opinion on this schedule.

For the past few week I have been submitting milestones to show my understanding of the Unreal Engine and what I can do inside. During each milestone, I began to understand and learn about different uses for the Unreal engine. I have had very little experience with the engine and now I’ve only just realized how powerful the engine, even with the minor stuff that I learnt.

When it comes to my experiences with the Unreal engine, I’ve only learn how to assemble assets from Maya into a blueprint in Unreal and attach materials. I did really enjoy making lighting for the previous projects I’ve done, where I created some headlights for a truck model. With milestone 1a to 1c, I had to use a grey box that I have created from a list of concept art provided. Through that I was able to create an indoor lighting environment. I got to experiment with different colours, angles and lights I learnt that you can build so many different atmospheres with just a couple of lights. I learnt that lighting is an important aspect and takes a lot more planning than just putting lights everywhere. After lighting I imported a rig from Maya into Unreal. I used a plug-in called A.R.Tv1 from the Unreal store which could be used in Maya, making the animation easier to deal with in Maya than in the Unreal engine. I imported my animation easier from the Maya program into Unreal with our complications. I was intrigue to find out that you can still animate the rig in the Unreal engine even after animating it from Maya. Rendering out the footage was simple when I was told there was a timeline called sequencer that allowed to capture your animation through the camera tool, which wasn’t too surprising since it was to be expected to have a timeline. Before all that I learnt from the milestones, My understanding of the Unreal engine was that it was a program that only dealt with rendering out good quality environments and animations but from what I have been shown through the animation cg tool kit classes, it’s much more than that.

Assignment 1 was all preparation for the next task, which is too pick 1 of 3 stream roles. All the aspects of the milestones are based on these 3 stream roles; these roles are Visual development, Character development and Asset development. We were given some new concept art along with the old that correlate to each role. My interests sparked at the character and asset development options. The character development would be an interesting but challenging task since I have never rigged or sculpted a character before but the given concept of the girl character gave me that motivation to try something new. I was also interested in the asset development because I’ve enjoyed hand drawing texture through photoshop. There’s something so pleasing to see something that you’ve hand drawn from scratch look on an object and look really good, kind of makes you feel like you achieved something more wonderful than what it is. But thinking about my last assignment, with making a grey box, so I want to try something new for a change and do the character development.

This week we were to create a character and integrate it into unreal and do composition in after effects. From what I understand from the task was to use all of the techniques that we learnt from the past milestones and make an animation sequence using the grey box and the character.

I decided to make the animated character fit in with the grey box environment because I thought it would give it more character and clarity. The grey box that I created from my Virtual Environments class has lots of furniture assets, so I used the grey box assets to my advantage for this animation. The character is sitting at one of the tables in the grey box. She’s rests her head on her right arm propped on the table, but she slowly succumbs to sleep and loses her support. She quickly wakes up before her head collides with the table top. With the shock of the sudden awakening she loses balance on her chair and falls backwards in her chair. Animating this character took me and hour to complete.

After I animated my character I transferred over to the unreal engine to place her in the grey box environment, but before that I’m going to do some lighting experiments. I did 5 different lighting ideas with different angles and colours. My favourite lighting from the five would be 2 and 3. The way that the light hits the figure is quite dramatic and dynamic. I decided to render out the different lightings into a video sequence because I wanted to see how the animation effects the lighting. I rendered out a png sequence to later put into after effects to be turned into a video. I did have a couple of issues with unreal after rendering them out the sequence. The unreal engine kept crashing after the rendering was complete. Though this was minor it was kind of annoying to deal with. This took me around and hour to complete the set up and rendering of the experiment.

Going back to the grey box and the animation, I managed to play the character on one of the tables in the environment. I need to colour the environment according to the concept art, it won’t be identical to the concept art but close enough to get the base colours. The lighting in the in the grey box had too many lights and it was effecting the atmosphere. Colouring the environment and the adjusting of the light took me around 2 hours to complete. I rendered out the footage in 3 different render passes in png to then be processed into after effects.

Render passes

Experiment: Lighting

The experiment that I conducted was to see how different lightings and colours shine on an animated model. I based the lighting inspiration from both natural lighting (sunlight and moonlight) and artificial lighting (headlights, lamps and other electrics).

The first lighting was inspired by red light district multi-coloured light. I used a blue and red point light on either side of the models body to show contrast.

