Animation Strategies (Week 2)

Environment Blocking

This week we were learning techniques on how to block out our scene on Maya, using the characters model to help us with the scale of our environment. Blocking out our scene in Maya was to give us an idea of the scale we would need to model our assets for our world and how they would be set up together and in comparison.

We started out by Henry giving us an image to upload to our computers using PureRef, to give us easy access to the environment he wanted us to practice our scale within. The image we had to work with was an empty parking lot with minimal colours of grey and built with a flat floor, a ceiling with light fixtures and thick, rectangle structures holding up the building. The shapes and designs of this building were fairly simple so I had used just the plain poly modelling blocks to scale out the majority of the room. It was interesting to try and in-vision what the size of the walls and signs would be in comparison to a human, so the use of a character model helped in creating an accurate life model of a scaled scene.

This was a quick enough task we had been given to start us off in class and also pushed me to think of all the necessary components I would need to consider when scaling, modelling, designing, preparing and finalising my own fairy island. I have not taken into consideration how I would want my islands assets and overall world to be scaled and how I was going to make it as real as possible.

I had also needed to consider what scales will I be following when I am modelling and sizing my own island, as our theme is fairies, so historically fairies are a lot smaller than humans. I needed to go back and reconsider the entire world or history of our island, as although it may not be documented within my work it would benefit my reasoning for how I designed my island and the scale I decided to choose. Decisions I could consider would be if this island is shared with other magical creatures that vary in sizes, so may appear larger or smaller to the average fairies and also if this is a fairy-built world or if it was inhabited after humans founded the area.

This would mean if the world was built from the ground up by fairies that the sizing of all the items, houses and components run generally small and fit ideal to a fairy’s size and even the vegetation would run small. However, if this was a human originated world then there would be a mixture of fairy-built items and human items left behind. Making the world a mixture as the fairies have developed their own world amongst the human items or the fairies instead made some buildings and items from scratch but have also re-modelled human items that appear a bit larger but serve them a purpose. This would also affect the vegetation because this would be something that the fairies cannot change the rooting of their surroundings and would be living in a towering forest of fruits, trees and flowers. This is all ideas that popped into my head during this lesson and I can have fun either developing my human world and the history behind or making it a bit simpler and keeping the world fairy born but focusing the scale to be fitting for fairies, but realistic enough to view when blocking out my environment.

Blocking out our environment was what we were tasked to do in the morning class and then we were going to focus on our own islands and be put into our breakout groups to talk about the sizing of our island, brainstorming our ideas and to talk about how we are going to block out and size out our island.

We had also been told by Henry that as we are making our assets in Maya separately, we could then also create the base of our island in Maya and for us this means our floating island, then we could all export our assets individually into our island base, keeping the scale of each item similar. We can then use Maya to set up and scale our islands, exporting the entire scene into Unreal, ready for textures and final lighting and filming. This was a great thing to hear giving the fact I personally have learnt a lot from Maya within this first semester alone, so feel a lot more confident having Maya be the main place where I can model my assets, design my floating island and design the entire layout of my environment. I’m aware I will have to export my final model, textures and set up my scene in Unreal for filming, but this is a more manageable task then trying to learn a long list of techniques for this software.

Once we had blocked out the empty car park scene or have at least got a better knowledge of what could help us prepare our scene for Unreal Engine and helping us scale our environments correctly, we then got put into our breakout groups. Everyone was in attendance today in class, so this was positive, meaning that everyone in the group was going to be able to talk together and catch up with what everyone has going on, which is a far better result than people being busy, everyone on different schedules and having to catch everyone up on what we discussed.

Just before we began working and preparing our world in our breakout groups, Henry had introduced everyone to the system Gantt Chart and how he advised everyone in their groups to use this chart to help our assignment production line. In this chart we could document what week we wanted to begin a certain part of our project, the duration of this project and what week we thought we may set a goal to complete this part. We also used the chart to include indicators of what this project includes, the duration and the percentage of how important this part is to complete our environment and our overall grade.

