Week3: An abstraction animated work
question: consider an animated work you feel represents formative abstraction that meets the above criteria and provide a short explanation of how this is evidenced in the work.
Week2: the FMP thesis proposal
- On graduation which area or environment of production do you wish to focus upon and why?
- What skills will you need to attain the standards required for vocational practice?
- How will you showcase your FMP practice for the final shows?
- Is it important to directly connect the thesis research to your practical work?
- Do you have an area of research you wish to conduct that is unrelated to practical element?
Week10: Team Work Summary
When each team member gave the initial version of the content they were responsible for, VR students integrated all the scenes and animations we did, and gave us a preliminary VR game test screen recording:
Part2 Personal Work Summary
I summarized my personal work in this collaborative project:
2d Character Design (1 character)
3D Character Model (1 character)
Character Hair creation (1 character)
Unfold UV and paint textures (1 character)
Design and modification of a scene (models and texture)
Binding the body and face of the role (1 role)
Adjust character and camera animation (1 scene)
Lighting (1 scene)
Rendering and composition (1 scene).
This is my personal working:
Part3 Retrospect the Teamwork
We have a group discussion every week. During group meetings, we would present our work of the week and then suggest changes to each other. Meanwhile, tell the team members what we plan to do next week. When I have some uncertain ideas or problem, they will give me some suggestions to help me overcome or solve it.
This is the link of miro and Onedrive cloud disk of our group, which is convenient for everyone to upload materials.
When I first joined the team, we need to make five 3D character models and five scene. But in this team, we only have two 3D animators, and we need to build five character models in two months, which is too much work. After discussing with them, the students in our team made some cuts to the script. At the same time, some characters were demonstrated by two-dimensional animation, which successfully reduced the workload of three-dimensional animation from five models to two, which was also the workload we could complete within the specified time.
In the middle stage, we invited students majoring in dubbing to help make dubbing of our working. Each of us, based on our own content, talked to them about what sounds we needed and what references we found so far. On the day before the meeting with them, I drew the storyboard overnight in the hope that the students in the dubbing department could have a more vivid understanding of the dubbing effect I wanted. Last week, I successfully received the dubbing email from them. Thank you very much for their efforts and contribution.
Last Friday, there was a playtest. Unfortunately, I was busy rendering animations in the classroom at that time, so I missed it. But the rest of our team is there. Many students played our team’s game and gave many useful suggestions, which made all the members of our group happy.
After receiving feedback, VR students made some modifications to our team working, and this is our final recording of game.
The Game file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1j0ClhA6EIHiy7kJJl_KHGBmXVgm6ORsr/view
The whole team work:
Part4 Reflection
About my team and teammates
This collaborative project was my first VR game. First of all, I would like to thank all my teammates, Zhou Qi, Iris, Xuan and Yiying Liu, for their tolerance and help to me in the past three months. There is a lot of respect and understanding among team members. If anyone has any questions about the project, we will discuss them in the group in time. In fact, I learned a lot about games and VR from them because they had areas of knowledge that I didn’t know about before, like how to import Maya files into Unity. In the process of cooperating with students in dubbing department, I also found the importance of timely communication. We need to give them enough time to make music. At the same time, I also found their excellent qualities in the team leader and team members. They will give me their advice immediately when I go wrong, incase the problem went worse. It is in this open environment that each of us can give full play to his own strengths and make the project better. At the same time, they also gave me a very powerful help when I met with problems. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who contributed to this project, especially all my team members, because of whom we can create such a warm team working.
About Myself
In this project, I learned to believe in myself. At the beginning, I didn’t have the confidence to finish such an arduous task. Every day was very anxious and painful, but when I forced myself to work and study step by step, I found that the problem was not so difficult. As long as I am on the path to solving problems, they will be solved one day. By making this story, I also taught myself that if you want to be loved, first learn to love and don’t be the proud rabbit.
My blog address:
Week 1:
Week 2:
Week 3:
Week 4:
Week 5:
Week 6:
Week 7:
Week 8:
Week 9:
https://wangyuyan.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2022/03/16/week9-rendering-and-composition/
Week9 Rendering and Composition
Part1 Solve problems encountered in team work
At the beginning, our team and I wanted to put the Abilene model into Unity to realize the combination of animation and VR. But I don’t know if it’s because the model I made is too complicated. The Abilene model was imported into Unity and there were always various errors. I checked the model and exported the FBX file four or five times. But the problem remains unresolved. We had no choice but to render the animation in Maya.
