Category: 4.2 project 2

This time the assignment was a real challenge for me.
I could do it all by myself, but the truth is that I couldn’t have done it without the help of my team members, not only in terms of time but also in terms of skill.

I liked the theme of mermaids, I made a 25 seconds animation when I was in bachelor, but with limited skills, it only had little meaning in 25 seconds. It became an obsession of mine for a while, so at the postgraduate level, I wanted to see if I could make something meaningful out of it.

My teacher’s advice was beneficial and brought the story to life. I eventually took his advice and incorporated the theme of environmental protection into this animation, hoping to show the polluted ocean. This was the best result we could achieve with limited technology and time.

During this animation, I realized that I had grown a lot more. I am getting faster at making models and textures, and the speed of making animations has also increased, which is not particularly good, but still watchable.

At the same time, I also saw that I had a lot of weaknesses. I used to do animations alone because it saved me a lot of trouble, but it created a situation where I had to be good at everything. My level of rigging and the special effect needed to be more to support me in doing what I wanted, but obviously, I couldn’t make it, which frustrated me for a while and showed me that I needed to improve in some areas.

I hope to make something better when it comes to making graduation animations.

Last week!

It’s been a hectic week, and I did my best not to go over time to make this animation, but I still needed to spend more time to complete it perfectly.
My teammate created the effects particles of polluted oceans that looked like black pollutants floating in the water, making the deep sea scenes look bleak.
In contrast, I used the same camera angle and brighter lighting to reveal the contaminated sea floor’s dark, lifeless, eerie, and miserable nature.

Then I copied an unreal file to create the unpolluted ocean.
I used the plant mode to import the different plant models and then used brushes to draw on the rocks and ground. The glowing mosses served as a nice decoration.
I then placed the prepared coral reefs, seaweed, fish, bubbles, and conchs to decorate the scene, and all the animation was done.

I then rendered the animation into a JPG sequence and imported it into After Effects to create post-production processing and text effects about the plot.
I used red and designed fonts, adding a disappearing text effect to make the scene look more creepy.

Finally, my friend gave me simple tones, and I put each into Adobe Audition for editing and, ultimately, compositing to complete the animation.

Material of black contaminants

Particle emitters

Display effect

Luminous mosses in plant mode & Decoration for each shot

Import all the resources and create a full animation

Text effects

sound

I finally made it to animation this week!

I made 11 shots, two fewer than the storyboard itself.
I’m getting a headache looking at all these messy animation curves…

In summary, I animated the characters in Maya, then imported the animation and characters into Unreal to match the scene rendering.
The animation was fine, but I had a problem importing it into Unreal, which tormented me for two days. I consulted countless sources and tutorials, went to a paid teacher, and solved the problem.

I solved it myself!

The root cause of the problem was that Maya calculated the movement coordinates differently to unreal, so it caused the result of the character moving dozens of times faster or the character moving in the wrong position.

(so painful, why is it so painful, it’s so hard that I wanted to give up for a while)

Then I finally imported the model, bones, and animations into Unreal.
The glowing fishtail swimming in the dark looks nice, and I’m very happy with the visuals.

I’ve recreated the camera trajectory in unreal, my team members have been involved in the debugging, and we’ve finished animating the polluted ocean part.

The animation file and keyframe curves

This is the export screen that has been torturing me for two days

Finally, I exported all the animations to FBX and imported them into Unreal.

Animation sequence setup and creation in unreal

The glowing pattern on the tail can make a huge visual impact in the dark to the audience.

(I love this shot)

This week I have made a model of an important relic in the scene. I have used the free model as a base, sculpted, and changed most of the structure, giving it a new texture. The method is the same as when I made rock – I put the low-poly model into substance painter and then baked the high-poly model to create a delicate normal texture.

For the scene, my team member completed the gradient textures for the seaweeds and the glowing conch materials, and I painted the texture to change the gradient’s color. At the same time, she also created a special effect for the fish, letting me paint the texture and change the color.

Once these materials were ready, I imported all the models and materials into the unreal scene. I gave each model its material, linking each material to its texture, which was a rather tedious process and took me a lot of time.

The relic’s models, UV, and texture

This is how the material looked at the beginning; the color was so saturated that it seemed particularly ugly, so we spent a lot of time adjusting this color.

The material and special effects in unreal. I draw the texture.

Here are all the models and materials I have made

The final rendering looks like this:

It has enough for a deep-sea environment. It looks quiet and creepy when no creatures are added, and it is very atmospheric with the lighting fog.

This week I made the rigging part of my character, but because mermaid’s bones are different from human bones and my skills are limited, my friend corrected me on many issues and showed me how to modify them after I finished.

I am unskilled at making skin weights, I repeated it many times, and my computer kept crashing, which was a waste of time; it made me miserable, and I wanted to give up at one point.

The final result was good, and it was the best rigging I could do, but I needed to improve my rigging skills in my final design.

I also made a texture of the mermaid. The advantage of making a texture in Substance Painter is that you can see the effect of the 3d model, but the disadvantage is that there is not enough detail.

After exporting the texture from Substance Painter, I also used Photoshop to change the texture to make it more detailed, at a higher resolution, and with fewer jagged edges.

My group member just happened to be working on a seaweed fluttering effect, and at her request, I also painted the water plant mapping, which was very simple.