The second scene is inspired by the natural moon light shining down. I tried using just one spotlight point down on the model but underneath the model it was too dark so I use a soft point light to create rebound light.

The third lighting scene was a mixture of 3 different coloured lights. It’s got some natural sun light with other soft point lights on the left and back of the model, making the colours contrast against each other.

I used the same technique for the fourth scene to see what the colours would look like in the moonlight.

(top/sunset       -       bottom/nighttime)

Environment lighting set up

This week I was to animate a character introduction using a rig from the ARTv1 from unreal to Maya. Before even starting I had some complications with getting ARTv1 onto Maya. I followed the instructions laid out for us but it did seem to work, so I had to resort to finding another source to get the plugin to work. After looking around I found this video that helped me figure out what I did wrong and how to fix it ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBjmvs6180M ). After the problem was sorted out, I was easily able to make a rig for myself to animate.

The rigs, overall, are very flexible and easy to manipulate which made it easy to quickly make a model to animate. There are so many variations to make that I decided to experiment on different body types I could make using the customization options. I this process quite interesting and made 5 different body types, the bulky built male, the generic male, the child, the curvy woman and the fawn hybrid. the creation process took around 1-2 hours. For some reason when I made the rigs, the right arm and leg look invisible. I don’t know if it was the plugin itself or how it was installed on my computer, but when exporting it into unreal it was completely normal. another problem I dealt with was the ball joints not registering when I put the figure into a t-pose but I’m very sure its because I made the shoulders/elbows too small which didn’t fit the rigs skeleton properly anymore

The animation that I made was something simple but showed some kind of character. I wanted to. I thought this would be a nice little test to see how easy it is to animate the rig. I spent under 30 minutes animating the scene and was ready to render out the animation but I had trouble trying rendering out both the skeleton and the animation. I tried following the videos provided but they didn’t help me with exporting out a skeleton. I figured out that I had to go back and export the skeleton from the character creator editor and export that out into a FBX file. Exporting the animation was easier to do since I can just export it normally, I just had to make sure to tick the animation box in order to transfer the animation over. This took me 1-2 hours trying to figure out but at least I know how to do it properly.

The process of getting the animation into unreal was pretty easy after that, the only issue I had with unreal was remember how to do the sequencing again. It only took me a around 30 minutes to revise what I did last time. after rendering out a PNG sequence I decided to put it through After Effects so I can make slight adjustments.

Experimentation

This week I wanted to experiment the flexibility of the character creation plugin from unreal in Maya. I wanted to see how diverse the rigs can be by making different body shapes. The creation process is very easy to understand and was enjoyable to play around with. I drew up a couple of ideas as reference, they are quite generic but it’s a good way to see how easy it is for me to mould the model.

The bulky model was the most cartoony, with his out of proportioned body. Kind of interesting to see how easy it is to adjust different size proportions on each component of the body.  

I decided to toned down the cartoony style to a more realistic proportioned male, which isn’t too different from the default rig given.

The next model was to test out the different options to choose for the default rig. They give you give you a couple of options like the gender of the rig and even the style of legs, so you can create some interesting models. I went with the female option so see how different the model was from the male option and it really wasn’t that drastic. With a little bit of tweaking I attempted to make a average proportioned woman.

The last idea is in the form of a child. It doesn’t have that many differences from the default other than the height of the model. Just like the first model with the large body proportions I wanted to see those proportions scale down to the size of a child.

Reflection

At the start of this semester I had no Idea what I was getting myself in to. I didn’t realize that Animation: cg too kit and Virtual environments were connected in some way, it really helped take a load off me. This week I was to create a grey box with lighting and a recording sequence; which thankfully I made the grey box for my Virtual environment. The development of the grey box was quite tedious, especially since I used one of the interior designs from the given concepts. The room was quite hard to scale out properly but you can’t blame the concept artist. The grey box without furniture took me around 2-3 hours due to some complications with the hollowing and the shaping and resizing of the room, such as the curvature of some the architecture and furniture. I tried many things to make the curvature of the platform for upstairs but they didn’t look right and so I resulted in using the stair brush from the BSP to make the curves. Only to realize later that I could have made it easier for myself by making the shape in Maya and imported them into unreal, but it did the job non the less. I carried on with the rest of the furniture only to realize the room was too small and needed resizing again. The furniture was simpler to model and took me around 2 hours and most of the models I could duplicate.

Lighting along with recording sequence only took me around an hour with minor problems with recording.