Unit BA1b

I finished retopologising the mesh, but it ended up being completely broken due  to mistakes made while Maya was lagging.  Due to time constraints I decided that it would take too long to retopologise again and also apply and rend fur, so I opted for creating a texture map in substance painter using different fur brushes to simulate the texture of fur.  its unfortunate that I couldn't add fur but the texture does look fine when lit correctly and it should do for now.  From now on I will remember to constantly clear the history in Maya to prevent this from happening in the future.  Now I just need to render the character turntable and composite the creature into some images in after effects.

I finished up the editing of the showreel and added int the now completed lip sync project to showcase my improvement.  Like many things on the course, this is the first time I've tired my hand at editing so it really isn't all that great.  I did try to cut the footage and images together in time with the beat of the music as much as I could but it was hard to balance between cutting to the beat and showing a substantial enough amount of each clip to demonstrate my animation skills.  

It turns out the source of the lag in Maya was the history slowing down the program to a snails pace.  Clearing the history seems to have solved the lag issue somewhat but I'm annoyed at myself for the time I wasted trying to retopologize when it was lagging without trying to find a solution; I had just assumed that the lag was because of the high poly count or something.  A lesson for the future, I suppose.

I finished up the lip sync project as well which I am very pleased with.  I definitely prefer 2D animation to 3D because it’s a lot more familiar and intuitive to me and I think I shows in the quality of the work I have produced.  I am especially proud of the timing and the spacing of frames in the secondary actions as they really help accentuate the movements of the heads making the movement appear more natural.   

I spent Friday evening and the rest of the weekend finishing up the lip sync project so that I could add it to my showreel; all that was left to do was to cleanup the lines with the pen brush.  I used the ellipsis and curved line tools to create smooth lines for the heads and bodies while the secondary actions were freehand with some line smoothing.  This made the end result look really clean and if I were to have added colour, I sure it really would've look very effective.  The perfectly circular heads also made it easier for me to create the chin movements by cutting the bottom half of the head away and reprinting it a little bit further down whenever the mouth moves which made for a pretty effective jaw movement.  

In the lip sync session I used the animation brush to create the mouth shapes for the characters using my own photo references and the mouth chart I found online.  I then spent the session filling lip-syncing the mouth shapes to the audio using a process of trial and error to match sounds made to the closest mouth shape in the animated brush.  Kathrine gave the tip of not trying to match letters to the mouth shapes, but the actual sounds that the person is making.  This allowed for a more accurate representation of mouth movements that matched the dialogue more closely. 

I finished sculpting the extra features on the face and the jagged fur effect on the torso and legs.  The model has quite a high poly count since I was sculpting on a higher level on Mudbox so Jon suggested that I retopologize the model using the quad draw tool.  I’ll try and get the topology done for this week so that I can uv the model and quickly sort out the fur as well.

I spent the past two weeks refining the model of the creature in Maya.  I think I managed to stay pretty much on model to the maquette which I'm quite proud of.  I still need to add the facial features to the model and define the eye sockets more clearly which I can do in Mudbox when I return to Norwich.

It’s not entirely relevant to character design but the talk also goes over the animation pipeline for the game and how it melds the 2D and 3D pipelines together as the backgrounds and camera view of the game are all 2D while the character models are all 3D objects.  It seems that even though the game has to built in a game development engine (Unity), they still use the Autodesk suite to create the animations for the game and then import them into unity as sprite sheets to mapp the animations to the movable character.

Over the past two weeks I've spent a little time refining the form of the creature in Maya.  I think I've managed to create a pretty faithful recreation of the maquette model that I'm very pleased with.  I’ll move on to Mudbox and sculpt out the facial features before applying some fur.

I watched a couple more showreels to pick out useful techniques to help make my own showreel more engaging and appealing.  There’s nothing much I found that I haven't already considered for the showreel but it’s always useful to keep analysing other people’s work to look for what I can improve in my own.

This isn’t a very successful example of a showreel because it is a bit too long to hold the viewer’s interest.  The showreel doesn't start with the most interesting clips so there isn’t much to grab the attention of a viewer right out of the gate.  There are also abrupt changes in music and tone that makes the experience very jarring and takes away from the effectiveness of the showreel.

Continued from the previous post on mouth shapes.

I photographed myself making the sounds on the mouth chart to get a feel for what shapes my mouth makes when speaking.  Hopefully, I'll be able to apply these mouth shapes to making an animated brush in tvpaint to streamline the lip-syncing process.

A useful mouth chart I fount on google images that demonstrates the full range of sounds that can be made by each moth shape. 

This is a pretty effective showreel in my opinion, largely held up by the quality of the animations.  The showreel is very specialised, showcasing the animator’s 2D skills and all of his animations have a psychedelic quality which ties the showreel together.  The kind of disjointed synth music suits the psychedelic themes well even if the editing is nothing too special.  One possible drawback is that some people may find it runs for too long at 3:40, but I think that there is enough going on in each animated sequence to hold the viewer’s attention.