SpaceAce_Art

Just a small progress update, Nimea's eyes and eyebrows are now keyed and I'm pretty happy with them! Though not going to lie, getting certain eye shapes to work is a bit of a challenge, just because of how the model is made and how the rig works

There's a couple of awkward frames where you can see the inside of the mesh from how I have to distort the rig, and that clipping issue with the iris is kind of unavoidable in some poses, but I think I've managed to hide it from the camera view well enough. Most of these problematic poses aren't held for long either so you don't even really notice it unless you're zoomed way in on a frame like I am here.

So now that I have Nimea's rig I've been starting to put together her final speaking animation! It's the same Maleficent clip from my earlier 2D tests, but cut down to only about 8 seconds ( so about half the clip). This is just to make animating the whole thing more feasible with the time that I have, but I may still try and do the whole clip once my assesment is over.

So her eyebrows and mouth don't move yet, but I'm pretty happy with the main movement of her head and neck. I think I'll tweak the timing of her ears and feathers a little to make the whole movement flow a little better, but for now I'm really liking this!

I think next I'll work on keying out her eye shapes, and for her mouth I'm going to focus on having it form the right shapes for each word before I start adding expressions in.

I know I haven’t been posting updates for Nala in a while, but that’s because so much has actually developed and I’ve barely been keeping track of it

To start, all of Part 1 is now cleaned up! I’ll put some of the stills at the end of the post, but that’s finally finished! It’s a huge relief to have it completely done, and I’m definitely taking a break before I start on Part 2. That being said, I’m not entirely certain I can get Part 2 finished before the Masters Show at the end of August, but I’m still going to try and have as much of it done as I possibly can.

In more exciting news, I found a composer to commission music from!!! It’s kind of funny how we met if I’m being honest. I was stuck doomscrolling TikTok and a creator, Dillan Schmitz (King Aurorus Music), showed up on my fyp. He’s an indie composer and the track he had playing in the video sounded VERY similar to The Waters Cleansed. In the caption he wrote that he was interested in working on smaller projects and to DM him if interested. I took a chance and messaged him, and he got back to me! He was unfortunately booked up into December, but he made the very kind offer to ask his circle of composer contacts if anyone would be interested in working with me.

That’s how I got into contact with Walter Wong (Wanphonos), I’ve now made arrangements to commission them for two tracks for the animatic! The last few days have been a lot of admin and legal stuff, and I also had to provide some annotated versions of the animatic for Walter to use during composing. But in the chaos of all that, I’m so thrilled at actually getting some custom music for my project! And Walter has been fantastic so far so I will definitely be remembering them for any future projects.

I probably won’t give another update on Nala for a while, because I’m going to lock in and get as much of Part 2 cleaned up as I can before the end of August. If I do, it’ll probably be more music stuff, or I might just post some stills from Part 2. The race is on now, but this project is nearing the finish line! It’s full steam ahead!

Nimea has a rig!! It's only from the neck up (since thats basically all I need) but she looks fantastic! I did this little animation to try out her rig

It's really good! Almost everything that needs to move CAN move now, with the only thing missing being a control to scrunch up her nose. I'm not too bothered by that right now, because I can probably add a shape key control for that later if I find myself really wanting it.

This is just a bunch of side-by-side windows of the rig view and the camera view. As you can see she doesn't have anything to control her snout if I wanted something like a snarl, but again I think I can add that in later if I want it. I would love to play around with this file once I have more time and add a rig for the rest of her body, but for now this is absolutely perfect!

Nimea now has a pretty lil texture map!

The original plan was to go into Substance and draw her texture there, but I forgot to bring her UV unwrapped file to the uni lab and I don't have SP installed on my personal laptop :(

So to save time while I install SP I had a look through some Blender addons and I found one that lets you import custom images to use as brushes! Ironically though I didn't use the brush I imported for this texture lol

Blender's texture painting doesn't have a layer system by default, so I just used the bucket to give her the purple gradients before painting her face details and black patterns on top. I don't really know where I was going with the black patterns; her original 2D design has some snowy owl-esque markings, but so far they haven't really translated too well onto her 3D model. I do kind of like what I've come up with, but I feel I could definitely improve it if I go away and do a bit of research on what I want the patterns to look like specifically.

Genuinely I may just stay in Blender for her texturing. Every time I go to another program I just end up coming back here and figuring it out. At the very least I want to get some kind of layer addon for Blender's texture painting so I can keep her patterns and gradients separate.

As for her rigging, I do not have time to do it myself so that task has been passed to someone else. I am a little disappointed, part of why I started this project was to learn rigging, but if I want her to be animated at all then I have to pass it off while I work on refining her textures.

So I’ve been on the grind with production and thought I was doing good until I went and reviewed my production schedule to check where I was at and uh.

I am FOUR DAYS behind schedule?? I am…baffled at how this has happened, and according to my schedule I’m meant to be starting on Part 2 today, and I’m only on like shot 16 for Part 1.

So I've come up with a new production plan, and that's to just sketch all my shots out before cleaning them up because then I'll at least have something for every shot in the animatic. This will also probably help me out later because I may have to change my background music (I'm awaiting a response from Gareth Coker to see if I'm good to use my current songs but I might not get it in time)

But the good news is, because I'm not cleaning every shot as i go, I now have Part 1 sketched out! Cody and Nala are a little off model in my sketches but I've been correcting it in cleanup in previous shots so I will be able to fix that later.

As for the entirety of Part 1, I probably won't be posting the rest of the clips until the sketches for Part 2 are done. I want to have something composited together before I upload something that big.

