The main task this week is to complete the texture of character and scene model.
About Character Textures
I made three character models. The texture of the characters’ eyes is drawn using Photoshop, which gives them a more cartoonish style.
This is my main character. Her texture is mainly to draw the skin. I painted powder blusher on her face, which is more playful and cute.
This is a model of my protagonist as an ordinary person. I painted cherry patterns on her home dress and added retro elements. Socks are a common style among teenagers.
This model mainly draws the texture of the apron, and the overall color is light. This way, it can be in the same color scheme as other models, and I hope the style of this animation looks soft.
About Scene Textures
This is a scene in a restaurant where the protagonist and her mother will have a conversation. Here their emotions became stable, so I adopted a cool color scheme, with the color scheme for this scene in the upper left corner.
The color scheme for this city’s scene is red, yellow, black, and gray. This color reminds me of the city streets before dusk. It wasn’t completely dark, but the street lights gradually lit up, and the orange sunset illuminated the outline of the city.
This scene is the protagonist’s room, which is a basic combination of green, purple, and pink. Overall, it’s not very special. It’s just an ordinary person’s room, and the carpet print is designed to make the room look more like a girl’s bedroom.
The current stage is to complete the modeling work of the characters and scenes. The characters are restored according to my character design, and basically the same model has been made. The model of the scene is relatively effective to make, because the bedroom and restaurant are not complicated.
About character modeling
Hair and body are modelled in Zbrush
Make adjustments to the model’s wiring in Maya and model the dress and hat.
This week, I started designing characters and scenes. Firstly, I searched for a large number of reference images and selected some of my favorite.
Character Design
My protagonist is a teenage girl who has two different appearances. One is the appearance of an ordinary person at home, and the other is the appearance of a witch dressed up.
I want to design a girl with red hair. This is the reference image I found, but I hope she has short hair.
So I searched for some new reference images as a reference for short hair. This picture is the red short hair that best fits my imagination, and I use this hairstyle as a reference for the protagonist’s hairstyle.
The image reference of a witch
The above is a reference to the three views of characters. I plan to create a similar stylized character model.
The final design of my character model
Scene Design
The following is a reference for my scene. My scene is mainly divided into three parts: the girl’s bedroom, a restaurant where she has a conversation with her mother, and a garden scene.
This picture is an indoor reference image of a girl’s bedroom
I finished the basic framework of the script last week, but it still doesn’t flow well enough at the beginning of the story and where the conflict is. So I tweaked a few areas of the script.
To make the conflict between the daughter and the mother more apparent in the animated script, you can focus on emphasizing their differences, communication struggles, and emotional tension.
1. Body Language and Facial Expressions:
– Show the daughter’s body language becoming more closed off and defensive as the mother enters her room. She might tense up or avoid eye contact.
– Illustrate the mother’s concern through her facial expressions and gestures. She could furrow her brows or sigh softly.
2. Dialogue and Tone:
– Have the daughter’s initial response to her mother’s gesture of bringing hot milk be curt or dismissive. For example, she could say, “I don’t need it, Mom.”
– Make the mother’s instructions for an early night more insistent, reflecting her worry. She might say, “You need your rest, dear.”
3. Inner Thoughts and Narration:
– Consider adding inner monologue or narration for both the daughter and mother. This can provide insight into their conflicting thoughts and feelings. For instance, the daughter might think, “She just doesn’t understand,” while the mother might think, “I’m just trying to protect her.”
4. Flashbacks or Memories:
– Incorporate brief flashbacks or memories that highlight moments of tension or disagreement between the daughter and mother in the past. These snippets can help establish the underlying conflict.
5. Subtle Clashes in Values or Beliefs:
– Show subtle differences in the daughter and mother’s beliefs or values that contribute to their conflict. For example, the daughter might be more rebellious and independent-minded, while the mother is more protective and traditional.
6. Misunderstandings or Miscommunications:
– Have instances where the daughter and mother misinterpret each other’s actions or words. This can create frustration and further exacerbate the conflict.
