Week 9 - Getting back at my own pace
- Leighanne Fernandes
- Aug 16, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 3, 2020
So this week, I visited the doctor and was diagnosed with migraines and low blood pressure. The doctor obviously suggested I rest but also provided some medicines to help ease out the pain. With that, I tried to take it slow but also try to get my tasks done since I'm aware that I'm way behind schedule. Here's what I was able to accomplish this week and feel a little better than I did from the previous week. Hopefully it continues to get better.
Character Model Progress
In comparison from last week's timeline, I believe I have achieved quite a bit this week. I was able to complete all of the clothing in Marvelous Designer which I took up as another self-directed learning for the term. As daunting as it was in the initial stages, I was impressed at my flexibility to adapt to a whole new software through online tutorials. The t-shirt, pants and Jacket were done AND retopologized. Below are proof of work and reference material i used.
References
Above references were culminated from a resource document on How To Bridge The Gap Between Marvelous Designer and ZBrush
Proof of work
Below are images of my work-in-progress of using Marvelous Designer to create the shirt, pants and jacket. By far, the jacket was the most complex to work on because of its intricate patterns and designs. There wasn't any specific tutorial that showed a step by step approach to this, so I had to experiment a lot with it. The jacket took me roughly 2 and a half days to complete with retopology.
However, when trying to export the Jacket, MD was being a pain. It kept giving me errors that it couldn't replicate the patterns to low poly because the patterns were too complex. I even looked up help manuals and none of them had this sort of issue - must be something new or a bug. Hence, I decided to take it to Zbrush and retopologize the high poly there instead of wasting much time.
These were the problems I faced. The jacket topology was broken and despite trying out various methods of fixing it, it wouldn't work. So my last resort was to take this retopologized mesh to 3ds max and manually fix it there.
In 3Ds max, as you can see, a disaster was waiting to happen. I needed to fix each of it manually which was extremely time consuming. The box i used was made to ensure the dimensions were right in terms of height, width and length. These are the standard dimensions and to my astonishment the length and width were perfect. I just needed to fix the height.
After hours of meticulous clean up, I rebuilt the topology in many areas, restructured the jacket, finished the hair, modeled and textured the eyes, got the shoes and socks done and the character is now almost ready to go into full texturing or rigging/skinning.
My next steps are as follows:
Take the body to Zbrush and project high poly onto low poly mesh
Unwrap the body in Zbrush - quick and efficient
Rig the character using CAT rigs
Skinning the character
Texturing the clothes either in 3Ds Max or in Substance Painter
Texture the base mesh in Zbrush
Facial morphs for the characters expressions
Although these seem like a lot left to do, I am confident I can finish it up this week with the plan I have put into place for myself. However, I will also need to multi-task and get the police Car and the OMELAS house done by the end of the week.
Ozbourne Checklist
According to the Ozbourne checklist we were taught to implement, a few changes were made with regards to animation. Some are temporary back up plans in case worse comes to worst. They are as follows.
Modify:
Environment modifications - will be modifying some houses to convenient store
Kite will have the image of Malcom X since his quote was sampled in the song:
1. Paradise:
"Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hands on you, send him to the cemetery" - Malcolm X
Lyric in song: "I'ma be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone put his hand on me, I'ma send him to the cemetery"
Magnify:
During promotion, making a teaser with just an instrumental track for paradise and clips from the animation to give a glimpse of what one of the MV’s will look like
Adding an extra shot to ACT 3 where Miles looks at a mirror but doesn't see anything. This scene will make sense in the locked in Music video.
Minimise:
Rescoped the project to creating just one fully animated music video, one CG shot in Locked in and sketch art animations
Change for Paradise to be still life rather than be animated
Might have to remove a few of the extra characters if a collaborator isn't found
Substitute
Substituting lost animator with multiple collaborators for character modeling (side characters)
Rearrange:
Gantt chart and schedule has been rearranged due to collaborator leaving and milestones being rearranged
Combine:
Film and Animation: Combining artistic styles for “Locked In” and every transition is match cut
Film and Animation: in order to balance the workload for both departments, Locked In will be a mix of film and animation
Animation: Multitask with character modelling with environment prop modelling
Apart from all this, I was able to get back at leading the team. Planning ahead and communicating with Amos and the rest of the team helped me get back with what I missed. I feel the time taken off helped me to rejuvenate a little. It allowed me to clear my mind and look at things more dynamically. Also since we are nearing the end of the trimester, having group meetings where we update each other with our progress and still brainstorming on a few more ideas was beneficial.
In a separate meeting i volunteered to have with the design team, we planned out the social media calendar. I had done this with the design team 3 weeks ago as well since I had experience with managing the social media account for @sae_hub. I also took the time out to delve deeper into how to create effective social media calendars because i figured it would help us in the long run.
Above are a few pointers that seemed very helpful in creating our own social media calendar (Calyton, 2017, p.1)
We roughly planned this and next trimester, but this meeting was more in depth about how we should go about things for next term. Since its mainly promotional material, it helps to know beforehand as to what kind of posts would be required from each field to showcase. So the idea was to have each department showcasing the work they have done within this trimester in a series of three posts per week. This will lead from the animation dept. to film, to audio and finally with design. After design, it will be the end of the term. This will fuse into the integrated and promotional campaign they have planned for their STP.
So far, things seem to be going well. The talk Bing had with Amos really pushed him to show us progress updates everyday. With this, his speed and work progress has been tracked and we are moving in the right direction (i feel). However, I still need to catch up on one week's worth of lost work. Hope I pull through.
References
Clayton, S. (2017, December 20). How to Create a Social Media Calendar: A Template for
Marketers [website article]. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-
3D Gladiator (n.d.). How To Bridge The Gap Between Marvelous Designer and ZBrush
[documentation tutorial]. Retrieved from
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