Submission Blog KNB221 2017

FINAL ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSION

If I were to go back and restart this assessment, the first thing I would do is choose another rig. Perhaps even choose another character option and make my own rig. I feel like that what I did with this piece shows that I am lazy and what I did I only belted out in a couple of days. If I were to make my own rig I believe that I would have taken more time and more care in how I presented it in the final production. If I were to go back to the start of this assignment without choosing another stream or a rig, I would have taken more care and done more research on how I wanted to present my dragon. I think that I would have researched more on movements of dragons in media like Game of Thrones and Merlin, and perhaps some 2D animated features to see how they do it differently. If I could start again I would do more research on movements of the legs, like was suggested to me, as well as the tails. I did very minimal research by only looking at how my cat moved.

I would use the Unreal Engine a lot more to test my animation, the timings and how I wanted everything to look. I would use Unreal a lot more to build a better greybox that would properly convey what I wanted to because as it stands right now it’s a disappointment to me. By using Unreal and Maya in conjunction, rather than just doing everything in Maya and then throwing it in I believe that I could have made a better final product and I know now for the future that this is what I must do to make sure everything runs smoothly.

I need to use Unreal a lot more, in general, to get used to the functions and the tools, and see what I can make it do with more than just a day, as was the case here as I didn’t stick to my week by week plan. I had issues with this as other subjects were creeping on me which forced me to put this on the back burner when I know how important it is to me to get this final result.

I do want to start again, and I was tempted to do so, but I know how much time it takes to animate, and I didn’t want to risk not being ready.

I am very disappointed in my animation as it stands. When I imported it into Unreal, the eyes (and I believe the mouth) didn’t smooth properly which left me with the strange floating things that I couldn’t get rid of. I looked in the Unreal editor, but I didn’t re-import the Alembic file because it has taken me a lot of time to be able to get it into Unreal in the first place. I was upset with this development, but I worked through it. It was my intention with the camera pass to be able to have those be hidden when the camera was moving, but as I animated the rig inside the Unreal Engine I realised that I had screwed myself by not testing the animation weeks beforehand. The flying sequence was far too short, compared to how it looked in Maya and I had to improvise to be able to get it to work properly.

My intention for the greybox was for it to be high up in the sky, a mountain with a big leg out into open air that the dragon would walk on. I was unable to do this properly with the tools I knew how to use, and I think using Unreal more would benefit me greatly, and if I had more time, which was my own fault, I believe that I could have produced the greybox that I had envisioned.

At one point with animating in Unreal, I noticed a major issue – I didn’t consider how the tail would move in the environment. The tail was my major, major issue with this rig. I didn’t know how to work the thing, how to make it move, how to let it do anything without it screwing the whole rig up and look useless. I should have realised earlier my issue with the tail and chosen a more simplistic rig that I could have done something so much better in. Again, my own fault, because I was silly enough to not plan ahead for this rig, and the final production.

I know that what I’ve done is nowhere near industry standard, and while I’m not happy with the final result, I did enjoy the pipeline – if only next time I could do it to a better, higher standard.

I’m happy with the final animation, in Maya (except for the tail) and if I had spent more time planning rather than go at it willy-nilly I think I could have done something so much better with smoother, cleaner animation.

Hopefully next time it’ll be a rig without a tail.

Rig is owned by Robert Campbell

Week 11 - Animation

Week 12 - Greyboxing and interpreting, maybe cutting down animation and changing timing.

Week 13 - Greyboxing, After Effects.

I don’t have any videos to show as of this update as I was afraid how long it would take to upload as the last playblast took a long time. Since the last update I’ve been able to add movements to the hip and the tail (although, the tail animation is god awful at this point and I will be removing it.)

I need to fix some of the animation with the walking. I have the foot lift and the step, but I need to add a different angle of the foot to make it look more realistic. I also need to change how the feet move while the dragon is flying.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble animating the tail. At this point of the animation I’m considering removing ALL animation that I have for the tail, and adding very little - perhaps using references from chicken with plungers on their tails, or dinosaurs (such as the ones on the P block boards at Garden’s Point) as the dinosaurs are similar to the dragons that I am imagining.

Week 10 - Animating

Week 11 - Animating

Week 12 - Greyboxing

Week 13 - Greyboxing and Rendering

I haven’t made any progress since the last update - the milestone. The since the first update I have a plan of what I want to do for my grey box, I have a blocked animation that needs very little tweaking to fix everything up. I had a rig that works in both Maya and Unreal, but I have yet to put the blocked animation into Unreal, which will be my next job.