7. Resolutions or Turning Points:
– Build towards a moment of realization or resolution. This could be a small gesture, a heartfelt confession, or a shared memory that brings them closer together.
Another thing I found unsatisfying was the beginning of the story, which was too abrupt, so that was adjusted as well.
Opening Scene
The night hung heavy with secrets, an unseen magic crackling in the air. In the heart of it all, a girl on the cusp of something extraordinary, her fifteenth year fading like a wisp of smoke. Little did she know, it was the eve of her transformation into something more than human.
As the sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in fiery hues, she sat in her room, words dancing before her like enchanted whispers. Then, a door creaked open, a glass of warmth placed on her desk. A tender plea from her mother to rest.
With the door’s soft click, the girl’s spirit sparked to life. A secret rendezvous with the night awaited, and a truth she dared not share.
The heart of this story is about a rebellious child’s thoughts and views on the world; everyone has had crazy experiences during adolescence, and in my story, the protagonist turns into a magical witch to symbolize her other state of mind.
Script
Scene 1: Bedroom
Foreground Introduction I still remember that special night, it’s an unspoken secret amongst the girls, today is the last day of my fifteenth year, and the first day I became a preppy witch.
One summer evening, the girl was in her room with a fan blowing, reading a book and taking notes.
The bedroom door was pushed open and the girl’s mom placed a glass of hot milk on the desk and instructed her to get an early night.
The girl nods softly at the sound of the door closing, then the girl gets up and plops down in the doorway of her room to listen for her mom’s footsteps.
The girl smiles badly and then makes a turn to the window, only to spin in place and snap her fingers as she transforms into a witch.
Scene 2 The sky outside the window
The witch excitedly rides her broomstick and draws circles in the sky, surrounded by firework effects pulled out by her magic broomstick.
Scene 3 Crossroads in a busy city
People look at the fireworks in the sky very surprised and reach out their hands to feel the beauty of the fireworks. There were also people taking pictures. The witch walks on the crowded street and passes through all kinds of people, the witch experiences a lot of happiness and new things she has never experienced in the night.
Scene 4 The windowsill at home
Close-up The witch’s feet land tentatively on the ground, she cats and pads her way step by step towards the bedroom, suddenly, she accidentally kicks over the small desk placed on the floor, and the milk tumbles to the ground, making a crisp ringing sound.
Scene 5 Living room
(the design of the living room can be as simple as possible, the picture only shows a dining table, surrounded by dark colors, you can vaguely see some of the arrangements, the daughter is sitting in front of the dining table, a beam of light shines down from above)
Daughter: Mom, listen to my explanation, it’s not what you think, I know my outfit is strange, but I didn’t do anything bad when I went out, I know it’s wrong of me to hide it from you, I just don’t want you to worry, and I have to go to set off fireworks to finish the social mission…
During this time the mom’s figure was busy with her back to her daughter until a cup of hot milk was placed in front of her.
The daughter looked at the present apprehensively, with the movements and eyes of a puppy that had done something wrong.
Mom looked at her daughter seriously said: mom tell you a secret oh, in fact, I was also once a witch!
Mom smiled, her expression was gentle, without the slightest reproach.
The daughter looks at her mom and her eyes gradually brighten up.
Scene 6 Outdoor sky and moon
Daughter and mom fly together in the night sky, straight at the moon, revealing the silhouettes of the two of them. The trailing smoke from the magic broomstick leaves a brilliant firework.
Design references about the main character
The main character in my mind should have red hair, so I looked for a few references of girls with red hair. These images are from two-dimensional artists on Artsation.
The image looks mischievous and makes me feel naughty, so I love the visual effect this image conveys.
The redheaded girl in this picture gave me a lot of imagination to inform and inspire the design of my main character.
The two pictures above can be seen as the source of my creative inspiration. I hope I can design a strange girl with short red hair who looks playful and cute and full of thoughts about life.
This image is a basic keycolor reference for a stylized animated short that I wanted to make, using childlike elements to reflect the troubles and pains of growing up.
