#milestone 1b

Milestone 1B (Repost)

This week resulted in several more issues, most notably issues with the plugin ARTV1. The animation portion of ARTV1 wouldn’t open in Maya, so after some playing around with the plugin I found that I could animate with the skeleton. The above gif is the animation I made using the skeleton - just a simple animation and nothing too sophisticated (such as movement in the top half only for example). Other than this, I didn’t have issues with Maya, but once again, I had problems rendering in Unreal, as well as importing the animation. 

Again, I tried several methods to get the animation to import and render correctly, but to no avail. This again also meant that there wasn’t much time devoted to experimentation this week. In all, I spent about 3-4 hours in Maya (about half of this time was spent trying to figure out the issue with the animation), 2-3 hours on tutorials, 2 hours in Unreal and about 2 hours on reflection.

I also need to note at this point that I’m completing these milestones and assessment at home, as I live a considerable distance from campus and it is very difficult for me to get there, and even harder to work between two locations and to transfer work and files between the two.

The knowledge I had of this main topic was none. I have never imported and animated character into unreal before now and didn’t know that epic has a tool to quickly make a rig with in maya. I know how easy it is to get rig with animations to work in side of UE4. If I spent more time on this topic I would have try to get the Morpheus rig working in maya as it wouldn’t open or work. So, I could have attempted to use alembic and import a character into unreal that way. I spent most of the time this week playing with the rig editor/creator and messing around with animations. Then making a couple of different animations and mixing learning how to mix them together inside of sequencer.

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.