This was a good idea to show where we are as a group in finishing our project and to help anyone who is struggling to understand what work they need to be doing at that point and help us not get too overwhelmed with the continuous workload. We could use this chart as a clear indicator of what part we are meant to be at, what work is next and will help us as a group and as individuals.

As a group this suggestion by Henry was going to be beneficial to our way of working, because we like to keep everyone informed and with some people not being able to attend class or weekly group meetings. This detailed Gantt Chart will hopefully keep everyone keep well informed and up to date on the work. In our group Gantt Chart the activity and tables we included was all the main subjects of work we were expected to complete throughout this semester including environment ideation, task allocation and environment concepts and we also included tables tallying when the plan will start. We talked about what timeline we thought was a realistic approach in completing our work, when we as a team world like to have our work completed and all our weeks, we had to complete this work right up until the end of week 12/13.

As we were already discussing what work we all had to complete and the components of our environments that we would have to model within Maya and create in order to match the fairies’ theme. We changed from using the app Pinterest to spread out all of our images and references we had gathered, to using the more reliable application Miro, Miro was suggested to us by Henry and was a far better way to brainstorm our ideas visually, as Pinterest can become very cluttered looking and is not a good platform to brainstorm together as a group. Everyone visioned their islands different to one another and have different eras, themes and aesthetics they wanted to include in their island. So, this was going to be fine as everyone is able to create their own personal island, but we still needed to see each other’s work so that we could possible work together on combining all our different aesthetics’ to create a centre island with a tree temple, which was going to act as almost the life or heart which gave breath our fairy’s world.

In order to set out in creating what world we are going to create and the assets everyone was going to individually make, a mood board was a good starting point for everyone to express their ideas. In the beginning when I had chosen a fairy’s world as my first choice for an Unreal project, I already had a rough idea of how I wanted my island to look and the style I wanted to create all my assets within. I had imagined quite a folklore, Irish and traditional fairy garden and had always been interested in the aspects of where a fairy lived in their home. This aesthetics was partly shared between me and Megan as she had also admired the folklore style of fairy tales and wanted to base her world around this also. The rest of our group Andrada, Courtney and Emily favoured the more modern fairy look of a neon glow and a very magical and almost ‘Avatar’ aesthetic.

It was good that between a group of five, we had only really two ideas of design that we wanted to go down the route of and this meant that combining these two was hopefully going to be a bit less difficult. We also each had an idea of where we would best see our design working and had all an idea of what part of the environment we wanted to work on, as it was a group project, but we all had the freedom of working on an island each ourselves. We needed to find a way to combine all our islands, to which we all agree including in creating a village which included places for the fairies to live, shop, meet up, explore and relax.

This group meeting was really an exciting start to the brainstorming of our ideas, and it was refreshing to see that as a group everyone was just as excited and eager to begin working together and really just create a lovely fairies island with everyone’s work and style showcased.

As we all had an idea of what style everyone wanted and what part of the island our work would suit best within, it was time to go and discuss briefly how we would combine everyone’s idea and what assets would be more suited to which island. This was going to be a brief talk about the ideas and composition of our world, as we needed to go and design some drawings of our work to really see if and how the colours and styles would fully blend together.

A brief idea that I had to maybe combine to two contrasting colours of me and Megan’s folklore theme and the rest of the group’s neon them, was to possible present the world in different time zones. As a soft colour palette of brown, cream and white would work better in the daylight and the stark contrast of blue, black and green would work better in providing light for the island at night.

This I think personally was a good idea and everyone had liked the idea of neon lights providing light to the environment in forms of streetlights or a range of vegetation and then connecting me and Megan’s soft colours to the fairy’s home or farm shop. A thing to think about thought was how the day to night contrast would work when everyone’s island is showcasing their worlds individual colours, however if we were to show and film everyone’s world together, we would possibly need to set the same time zone, and this would mean one of the aesthetics colours might not show up correctly or be what we are wanting to showcase.

This was going to be something we needed to discuss a bit more and also to go away and draw up some concepts, to even confirm if everyone is happy with the decision and if it was working personally for them and how they would incorporate their world within the groups final filming.