Just like last week I’m still focusing on making animations. As I have already made several animations, the speed of animating becomes faster this time.
I also added several shots into the storyboard this week since I found that the translation between some shots are not quite natural. I also added more reaction shots to show the facial expressions of the character. This change made the rhythm looks better, but also increased a huge amount of works.
There is nothing fancy this week. I just keep making facial animations and body animations. Animation is a huge task, which is also something that takes time and patience. I am not an expert on animating, but I will try my best to make it as good as possible.
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.
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.
I started modeling and texturing scenes in my animation. Totally I need four scenes: working room, livingroom, corridor and printing room.
Since these rooms requires a lot of furnitures and props. I modeled part of it, others are found on the internet, all the models are free. After that I textured them in Substance Painter. I did two versions of the livingroom. One is for the first part of the story, and the second version is for the suicide scene. I firstly layout the scene and build the pose of dead body, after that I export the character and the scene into Substance Painter to draw the blood. It took me several days to finish shading and texturing.
I started to design my character after finished the script. The character is a man who works as an architect/designer in a company. The character should wear like an office stuff. Therefore, I draw an outfit design for the character. The design is quite normal. The man is wearing blue shirt, jeans and sneakers.
Below is the design of the character:
After that I modeled the character. I firstly find a free male base character on website and reshape his head in Zbrush to get the result that I want. I then find our clothes in character creator 4, which is quite suitable for my character.
I then used Substance Painter and Mari to paint skin textures of this character. I spent most of the time making diffuse texture, normal and SSS textures because these textures will significantly affect the quality of character rendering. Especially the SSS ( sub-surface scattering) texture, which judges the texture of human bone and skin.
After that I also used the base model to generate the human-like creature for this animation. The creature has a giant and weird mouth which is full of blood. It also has long fingers, which looks creepy. I also want the creature looks like a dead body and has some blood on it’s skin. Therefore, I used Substance Painter to make another version of skin texture. This skin texture has more green and blue colors on it to mimic the dead body texture. I used some physical brush to paint blood on the model so that it can form quite realistic blood flow effects on the body. These brushs are really handy, which can also be used in the texturing of environment.
This week I started to prepare for my FMP. What I would like to do in my FMP is a short horror animation which is based on some urban legend artworks such as SCP, Backrooms, Mandela Catalogue, Game Control , etc.
I firstly did some research on urban legend stories and artworks, trying to find out which kind of style I want. Urban legends usually base on some background like night city, village, secret laboratories and folk stories. I finally decided to build up a story based on abnormal space and abnormal products.
After that I came with several ideas like secret investigations, laboratory accidents and other things. I finally choose to write a weird experience of a normal person working at midnight. I want the protagonist to get into a space that looks normal at first, but as the story goes the space will become weird and become aggressive.
Here is the breif of this story:
CHANNEL-7: the protagonist who works overtime until midnight experiences hallucinations after watching a non-existent Channel-7 program on TV, which triggers his abnormal behavior and leads to tragedy.
I decided to split this story into three parts:
Part 1, the protagonist is working normally and accidentally get into the strange space (in his mind).
Part 2, the protagonist exploring in this space and then find out weird things in this space. Finally the protagonist was trapped in this space and lost.
Part 3, back to the reality, the protagonist has been found dead and committed susuicide.
Storyboard
Based on the story, I started to draw the storyboard, which is about 40-50 shots. I added more shots during the production, and finally the storyboard covers about 50-60 shots.