I wanted to have something to show, and I didn’t have time to put anything into Unreal. I wanted to show my playblast of my full animation before I moved it into Unreal, where I will move the character around the grey box I plan on building,

For this, I spent about five straight hours animating it and tweaking it and I know that I need to tweak some positions of the rig to make everything smoother.

I really do enjoy this rig. Most of the movements feel very organic and there is little breaking the rig. Sometimes I have some trouble with the wing movement and more than once I did have the rig break with the wings. This was easy to fix. I believe that I will have trouble with the wings when fixing them to look more organic.

For my grey box, I’m going to make a cave and a cliff, which the dragon will fly around. I will need to build this next, and export this animation as it currently is to test timings and if the movements of the dragon look okay with the grey box. I’m unsure at this point if I will colour the grey box or leave it as it and only use the texture on the dragon.

Logbook

20/09/2017

8.55 am

I haven’t worked on this project in two weeks. I’m very ashamed of myself and I know that I’m going to have to cram to get the milestone done by Sunday.

10.29 am

Rigged flapping wings. Going to do some storyboarding tonight and have the images for the final. Will block the animations for

23/09/17

9.58 pm

https://youtu.be/_iMH8qyEEJw

Playblast of animation blocking done

RIG IS BEING USED UNDER THE MIT LICENSE

Logbook

30/08/17

10.30 am

Rig chosen, will be using pre-existing rig for final assessment

https://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/free-fox-rig-for-maya

Website had some other, very nice rigs.

31/08/17

1.16 pm

Some problems with downloading the .fbx file – contacted the staff of the website, and it was sorted very quickly

Fox rig downloaded, open in Maya, some issues with camera movement might be my own fault. Saved as an FBX to test in Unreal Engine to see if Alembic will be required for later animation

https://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/dragon-rig-for-maya-65689

might use dragon rig but will see how I go on time.

1.31 pm

Problem with import, unsure of cause

Happened again with another exported file. Alembic might be needed

1.37 pm

Issue appeared after exporting to Alembic – I didn’t follow the instructions properly on the how-to site, which may have caused this. Because of this error, it didn’t want to save as an alembic file. Tried again with following instructions this time.

7.45 pm

via GIPHY

Small animation test with dragon rig, very easy to use. Need to test the rid and animations in Maya – ask Trendt about adding animations because it’s different to the ART plugin?

7.50 pm

Cannot export dragon rig because of problem with nodes … see about getting that suggested program

7.56 pm

Nvidia Mental Ray is needed – paid version is $300 might have to use fox rig…

8.25 pm

Nvidia Mental Ray has a free trail, but doesn’t have a 2018 version that is compatible with the 2018 version of Maya. Downloading 2017 version to see if it will work with mental ray. This seems as though it’s too much effort for this dragon rig

Speaking of, the rotation in both the dragon and the fox rig is a little weird. Might have something to do with the focus point, ask about this.

Found another rig that I could use as a background character maybe … could be going too far with how complex I plan to make it. If dragon doesn’t work, then maybe fox and eagle

https://www.highend3d.com/maya/downloads/character-rigs/c/bald-eagle_rigg-for-maya

8.33 pm

Not related to the project, but I realise the because number of files that I’m getting I REALLY need to clean up my files … tomorrow

9.00 pm

Mental Ray installed, no issues like before.

9.12 pm

In the 2017 version of Maya, the rotation issue is fixed, and I can save the dragon rig as an FBX, played with the bones and the movements of the rig. Really liking how it’s moving.

Moving into unreal now, to see if it will export over properly.

9.14 pm

Same issue as the fox. Need to test alembic properly this time…

9.26 pm

I got further than I did before, with the importing, but when I tried to open then in unreal, I only got a small sphere, these errors and nothing else. It might be something that I’ve done. I don’t want to continue any more at this point in case I cannot use the rigs I want because if I have to change, the work that I would have put in will be all for null.

However, I am happy with what I’ve done so far for this project as I’m much further than I was this morning.

I hope to be able to use the dragon rig, but as I’m also having trouble with the fox rig, I may need to look for an Unreal ready rig perhaps. I hope not to, as the dragon rig is simple and I like how it moves.