This week is a summary of the animations done in the past ten weeks. Here are two videos of my animations.
Advanced Body Mechanics
I made a few more changes to the arm animation, hoping to show more about the pauses in movement and a sense of coherent rhythm. But I found that I didn’t pay attention to the direction of rotation of each controller, so the left and right hands might appear to be reversed 360 degrees, and I modified this issue for a long time.
In addition, I found a shockwave effect on a footage site. I added this effect when the character hits the sphere of the shockwave and it looks fine.
This is the address of the footage site：
https://vfx.productioncrate.com
Acting
The acting video I rendered out separately to make it look more like a complete small movie. For visual effect, I changed the character’s original lambert material to an Arnold material and set it to a light color. This will make the animation more clear.
Summary & Reflection
During this ten-week period, I completed two small animations, one for body mechanics and the other for acting. These two animation trainings gave me a clearer understanding of the animation process. First I need to do my own reference animation, this step is very important, just like a good movie needs a good script and pre-design. When doing the first body mechanics, I also had a hard time expressing the feeling of the body floating and the rhythm of the pauses of each body part. So I need to keep checking the position and duration between each frame. Also, the Fk controllers of both hands need to be adjusted one by one. As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t pay attention to the orientation of each controller of the hands, so there was a 360 degree flip. To fix this problem, I cleared some keyframes behind and then adjusted the hand animation. About the second animation acting, I really like to try this lip-synching animation, because it mainly focuses on the character’s facial animation and reflects the change of emotion more. But I still had some problems with the rhythm control between the movements, for example, I always did not keep the animation keyframes of each body part in a similar position, so sometimes the neck and shoulders appeared to be out of sync. Also, I had fun doing the mouth animation by performing it myself many more times to get better familiar with each pronunciation and then slowly animating the mouth part.
Finally, thanks to George for every feedback he gave me, it helped me a lot to learn and understand the animation process！
About Artwork
This is my final rendered video
Summary and Reflection
This artistic creation left a deep impression on me because it was the greatest attempt and effort I could make in the shortest possible time. Compared to the previous collaborative unit tasks, this task is more difficult because I am completing this short film alone. In this creative process, I encountered and solved many new problems, such as how to create character hair, learning how to rig character using the ADV plugin for the first time, learning scene building and light rendering in UE5 for the first time, encountering Maya’s FBX format file where the texture disappeared, and then finding the problem and trying to solve it. Understand the differences in animation import between Maya and UE5, and more. I am pleased with my progress and patience. At the same time, there are still some points that need improvement.
I didn’t think enough about the story design in the early stages, so it took up time in the middle and later stages later on. Pre-planning is necessary and needs to be planned in advance.
The wiring of the character’s model needs to be considered when doing the graduation design, otherwise there will be another case of character face rigging failure.
I hope to learn how to import ADV with controller into UE5 in the next time, after all, the animation made with motion capture data is not natural and vivid enough, and I need to modify the animation by hand to be able to do more expressions on the character’s face and increase the emotional expression.
This week’s task is to add lip animation and face animation to the characters
Plus lip-sync animation
The animations mainly focus on the face, and the lip animations refer to my own movements when speaking lines, as well as theories based on the pronunciation of the mouth. The length of the whole animation is 7 seconds, a total of 5 lines. I will detail the process of lip-syncing the first two lines.
First is the first sentence, Love you：
The line in this place is “love you”, and the first thing is to pronounce like a,ai, so I made a round, full-grown lip-sync.
Here it is pronounced as v of Love
Here is the pronunciation of the u in You, with the whole lip outward and slightly protruding
This is followed by a second line： But stop pushing your life style on my face/
Here is the mouth shape of But, first the B is pronounced and the lips close inward first, showing a straight line.
Adding down is the u in But, pronounced a, so the lips are more rounded.
Then comes the mouth shape of STOP pronunciation, where the mouth shape first changes to a flattened line, then opens the mouth and the mouth shape becomes more rounded and pronounces the O sound.
