Month: September 2022

This week I started to make animations. The animation contains camera animation, props animation and character animation.

Camera animations and prop animations are quite easy. I have already set up the rig and controlers on these props so that I just need to do some simple animations. However, character animations can be a big task, which not only has body animations but also facial performance. I tried to finish about 2-3 shots everyday so that I can have enough time to do VFX parts and compositions.

Based on my research on facial animations and expressions, I know exactly how to make facial expressions to express feelings. However, some of the shots still took me a lot of time to finish. I need to consider the rhythm of the whole shot and the layers of expressions. For example, I need to animate the face in several ways to show different levels of fear. When the scene becomes stranger and stranger, the emotion of character should keep changing so that audience can realize the situation becomes worse.

After I finished all the scene models and textures, I started to combine them together to form the real scene in the animation.

I firstly used the reference system in Maya to reference these objects into a new scene project so that these original projects can be protected. I layout several scenes like working room, livingroom, office, corridor, printing room and dead scene. This can be the most easy part for me. I just need to move things here and there.

After I layout all the scenes I started to do lighting. The lighting section didn’t take to much time. What I need to do is to create a sense of cinematic and horror in these shots. I created light layers in redshift so that after I finished rendering, I can change these lights in other softwares like Nuke. Therefore, the set up of light is quite easy to me.

Below is some scenes layout that I finished:

This week I finished the other part of texturing. And mostly focusing on riggings.

I textured some props and covered them with blood, since some scenes need to be blooded to create a sense of horror and disgust.

Fortunately, some props in the scene don’t need to be textured in detail. I just need to unfold the UV carefully and put textures into their materials, which saved some time and energy for me.

After I finished texturing, I started to set up rigs. What I need to rig in this project is some props, the character’s face and body.

I firstly rigged the most difficult part: character whole body rig. I started with the body, which is not a big task for me because I have done this several time in the former projects. It took me several hours to set up controllers and paint skin weights for the body. After that I started to rig the face. What I want is a character which can show complex facial expressions. Therefore, based on the research in my FMP thesis, I set up a facial rig based on FACS (Facial Action Coding System). Since the time and my technique are limited, I cannot set up a cinematic level rig, so I did a easier version. It took me days to make the action unit blendshapes and paint skin weights, which can be really struggled. Finally, I finished it, and the result looks good.

After I finshed the character rig, I turned to rig some props in my scenes.

The rig of printer took me some time to finish, since it is an important object in this project.

I also rigged something like laptop, vending machine, doors, clock, etc.

In week 4, I still need to finish the other part of the scene first.After that I will start to make textures for the whole scene, which can be a big task.

Just like last week, I prepared the corridor and the printing room. I add more props into these scenes. For eample, some books and laptops.

After I finished all the scenes props that the model list. I started to make textures.

I use Substance Painter to make textures. Since Quixel has a lot of great and high resolution textures, I grabed some textures on this app and use them to shade my models. It took me some time to finish part of these textures.