This is a problem with Abilene’s FBX file being imported into Unity：
Rendering
Before start batch rendering, I set different render qualities in the render properties of the first frame. The first frame is then rendered, with high quality images taking 40 minutes to render and low quality images taking 15 minutes to render.
low quality:15 minutes
high quality:40 minutes
Part 2 Group discussion and decision making
Then I sent the rendered renderings to my team members and told them the rendering time for each renderings. I talked to them about what rendering quality to use. They thought it was too long to render each frame in 40 minutes. Low quality pictures although there are noise, but the gap with high quality pictures is not very obvious. In order to finish the task on time, the team members uniformly chose low rendering quality.
Part 3 Problem
Maya always crashes without warning during my batch rendering. So I had to bring a USB drive to the school to render. Next time I have a chance, I will try the rendering farm recommended by Anna for rendering.
This is the rendered sequence：
Part4 Cooporate with students in the Sound major
Three weeks ago, our group had a meeting with students majoring in dubbing. We told them the story we were working on, and we told them about our voice acting needs. They emailed us their dubbing files this week.
Part5 Composition
I did the final video synthesis in PR using rendered sequences and the dubbing given to us by the students in the dubbing department.
Final composite video：
Part3 Feedback & Updates
Part7 conclusion
In the process of cooperating with students who in Sound major, I found the importance of timely communication. Because our project time is very short, we need to communicate with them in advance, tell them the sound quality and effect we want, and leave them enough time for dubbing. Otherwise, it will be difficult to get the perfect voice acting effect before the project deadline. If I have the chance next time, I will try the rendering farm recommended by Anna, because it really consumes a lot of time for me to use my own computer or take a U disk to school to render, and the picture quality cannot be guaranteed.
At the same time, It is a pity that the Abilene model was not successfully imported into Unity and we did not achieve the perfect marriage of animation and VR. Because there are very few opportunities for us to cooperate with students from other departments during the postgraduate period. It was a rare opportunity to bring VR to animation. If we have enough time, I hope we can solve this problem. But luckily, the leader and team members came up with a new solution. In my sense, they changed the way they were designed to interact of VR and animation. It may not be as good as the first thought, but the end result is good.
Week 8: Lighting
Part1 Reference
As I said in week6 blog, These room reference were searched by group members together.
Part2 Lignting
The tutorial
I found a lot of tutorials on lighting this week. Although I had learned about lighting before, I hadn’t used it in a long, long time. I almost had forgotten everything I had learned and had to start learning again.
The tutorial
At the beginning, I created an ambient light for the overall model. The story takes place at night, so I found a picture of the night sky.
I created a zone light and a parallel light outside the window.
To brighten the character’s face and add reflection to the room, I added a zone light on the wall opposite the character.
Wrong attempts and corrections
I tried many way, finally, I solved it. I lowered the opacity of all the glowing models and added a point light source in the center of each object.
For each light, I set a key frame so that when Abilene turns off the lights, the lights go out.
This is the lighting effect in the room when the lights are on.
This is the lighting effect in the room when the lights are off. There is a bit of blue light coming in from the window in the lower left corner. The lighting effect may not be obvious due to the different screen brightness. If I make something like this again, I will increase the outdoor lighting.
Part3 Feedback & Updates
At first, I planned to put a point light source into every bulb at the head of Abilene’s bed, but in practice, I found that the scene was rendered much slower with each additional light. So far, I’ve added a lot of light to the scene. If light bulbs at the head of Abilene’s bed were added, the atmosphere would be great, but the rendering time would turn to be horrendous.At the same time, the software will crash easily when rendering. To this end, I consulted with my team members. Their advice to me was that the ambience of the lighting in the room was good enough so far. It is not recommended that I turn on all the lights, making sure the project is completed on time as a priority. Finally, I accepted their advice. Removed the light from Abilene’s bed, and lit only the light above the room.
Part4 conclusion
In order to make the lighting atmosphere better, I carefully arranged the placement of each star lights on roof. In the process of making the lighting for this room, I realized that I still have a lot to learn. Making lighting is a very artistic thing, which requires certain artistic aesthetics and theoretical knowledge. At the same time, I need to spend time learning and practicing how to adjust the lighting and the function and use of each light. By trying to understand the properties and functions of each light, I can make better lighting in the future. If I had the chance to do it again, I would modify the intensity of the light outside the window. To make the light into the room more visible.
For lighting, I have saved 4 working files.