The p of Pushing, the mouth shape should be made closed first and slightly puckered.
Next is the pronunciation of the O in Your, with a rounded mouth shape.
Finally, the L and F of Life are pronounced with the mouth shape showing stretching into a line, then the top teeth pressing against the bottom lip and the bottom lip contracting inward. This is the pronunciation of “f”.
Artwork
This week’s content is rendering and editing. Most of my rendering is done in UE5, with two separate shots rendered in Maya.
Before rendering, preset the camera motion and set the output format of the rendering to PNG format.
I will upload the rendered file to Onedrive and save it
Next is organizing the files and then editing
There are approximately 21 files in total, which are then edited in order and accompanied by special effects. The website for special effects materials comes from：https://vfx.productioncrate.com
Where the candle was extinguished, I composed a smoke effect
In the rain scene, I added a layer of rain footage
This week is to make keyframe changes to last week’s blocking, and to take notes on George’s feedback.
Last week’s animation was clean on most of the poses, but the lack of movement linkage makes the animation seem a bit stiff. The main goal of this revision is to make the character’s upper body animation more flexible and linked.
The third blocking modification
The third modification can be divided into two parts, the upper part of the shoulder and neck, and the second part is the movement of the arm.
Raise that right hand to the right, then turn the head to the right.
Then twist the body and tilt the neck to the left.
Then adjust the finger animation.
Firstly, the posture of the hand was adjusted and raised to the right. After that, the animation of the upper body was adjusted, with the overall body tilted to the right, then driving the neck and the left shoulder.
After that, do a key frame of putting the right hand down a little bit and sit the body slightly straight.
The head is turned substantially to the right and is shown talking to the person next to her.
There is a keyframe of the process before the right hand is lowered.
Hands fully on the table.
Artwork
This week’s character is mainly to complete the character rigging and animation.
First, I need to state that I am also learning to rig with Advanced skeleton for the first time, so I searched for a new video tutorial on rigging. The good thing is that the plugin is not very difficult to use, so I was able to follow every step of the tutorial clearly.
I learned character rigging based on this tutorial, and it uses Chinese, which is very friendly to me.
I finished rigging to the body after repeating it several times
After that, I continued to try facial rigging, which is a little more complicated than body rigging, and the steps are more complex.
Here are pictures of my process in rigging the face.
Firstly, the selection of eye parts
Next, select lips and eyebrows
Then, the positioning points of the entire face are gradually selected
Finally, there was confirmation of rigging, but when my steps reached the lower jaw, the plugin prompted me that there was a problem and I couldn’t rig. I tried for two afternoons but couldn’t solve this problem, so I only rigged the character’s body.
About animation
Initially, I planned to create animations in Maya and then import them into UE5, but my idea did not achieve.
Due to the need for a special method to import the skeleton created by ADV into UE5, it is very difficult. I have tried many times but cannot import them correctly. Before that, I made three animation clips in Maya that were abandoned.
So I changed my approach and after searching for methods online, I found a website called Mixamo, which has many actions and can import my own model for rigging and assigning actions. Its principle is similar to Motion capture.
This is my model, and she is doing the actions I assigned to it.
This week’s acting animation refines Blocking from the previous week. But perhaps the movements were still not natural and consistent enough and lacked dynamism.
This is the second blocking animation that has been done, mainly adding hand and head movements. Also, the animation of the eye part has been added.
Feedback!
George’s suggestions for changes to the blocking animation focus on four areas. They were about the coherence of the whole head-driven upper body movement, the hand pose waving process, the adjustment of the shoulder animation and the naturalness of the hand lowering movement.
Head driven upper body posture changes
More obvious twisting of the head and upper body
Next is the planning of the arm posture adjustment
The picture above is a breakdown of the process of the hand waving. I had only done the keyframe with the hand on the table and the keyframe after the hand was fully raised, but I didn’t pay attention to the keyframe in the middle, so it looked like the arm was not raised vividly enough.