I also need to check if the texture came with the rig itself. I believe that it did.

…I think that’s a jawbone … and eyes. It’s the fox rig, facing the ground in unreal

9.45 pm

Confirm     your chosen stream and brief

Describe     with text and images (or existing examples) of what you're going to do to     meet the brief

Based     on time estimates from the last assignment, roughly work out what you will     do each week (Week 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13) to achieve your objective

If     you have done any work towards your brief, state what you have done

Stuff for first stream. Stuff on this doc for #4 .., finish this tomorrow.

1/09/17

2.55 pm

Played with the dragon rig a little more. No animations done yet. I feel as though at this point the animation is going to take a long time. Unsure what I’m going to do for the greybox at this point.

3/09/17

4.28 pm

I didn’t finish the work like I said that I would. I need to do important things now, but I will leave it open and do it when I’m sitting down again. Today I modelled a book in Maya and I was really pleased with it. I need to ask about texturing and such because I don’t know how to do it in Maya.

4.54 pm

I’m going to start my tumblr post now. I don’t know what I’m going to do for the second point at this point, I’ll need to see as I’m working.

5/09/17

9.24 pm

I plan on using the Character Development stream. I’m going to use an existing rig to animate a highly polished shot.

I plan on having something similar to a POV at first, where the camera is sitting on the dragon rig’s head, then it will move to a third person position above the dragon’s head. It will pan around to the front of the dragon. I believe at this point I’m going to have the dragon stretching and moving. It will then take off and fly into the air.

Week 7 - Animation

Week 8 - Animation

Week 9 - Animation

Week 10 - Animation and Greyboxing in Unreal

Week 11 - Combining the rig and into the Unreal Greybox

Week 12 - same as week 11

Week 13 - Rendering and After Effects

At the time of editing this post, 5.33 pm, 3/09/17, The work that I have done, in another post, is not uploading properly. When/If it does, I will link it in this post.

I honestly didn’t follow what was in the video tutorials and by the time I was ready to render I was done with this project.  I did enjoy animating and I did for this, but when Maya crashed when I went to export my file, I lost interest in completing it that day.

I enjoyed learning about using ARTv1 in the tutorial class and I enjoyed the small amount of experimentation I did while in was on campus. I had originally planned on using the files that I did on campus for my cinematic but I found it easier to just download ART and repeat the process with Maya on my personal at home computer.

Prior to this I had never used Maya before and it took me a short amount of time to figure out how to use the program and I was very pleasantly surprised that it was easier to use than Blender, which was the only 3D animation software that I had experience with (as I have not done 3D 2) . I very much enjoyed learning the basics of Maya by experimenting and I hope to learn some more during the process of this class.

I spent about two hours animating and testing the timings of the animation, and the final video is still at 0.4 (I believe). The next time I animate I might make my keyframes longer. I very much enjoyed the final product in Maya and if I knew how to make my animations smoother (likely to do with the durations between my keyframes) I think it will make for a better product.

Now reviewing the video after about 20 hours I think that I went a little bit too far with the animation, rather than doing the idle animation. I think it might have been because of how new I was to Maya and how I wanted to experiment with it.

I had some issues after placing it into Unreal with the camera movements. I was unable to pilot the camera and I couldn’t figure out why. (As I type I realise it might have to do with me removing my ‘player start’ in the world?) I still managed to do a pass with the camera by using the transform tools. The process in unreal to me about an hour to render time.

An hour was put into contacting Adobe to renew my creative cloud license and then it was only a half hour to use my rendered images into After Effects for my final product.

I spent about an hour and a half with this project trying to figure out how to do the mattes and such by using after effects. Even after this, I was unable to produce the same kind of content that Trendt had in the lesson. I was concerned that by only uploading my final video, despite it having both my depth and colours in it. I would like to learn how to do this properly in the next lesson.

In the image above, it is a screenshot of my after affects window where I have the pre-comp open. As i said before, I was unsure how to put the matte on the sequence properly, and which one to put it on to get the result similar to the one shown in the lesson.

The most time-consuming thing I believe was trying to figure out how to have the camera view through the camera I wanted. I rendered a few sets of images (below) while I was testing the rendering. I was not using the camera cuts at the time, and even when I figured out to use it still took me some time (around an hour) to figure out how to put the moving camera into the cuts part. Once I was able to do this I was able to continue onto After Effects, where I ran into the issues spoken about earlier.