Rigging

Skin weight

Improve Bone settings( the hair and ears)

Adding control curves

Adding controller curves to models using plug-ins

Addition of face controllers and bones (version after being fixed by external helpers)

Body Texture and glowing body pattern in Substance Painter

Final textures

Seaweed alpha textures

This week I made more details of the character, again using Maya to create the general shape of the hair; I wanted the character’s hair to look like clay material and didn’t intend to make it hairy, as the design of the art style I will make the hair glow.
I imported the basic model into Zbrush to sculpt the details and created some textures to make it look like a bundle of hair that had been tied up.
(The detail is barely visible after I add the glowing material to the hair..)
Similarly, I made the basic ear shape in Maya and then sculpted the details in Zbrush.
I also tried to make flippers for the character’s hands, but again, it needed to be made in a transparent material, so I abandoned that design.
I created more detail on the face, separated the upper and lower lips, and hollowed out the mouth.
Once the model was complete, I imported it into Maya and started topology, turning on symmetry mode and topping up the whole head, beginning with the eyes, then linking it to the chest, back, arms, and gradually the tail, which was a lot of work as I needed to think about the correct number and position of each line.
Similarly, I made the ears and hair, which will be imported into unreal as a low-poly model of the character.
The next step was to cut the UVs; I split the material into three parts: hair, eyes, and body.

The basic process of making hair

finish the basic model

import to Zbrush

starting made some details

The basic process of making hair

made the detail of ears

Spikes on the elbow, a means of protection for the mermaid

Flippers

Details on the face

Parting of the lips

low poly model topology

Face effect

Link the chest

Making Hands

Making the arms, linking the chest

Finishing the elbow line neatly

Topological body model

Make hair and ears in the same way

UV cropping

My job this week was to make a character model; I used Maya to make the most basic shape and then added details to this shape.
I used Zbrush to add detail, and as I kept using Zremesher, my model became a high-holy model.
At the same time, I put my design into Zbrush to check the scale of the character, and I found a big difference between 3d and 2d and that sometimes you can’t make the body exactly to 2d scale.
I used Zbrush’s default hand model to save time and modified it.
Face sculpting is particularly difficult as I needed to give the character the characteristics of a fish and still make her look good, and as we all know, the fish man just does not look good…
I also focused on the muscles, including the abs and the muscles on the shoulders, to make the character fit a whale shark’s character and make her look well-built.
I modeled her fins on those of the whale shark, which was a bit fiddly to sculpt, but worked out well, and the whale shark’s fins looked hard, so I carved them with sharp edges.

I learned this week that it’s tough to get a 3d model to look exactly like a 2d drawing…

The basic bady

Importing 2d designs into Zbrush to control the scale of the model

However, the model’s scale was not good according to the 2D design, so I changed it a bit.

It’s really hard to get a good sculpted face, especially with a flat nose

Because fish don’t need noses, and if I remove the nose, it may look like Voldemort …. that would be too creepy, so I changed it to a flat nose.

(What a perfect chest and abs)

This week I imported all the models into the scenes made by the group and, linked the materials and textures, set up a few effects shots, and they turned out pretty well.

I adjusted the angle and position of some of the stones and used Unreal’s terrain mode to change the shape of the ground to make it more suitable for the scene.

I also tried posing a few shots, and the results have been great.
I imported the prepared model into Unreal, created new textures, and linked the texture of this model to each material page.

An overhead view of the whole scene

The outliner in unreal

Camera testing

Imported models and textures

Terrain pattern in Unreal

I also recorded a first view of the underwater, which worked very well

This week I am still working on the stone models, and although I have completely mastered the method, the stones take a lot of time to carve, and this has made my week very tedious and tiring.
Meanwhile, my classmate has finished building the general scene for UE5, and now what is needed more is my design of the scene and the models in the background. I have made many underwater things simultaneously, such as water plants, sea snails, corals, etc., so she does not waste time, and I have also drawn the general look. To save time, I designed the details at a reference, the final items that needed to be made were these:
Water plants, moss, conch, coral, jellyfish (do it if have extra time) and fish
All these things need to glow, so she is working on the glowing materials for the scene.

Draft design (undersea scenes are references)

Removing the design of the underwater scenes

The stone models made this week

This is the model sculpted in zbrush

Draw a texture for each stone

All textures

This week all worked in the same way as last week, so no particular techniques need to be explained, and our underwater scenes are taking shape, which gives me a great sense of achievement.

This week I’ve been working on the rock model, and because of time constraints, I’ve used the free modeling resources I found as a base to re-model the stone using Zbursh on top of that to make the look of the stone simpler and more stylized for the Cel-shading style.

I made two sets of stones in total, which needed to be reshaped, so it was very time-consuming.

The way I make the stones is as follows:
1, reduce the number of faces in the model, keeping only the approximate shape.
2, add planes to this and sculpt with Zbrush.
3、Adding details to the model
4, Re-edit the lines with Zremesher
5、Reducing the number of faces of the model with z-plug
6、Export low-poly

Next, I needed to import the model into the Substance Painter to draw the texture. I started by baking the normal mapping using the high-poly model I had just created and then using the textures to add texture, desired effect to the model.

This is me adding texture to the stone model with different materials.

This is a technique for outlining the edges of the model, which brings the model closer to the Cel-shading effect.

Render in Substance Painter to see the rendering of the texturing.

Export the texture.

Use the same method for the rest of the stones

In the meantime, I have created a rough Previs of the general animation using the free resource model. Here is the result:

I added the environmental element to my teacher’s advice, who felt that my animation needed clarity, so I prepared two identical scenes to show the ocean before and after pollution.