Hold the right hand out at a distance from the body
Next, it’s the shoulder animation that appears to be broken, and it looks like there are still adjustments to be made to the settings of the shoulder controller. Make the movement of the shoulder more stretched.
Small design of action: palm lift
Finally, the ending action, as the hand gradually falls onto the table, also needs an undulating change of motion to give this part of the animation more flexibility.
Artwork
This week’s content is the construction of forest scenes. Because of the learning of UE5 asset building in the previous week, I basically already knew the main points, so the forest scene was not that difficult to build, and I only spent one afternoon to finish building the scene.
For building the forest scene, I studied this blogger’s video tutorial. Since my scene will have a pond in it, I want to know how I can do the water effect in UE5.
In fact, this blogger’s method is very simple. Use a plane instead of a water surface, and then texture map the water.
This is the effect of the water surface I created, it looks pretty nice.
This is the material ball of grass
In fact, the whole scene is based on the existing assets, and I built it the way I like.
These are the assets I use, and they are all completely free and open to everyone.
This week’s task is acting, focusing mainly on the facial expressions and lip-synching of the character. What I’m going to do is find a suitable audio of a movie or TV show, and then perform it myself based on the recording and then do the facial animation.
Learn more about how we pronounce
These are demonstrations of the lip movements during pronunciation. Different syllables will form different lip patterns, for example, the most obvious ones, such as b, m , p, my lips will tighten inward and close and form a straight line.
Video of my acting
This is a video of my performance based on a clip from the American series ” 2 Broke Girls”, with the main actions focusing on the face and lips, as well as some of the eye changes.
According to my previous acting video, I divided the movement into two parts, one part is before the hand is raised, this part of the movement is mainly focused on the head and shoulders. The second part is after the hand is lowered, the body is tilted backward, and then the head and shoulders are animated.
Artwork
This week’s content is to build scenes, a total of three scenes, an indoor scene, an outdoor scene of the forest, and a scene of the door and the stone wall.
To save time, I chose to build the scene with UE5. Since I am a beginner in UE5, I don’t know how to operate UE5 at all. So I followed the video tutorials on Youtube to learn how to import UE5 assets and build scenes. Fortunately, there are many video tutorials for UE5, and it is very similar to Maya, Blender and other 3D software operations, so I am familiar with it quickly.
This is the video I learned in order to do the third scene
Following the video tutorial on this, I started to try to build my scene, mainly needing some stone walls to form a channel, and then digging a hole in the stone wall to place a door.
The most accessible point is that UE5 comes with a library of asset materials called Bridge, in which some basic materials can be found, and then start building to create my own scenes.
Full view of the completed scene build
Create a camera view
The effect of the camera view, here I have hit the light and adjusted the exposure.
Options for lighting
Camera movement can be keyframed
I rendered the clip right away, and it only took me five minutes! It was amazing!
About the indoor scene
I downloaded the basic model of the indoor scenes, but I made the mapping of the indoor scenes by myself.
This is part of the indoor scene textures
The files for the indoor scenes I placed in Maya first, then mapped, and then imported into UE5. The interior scene is typical of Chinese furniture and screens. So in the overall tone I chose a dark color
Rendering effect in Maya
All I have to do after that is to import the scene with the texture into UE5, I exported it in Fbx format, so that it is a model with texture information. I exported it in Fbx format, so that it is a model with texture information. This is the way it should be, but after I imported it into UE5, there was no texture information.
There’s a big problem with this step, and I don’t know how to fix it!
So I sought Qiaoqing Yu‘s help and thank him very much! It took us about two days to solve this problem. He told me that his previous exported Fbx’s file was with mapping information, and that I was having this problem, probably because of a Maya bug. Later, after testing the exported Fbx file several times and looking up many methods on the Internet, he found that the Fbx file would automatically generate a texture file after importing into Maya, and UE5 was unable to recognize the Arnold material ball.
The problem was found, so I reworked all the models with Lambert materials, which consumed a lot of my time. Finally, the indoor scene was successfully imported to UE5.
