Finished Animation and Rationale - 12/11/10

So.
Here we are.
We've made it to the end of this project.
And yes, I skipped blogging the lighting progress - mostly because I forgot to screenshot it, and tomorrow I jump on a plane back home.

But I'm pretty proud of myself.

I learnt a lot of things throughout this process.
I started with really bold expectations - a huge storyboard, big ideas, and big designs.

Ideas that might've been a little too big, when working in 3D for the very first time.
I wound up simplifying out the jagged edge of her skirt in the final 3D model, and cut out the key in her hair - as cute as the idea was.

My initial storyboard was six pages long, and involved 9 separate shots. I knew it was never going to fit in the 6 second clip we were supposed to animate, but I had all these grandiose plans to fully draw out all of the panels that weren't going to make it into the actual shot, to give context and the rest of the story.
I also had a complex environment - and a second character! - both of which I simplified down a lot. The sign posts based around the tower are gone, and so is the extra character (and his horse).

These two pages were the clip I used to animate.

I also changed a lot of the camera angles from these, to accommodate for the removal of the extra character - shifting it to partly play out from his perspective, and to accommodate some... well. Poor choices earlier.

I'm proud of the character model itself, but...

When I came to rigging? I had no clue what I was doing. We had spider controls, we had weird controls that were done incorrectly - so when I hit animating, parts didn't work as intended - eg the hands, which I found couldn't actually bend to grasp the sword - which just made my life harder. The skin paint weights weren't great either - due to the fact that I made the skirt with two layers, these two had a bad tendency to overlap when the weights were changed, meaning that with both time restraints and a general 'too much will make this look worse', I had to avoid painting some areas, meaning certain poses were too complex to make.

Or - a basic character design flaw - the fact that with a head that large, she couldn't raise her arms high enough above her head to raise the sword as much as I wanted, without clipping inside her skull.
I made do with what I had, but I hadn't really given myself the greatest advantage.

When we hit the animating stage, I realised very quickly that I didn't overly enjoy the animation step of the process (which would figure, being a student at an animation school and all). I really preferred designing the character, and making a 2D drawing pop to life in a 3D model.
I struggled a little, with a less than perfect grasp of how to use Maya, and how animation principles worked.
So is it perfect?
No. Of course not.
Did I struggle, and make a lot of mistakes?
Naturally.
But I made it, and completed something I'm proud of, regardless.

Next year, I'll know better.

Animating - Character (10/11/15)

"Update your blog", they say. "Okay", she accepts, and then forgets to for another hundred years.

Woops.
I'm bad at this whole blogging thing (but I'm sure that's obvious by now, seriously.)

However! Progess is happening.
I fell behind a little when we hit the actual animating part, since I've realised a few things. One, animating a skirt is awful. Two, don't give the skirt multiple layers - why would you even do that. It's only going to end up with the two layers trying to go through one another, and it's going to suck. Three, I really didn't know what I was doing while rigging, and I've made this so hard on myself.

But, complaints aside, I'm filled with determination to finish this.

Look at all those torture rings controls.

See what I mean about the skirt going weird? That black's the inner layer. All the skin painting I tried to do couldn't make those two stay apart.

The beginning of her jumping out of the tower took the most effort, but I think I'm figuring that out.

It looks sorta decent in motion?

Everybody put your hands in the air if you just don't care

Figuring out the timing on the sword swing - which I haven't even brought the sword in yet, oops - is gonna be hard.

Rig Test Video - Character (21/10/15)

Joint Constraints and IK's - Character (17/10/15)

Joint constraints are weirdly complex.
More complex than they ever should be.

Most of the torso and body constraints done.

I'm ever thankful I didn't have to constraint the horrific mass of joints this thing once was.

We have working arm IK's!

Bends nicely, too.

Leg IK's.

And bend.

Blend Shapes - Character - (17/10/15)

Once I had Keat show me how to do these, I powered through them pretty fast.
I'll probably knock out a few more, if I have time.

We've got a few different emotions, and then controls for the overall scale of the head.

Default expression.

'big', courtesy of Keat.

'small', also courtesy of Keat.

Happy.

Angry.

Mad - which is a little more exaggerated than anger, and the mouth opens slightly.

A little smirk.

And I still like what you get when you turn anger and mad on together.

Grrr.

Skinning - Character (17/10/15)

There isn't a huge amount to say in terms of how skinning the model went?

That part seemed to work out rather smoothly, however I did start painting skin weights before adding joint contraints, so I promptly stopped with it, and moved on, to come back to finish testing things after I had easier controls.

Fully skinned.

The spine stayed purple, however? It doesn't look skinned, but it works same as if it was.

There were some pretty immediate issues and deformities.

They were tamed pretty easily.

Rigging - Character (17/10/15)

I'm skipping a step here - UV textures. Why?
I did complete them, but in the last.. month or two since I uploaded, I lost every single file I had on USB - including the UV's.
I'll redo them and upload them soon, I swear.

Rigging though!
I did not like rigging.
This hurts.

Started with the spine. This isn't too bad...

..yeah, I can do this..

Oh god, why did I make a skirt.

Welcome to your new nightmare. Joint hell.

Don't worry, Keat talked sense into me, and the skirt's back down to only four 'pleats' as I've been calling them.

3D Model - Completed Model (17/10/15)

Holy posts, Batman!

..yeah, guess who forgot this needed updating after the last hand in, and then forgot her password?
Good guess.

So, brace yourselves for a pile of posts as I update everything I forgot to show.

Completed model, low poly.

Completed model, smoothed.

Face detail

Dress detail

Hand detail

3D Modelling - Character (20/08/15)

Modelling hair is pain.

Modelling ears is pain. Everything is pain.
Why didn't I make a simpler character. Dear god.

3D Modelling - Character (19/08/15)

You're not hallucinating, this is, in fact, another update, for, drumroll please, the third day in a row.

We now have feet and hands!

unsmoothed

smoothed

3D Modelling - Character (18/08/15)

What's this? An update?
For, can you believe it, a second day in a row?
Calm yourselves, a miracle may have just happened.

In terms of progress though?
Maybe not a lot.

But hey, she has an arm now! And a sleeve, and a bit of a leg!
My god, she's starting to look like an actual person.

3D Modelling - Update (17/08/15)

One of these days I'll just straight up remove the 'daily' part of the title of this blog.

But hey, once again, finally, progress!

The sword has all of its parts (yes, finally). It took a lot of work to figure out how to do the side parts - namely, I kept starting them, deciding I didn't like how I was doing them, deleting, and starting them again. But hey, got there in the end.
I still need to connect them to the actual sword, sure, but progress is progress.

And believe it or not - the actual character model has been started. God knows how I'm gonna manage to make this in time. But I'll try.

3D Modelling (Prop) Progress Update - 06/08/15

'Daily'. What does that word mean again?
I'm really terrible at this.
If it counts for anything though, I have been thinking and wanting to update this, except I tend to only remember that I need to update it once I get home each day. Home, where for most of the week, I've had no internet.

But hey! There's progress, albeit later than expected.

with smoothing

without smoothing

There's something really rewarding in seeing a drawing come to life like this.
Onwards, to working out those smaller additions to the sword!

Storyboard - 31/07/15

I was going to finish and upload these last night, and then I got home and promptly fell asleep.
Oh well, there's still time.

If you haven't noticed yet, I evidently like using cuts.
Maybe too much.

The only part of this that I'd really be animating in 3D would probably just be shots 6 and 7.

Otherwise I have far too grand an idea of what I am capable of.