The first 10 shots of the animatic are done! I think they look really good, and definitely capture the annoying and endearing relationship between Cody and Nala.

My thoughts seeing it all put together, however, is that I think the timing is too fast on certain shots. I especially think shots 05 and 06 could hold for longer because they're quite dramatic background changes, and shot 07 (feeding Nala) goes way too fast for all the movement that happens in it.

So a while ago I found this cool-looking 3D eye tutorial on TikTok (user Mokuna Choi) so I wanted to give it a try on Nimea

She just has a super basic texture on her eyes at the moment but these are looking really good! I already like them a lot more than the previous 2D projection eyes she had.

A close-up of the eye to show off the cool 3D effect

So basically the eye has a divot in it, and the iris is a disc with flipped normals to get that warped look that real eyes have. The pupil and highlights are all 3D objects inside the disc, just kind of floating there for a bit of depth.

The only caveat with this though is that because the disc for the iris is essentially inside-out, that means it's really obvious when it's clipping into the face as the eye looks down or up. I think this is mostly because the eye sticks out of the socket a tiny bit, so the eye bulges out in a way that's not as noticeable with the 2D projection. It is worth noting that I actually did tweak her eye socket a lot to better fit this eye, so I think this is more a problem caused by the flipped normals of the iris.

(Shots 40-45)

So shot 43 has 2 variants because the daytime color is going to come back in during that shot, and then shot 44 and 45 are fully in the daytime color palette.

The perspective on these was actually really difficult so I made 3D references for them

(Shots 26-39)

So I did end up bringing Nimea into Substance, and I got all her high poly normals done so she looks nice and crisp now. Substance's normal baking is WAY better than Blender's, but WOW did it take forever. Obviously she has a lot of tiny parts and feathers and whatnot, and so I had to go and export all 49 INDIVIDUAL HIGH POLY OBJECTS so that I could then plug them all back in for baking. Jesus Christ. But!! It was very worth it, I now have a beautiful pair of high poly normal UDIMs :)

I brought these back into Blender because you can actually have multiple normals active on the same shader, so this means I can have both the high poly normal map AND the painted normal map (once I make it).

She's a little crunchy-looking here (I have 3 lights in this scene and I don't think they were getting along with each other) but just look at that brand new sculpted detail around her face and chest! My favorite feature is actually her ears, and you basically can't even see how low poly they are anymore!

She still looks like a PS2 character but her textures actually went on so nicely! I was just using Blender's default painting mode, which isn't nearly as comprehensive as something like Substance Painter, but for a first look she turned out great!

Her UVs are actually split over two UDIM tiles. I chose this over a standard single UV tile because she just has so many parts to her mesh and I wanted to make sure her body had enough space for detail. I may revisit this UV map later if I decide to reevaluate where her details are going.

Her eye UV is just a simple image texture I drew, but this may also be revisited because I want to experiment with making her eyes look more 3D and not just a flat projection onto a sphere.

The REALLY interesting thing I did with her textures was hand-paint her normals. I tried to do this a while back for another project, but I had other shader nodes utilising the normal map so it didn't end up working out.

However, Nimea's normals aren't tied to anything so it was full steam ahead with painting them! I haven't finished the map yet, but you can see the difference it makes especially around her legs. Her front legs have painted normals where her back legs don't.

This might take some practice, because I noticed some weird clashing in the normals where the UV seams are. This could probably be fixed by remaking her UVs to better hide the seams though.

(Shots 11-23)

(Shots 1 - 10)

Some recolored backgrounds for Part 2, encompassing shots 29-34. In addition to being recolors, some details have also changed from their Part 1 counterparts. The cat toys are gone, the kitchen fridge is emptier, and the living room plant has wilted. If these were full backgrounds I would probably add a lot more to both my Part 1 backgrounds and these, but they’re not supposed to be full backgrounds so this is fine for what I need.

Backgrounds for shots 03-10! I’m getting tired of fighting with my color palettes so I’m taking the ones I do have and just blending them however to get the look I want

Something about my backgrounds as well is that I have a total of 37, but over half of them are reused in later shots with different color palettes. So basically I’ve changed the way I’m scheduling my background drawing. I’m starting with the most complicated ones first, and the ones that are reused the most times. Like the downstairs hallway shot is reused 4 times, so I can essentially knock out 4 backgrounds with one drawing.

She is retopologized!! Every tooth, feather, and claw is accounted for, and she's sitting at a nice ~12.5k verts compared to her previous +1 million verts.

Her wings took some trial and error (and a lot of help) to wrap properly, but all her loops are connected now! all of her flight feathers are still separate objects for now, I think that may work better for rigging but I can blend them in later if i decide otherwise.

Her paw fluffs were TOUGH to wrap. They're not really wrists with fingers, but they need to be able to match the movement of the actual hands and fingers underneath. This is what me and my advisor came up with, and while it looks really funky on its own, all the loops connect and should let the fluff move in the way I need it to.

Her hands are just cones and spheres, and her feet are the same. Her fingers are going to stay disconnected from her palms for now, because that will mostly be hidden by the fluff and might save me some time with rigging.

In addition to her teeth and gums, she also now has a tongue that I just modeled and retopologized in Blender.

And lastly just some close-ups of her feathery bits along her back and tail.

I want to see if I can bake her high poly normals onto the retopo meshes, but I need to research how that's done in Blender because I've only ever done it in Maya. Then she'll need to be UV unwrapped, and I need to go research how that works in Blender because it's been a hot minute since I last did a UV map in this software.