Animation Strategies (Week 10+11)

Setting up, texturing, scene in Unreal Engine

This week we recorded another presentation for our assignment one within animation strategies and the purpose of this presentation was to show what work we as a group had developed up until this point. As it is also our last class before the Christmas break and we all have to hand in our completed assignments A brief presentation before the break, allows the tutors to gather where the class is before the completion of our assignment.

In this group presentation we also wanted to show we had listened to the advice given from our last presentation and wanted to apply the pointers we had gotten to improve our presentation, such as cutting the timeframe from 30 minutes down to ten minutes instead. This showed we had listened well to our feedback and we were able to explain our points, our descriptions of our assets, what we are currently working on and how we are handling or assignment coming up to the deadline.

In preparation to our group presentation, we each created a handful of slides presenting each of our assets we were assigned to personally and gave some images to show how we are working on our assets in Maya, our textures in Substance and how we will complete all of these assets for use in our final unreal project.

The assets I am currently working on for my project is a mushroom house, a picnic table, a stone well, a log fence and a spider web washing line. In the presentation slides I was able to show my beginning concepts of each model that I drew in procreate and then further showed my progress by adding in some snap shots of different angles of my 3D Maya models.

My mushroom house was the first model I began working on and is also for me, the one I thought would take the most time and be the most complex. I have a few windows and doors to add and then my acorn bottom, but I am the close to completing and being ready to UV map and texture for Unreal.

My next assets I was working on was the stone well that again I am close to completing, however I am just left with finishing off my twisted tree poles that I am using to hold up the top of the well. I added in the element of twisted trees growing and holding up the covering of the well to make my basic stone well, a bit more magical and within the woods theme. My picnic table was next, and I really enjoyed the idea of using a large flower with petals and a base to use for the fairies’ seasonal picnic table. This is a fairly quick model to design, however, was held back as when I passed my model onto Henry our tutor and he noticed my petals had lots of polygons that were centred around the middle and was something that was messy in the modelling process and that would cause a problem when rendering in Maya. I agreed with this point and thought it would be best to take my picnic table a step back, deleted most of the overcrowded petals and made a simpler approach to my petals.

The last two models I have not yet started to model, as I thought they would be the least difficult of assets to model and would take the least time and effort. The last two assets are the log bench made from a tree trunk and the spider web washing line with some clips. These are my assets that I think will be duplicated the most as they would be good scene fillers for the background and the spider webs would be good to scatter within the world’s benches and trees.

In our presentation we first showed our Gannt chart and how we all allocated out our assets within the fairies’ world, showing what everyone is working on. The time frame we hope to complete these models by and showing what everyone wanted to create, as different assets would be best suited in different worlds. We then as a group Courtney, Andrada, Me, Emily and Megan each took turns and went through explaining each of our slides for our assets, how we hope to continue, what we currently our working on and just explaining what our work has produced so far.

I was fourth in explaining my concepts, assets, journey in modelling and were I hope to progress to and as always, I nervous showing my work and use my voice to explain my thought process and explain my work. Recording and presenting your work over a pre-recording to our class is a way better method for me as I am naturally shy, and I am working on my confidence when working with others and expressing myself. So, these few presentations that we are doing over lockdown hopefully will make me more relaxed when it comes to presenting in a real room of people and would be a beneficial skill for me to learn over lockdown.

As I watched over my presentation, I noticed immediately that I needed to work more on projecting my voice when I am talking about my work, showing the passion I have for my projects and just allowing the audience the chance to hear what I have to say and the chance to understand my work better. Looking into to it, is noticeable that I am more behind that the majority and I would need to put more time into completing my work, having my models textured and trial my completed models within Unreal.

To say the least I was a bit embarrassed by the efforts which I produced for presentation and the work I have completed up until this point. I can only use this knowledge as a positive reinforcement though and work smarter and harder up until assignment one deadline and show that I want to produce a well thought out and improved design and more a positive work ethic.

The tutors after watching our presentation had gave some time for the groups to take in the feedback they had for our worlds and the work that we have created so far. Some of the feedback I had gotten personally from Henry and Alec was that the couple of assets I had made so far in Maya looked like they were made well and that they included some interesting shapes and overall were cool models to include within my fairy’s world. They both suggested that I needed to make a start in adding colour and texturing my assets, as I am falling behind and these components can really help carry the project and show a nice finish.

