Category: Advanced and Experimental 3D computer Animation Techniques

A 3D computer animation course is supposed to be about learning animation; in fact, I think this course is the most interesting thing I’ve learned, animating is much more fun than making models, rigging, and drawing texture, but it also requires thinking about more things, and maybe learning physics if necessary?

I haven’t studied animation in any particular detail systematically, which has led to my animations being very stiff all the time, and I’m not a big fan of exaggerated expressions myself, so it’s hard for me to come up with flexible dynamics, which I think is my weakness and quite fatal.
I have learned a lot of the basics of animation production in this course, which is very useful, and my level of character animation is gradually improving. Unfortunately, I have limited energy this semester, and I would like to do both assignments perfectly if I could。

I enjoy whether it’s just animating the movement or the expressions, and it gives me a great sense of achievement when a model comes to life.
But these results are only possible with the teacher’s feedback. I can’t rely on my teacher to check my work all the time. I still need to improve my animation skills. After all, without my teacher checking my work, my animations would still be stiff.

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

There’s little that can be amended this week.
I still have some dynamic movements that aren’t curved trajectories, but it’s not a big problem, and my teacher wants me to be a little more precise with my mouth shape and then pay attention to the head delays.

I exaggerated the movements a bit according to my understanding, changed some more dynamics and angles, and made the final result:

Although this animation exercise was only three seconds long, I gained much important knowledge about making animations, which I found very useful.

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 got only a few feedback because the teacher could not explain the questions to me face-to-face.
To summarise the teacher’s requirements:

1. The hand movements are still not harmonious and need to be adjusted
2. The body movements do not feel like its drag the head, there needs to be a feeling that the body moves first, and then the head moves

This is the effect after I changed it:

The feedback I got from my teacher this week was constructive!
I think this rule can also be used in future animations

My teacher told me about the curve principle because human activity is always shown as a curve, so if you look at it on a flat surface, the character panning activity will look unnatural.

My teacher gave me a few demonstrations using the nose tip as a marker point and asked me to change it.

There was also a very annoying mistake; I turned on IK to create the arms animation, so now the hand movements would freeze sometimes.
Finally, the teacher asked me to move the hand placement to the left so that the main body area would be more exposed.

The curve principle is instrumental, and although I can’t notice the problem all the time, I will try to troubleshoot these problems.

Here’s how it looks after I’ve modified it

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 produced my first animation exercise.
As requested by my teacher, I created the characters’ body movements and then tried to add some mouth shapes.
Even very flexible models have some difficulty creating expressions; blocking was an excellent way to see this.
I am very happy with the first pointing movement of the character, which looks very smug.

I am looking forward to the feedback from my teacher text week.

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