WEEK 8 – Whoops! Continued…

So, the animations weren’t entirely approved… And a lot of work is needed from this week! Here’s a continuation of the Whoops! drama series (*continues to laugh and cry in the corner*)

Whoops! – S01 E05

We realized that we had been animating in a very inefficient manner this whole time. Our lecturer told us that we needed to block the animations by setting key frames first, and once we were satisfied with the blocking stage to spline it together. He showed us how we could use the curve editor to make things easier for us. So, I researched for some videos that showed a breakdown of the stages. Here’s one scene from Disney’s Tangled that I used as reference for modifying my animations this week.

Teuchtler, V. (2013, April 8) Tangled Animation Process [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8fXYZ-6u0.

Whoops! – S01 E06

Since the animations took another 3 to 4 days to fix, things were not looking good. I couldn’t seem to find a good way to animate the NINJA. Because he held the daggers both facing downwards, it was hard to find a suitable reference for it. I researched a lot.

I even asked my peers for suggestions and feedback and they helped me with some resources. I even thought of recording a live action reference so that I could use it for my animations, so here is one of Amos.

Using this reference, I tried to animate with the blocking first but soon figured that it wasn’t really going to work in the game. Each time the NINJA spins, it would be rather impractical as the enemy will already have sliced him off. Also, the other NINJA attack done by Ahmed had a similar back spin, so it was lacking variety. The whole of Wednesday went to waste, I thought! But I did learn a lot from my mistakes.

Whoops! – S01 E07

By Thursday, I did my best to work around it. I figured that I had to make a separate animation of the NINJA flipping one of the daggers before he attacks. So that was an additional one. All throughout this week, we also faced clashes with the animations glitching in UNITY, but somehow found a fix around them sooner or later.

Whoops! – S01 E08

With the animations done and cleared, I hustled to finish modelling the remaining assets for the game such as the rocks, stones, boulders, door posts and stairs. All this was done in a day. I also unwrapped the vases and pillars sent by Amos and prepared to texture them. Unfortunately, since they were not four sided, I had to spend some time before unwrapping to make them quads.

Because we were lacking time, I thought it would be fitting to just reuse some of our already existing textures in a more creative way. It is also one of our LO’s to reuse modular assets. So, I experimented with the wall textures and hieroglyphs on one of the vases. Here is the first draft of one of them:

First draft render of one of the vase textures that uses recycled texture material. Done on Substance Painter.

I received good feedback from my teammates stating that it looks good and suggested if I could make a variation with a gold band of hieroglyphs. I will work on them for next week, along with the rest of the pillars and assets.

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Amidst all of our production work, I was also working on some collaborations to meet my LO’s. I will be working on three animation related work and count in two of my interdisciplinary work that I did at the start of the trimester. For my animation-based work, I will be doing the following:

• Three character designs for a Kids Milk-based brand (working for one of the design groups in Studio 1)

• An Animation logo for a Plant-based Milk brand (working for another design group in Studio 1)

• Making an animated demo reel of a concept proposal for an aluminum company on producing more reusable designs for their aluminum cans – for a friend of mine outside SAE

So far, I have made the three character designs that meets the brief given to me. I will be working on the other two shortly.

This is a slider. Use the arrow keys to view all three designs. It is a character design of a child in a cow onesie. The colors will be modified at a later stage but the team liked these designs.

In conclusion, I believe that the pace at which I am currently working has improved significantly. I am able to do a lot more tasks and multi-task simultaneously (which amazes me sometimes). Even though, I am still facing workflow clashes with having to check up on the other two animators constantly, I am still on track with my work! I wish for this to continue in the upcoming weeks as well.

References:

Teuchtler, V. (2013, April 8) Tangled Animation Process [video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM8fXYZ-6u0.