My tutors had also suggested that I have the freedom to choose whatever software I wished to use to add textures and colours onto my models, but that it might be nice to practice experimenting with textures in Unreal Engine and that this can help improve my skills within the software and provide me with more options to complete my assets.

Along with this Henry had provided me with some helpful links to YouTube tutorials and a blackboard session he had recorded on how I could create my own texture/materials in Unreal and use them to add small details such as clouds to the bottom of my floating island, to represent the sky.

Having the opportunity to present to the class and tutors the work we both as individuals and as a group had presented up until this point in the semester, was a really helpful thing to provide anyone who was stressing with their work the ability to show their tutors and get one to one feedback. I had been given a number of things to think about in my work and had a good idea of what I needed to go and work on straight away.

This was the same for the rest of my group as we all decided whilst we are all together in class, we may as well take this opportunity to have a group meeting discussing our groups feedback and how we are going to continue working on our projects during the Christmas break. In the group meeting we were all proud of our work, but admitted we were noticeable behind and needed to begin in setting up our island in Maya, to export into Unreal. We were advised and agreed that everyone was going to create their own islands, but to share each other’s assets throughout and keep a similar style between each world. This would help keeping the worlds cohesive, for when we had to film our island for our assignment submission.

In both the last class of our semester and last group meeting before finalising our project, I had taken a pause in writing this blog to work hard the last couple of weeks and make sure I was going to submit my assignment on time. After the initial class I had still a lot of work to carry out such as finishing my assets, texturing them in Substance, setting up my island in Maya and exporting all of this to Unreal ready to be filmed. I can say that I did not use my time wisely and with added pressure of this confusing pandemic and the upkeep of blogs, I was not able to produce my work on time for a group filming. This year and semester have taught me a lot specifically in regard to keeping up teamwork and respecting the deadlines and animation pipeline, but also that time management when done correctly can help in so many ways and provide a safety net for the future, if I find myself falling behind in work.

As I was almost done my models in Maya this was easy enough to finish, as was setting up the model and my final island layout in Maya. In my final design I was using a mix of my own models and my groups models to include within my island and this was overall a relaxing step in finalising this assignment. The difficulty I had was when it came to creating textures in Substance, as I had to practice a bit beforehand to get myself used to the software again and exporting all of my models textures in Unreal, preparation and to film.

Substance was tedious when it came to adding a base colour onto my models and following this up with a mix of colours, materials and textures, however, was the software I felt most comfortable creating my textures with, given the already familiarity with the software and lack of time. Unreal however was a software that I had briefly tried to use in class, but overall, I was very new to Unreal and had to quickly familiarise myself with positioning the lighting in my world, understanding the mechanics and getting everything ready with exporting textures.

Setting up Unreal was a simple enough process as most of the work had be completed on the software’s Maya and Substance and that all was left was adding in my clouds, spider webs and filming the islands shots. Sadly, because I hadn’t managed my time wisely and was falling behind in my work, I wasn’t able to include my spider web and clouds, as both of these textures had the same process to include them in my world, as all I had to so was add them onto a lambert as a material and spread the texture onto a plane model. This had seemed easy enough as I followed the advice of both Henry and numerous YouTube tutorials, but one thing that I kept having difficulty completing was the opacity of my textures, as every time I added the texture on a plane there was a white background. This was a very small and tedious problem that I knew I could understand soon and fix easily and also understanding that these extra textures in my island would really tie the layout together and give great movement to a flat surface. However, I was aware of the time and that I was going to have to film on a software I had already and trying to learn all of these different processes was becoming confusing enough.

This is why I made the decision to leave these textures and to spend the time focusing on gathering my shots for the video. I had been able to get help from a quick YouTube tutorial on how to shoot the scenes and edit the shots together for a final video and this process was a nice way to end the entire project. Allowing myself to be creative with different shots, movements and camera angles to really showcase all the work I had created up until this point. I had made sure to get enough close-up shots of my different island areas, assets that I had personal made and an overall side and birds eye view of my environment. This assignment was such as new thing to begin with from start to end and was a really in depth and satisfactory project to have had the support of a group, but to be able to showcase your own individual talents as well.

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/8535eb_d5d9966e3fdd40f4b309497d6799a69a/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

I hope that the final video I have created shows the effort and enjoyment I had when creating this environment and for this assignment overall, I am happy to have gained some personal goals and really developing my knowledge within Maya, learning a new software Unreal and having a cool and fun final environment to present.