Week 10: Project developments

I have decided that I will set the scene for the Fisherman project in the early morning since I have carried out some research on fishing and I have found out that fish are more active in the morning and late evening (this results in greater feeding confidence from the fish) and experienced fishermen tend to go at this time of the day.

I have researched few ways I could create exterior lighting in maya and I have found d this tutorial which I have implemented in my scene using the physical sky tool in Arnold to recreate ambient sky.

when you create a physical sky it creates a dome and you are able to see it using Arnold render view: what it created is a gradient sky with an horizon light. The is one source of light which is mimicking the sun that is why the light has warm values and blue shadows.

You can control the dome rotation. In the physical sky menu you can use the ground albedo option to lighten up the background affecting the bounce light. Elevation is the option to use to decide where you want the sky to be. Azimuth can rotate the light. The sky tint can edit the sky colour. You can even change the size of the sun or turn it off and on depending on the ambient light you want.

Knowing all this, I have applied it to the ocean scene I have previously created:

I also continued experimenting with the ocean/lake I want to create for the project and I followed this tutorial:

I have created a disc and implemented the geometry of if (turning up the subdivisions). Deleted the history, created an ocean shader but when you run the animation the disc is flat and the waves are not showing. In the effects menu I have selected BOSS editor, I have first created a wave solver and created a spectral wave which added waves to the surface. In the menu you can edit the heights of the waves, the length as well as the scale of it. I have used TMA as the frequency spectra type to randomise the waves. In the future I will add my boat to in to have local influence on the water.

Final render:

Week 8: Structuring and writing an Introduction and conclusion- Literature review tips on structure

In the completion of all academic writing three essential components must be achieved:

  • A clear understanding of the research topic undertaken and why
  • what information, data, learning informed the research and findings
  • a conclusion restating objective and connecting findings

Introduction and conclusions are an essential part. They may play an opposite role but connect to create a “sandwich” for all writing framework.

Orientate the reader: the introduction defines the topic research informing the reader of the purpose and motivation of the research and a guide to the inquiry undertaken.

Inform the reader outcomes: The conclusion reconnects the reader to the topic objectives appraising the learning and summarises information for readers and consideration of any significant contributions to established knowledge or foundations for further research.

Introduction

the goal of the introduction is to let your reader know what he or she can expect from your paper.

Attract the reader’s attention

Attract the reader’s attention through a “hook”: state an interesting fact or statistic about your topic; ask a rhetorical question; reveal a common misconception about your topic; set the scene of your story: who, when, where, what, why, how?; share an anecdote (a humorous short story) that captures your topic.

State Your Focused Topic

After your “hook”, write a sentence or two about the specific focus of your paper. What is your paper about? Why is this topic important? This part of the introduction can include background information on your topic that helps to establish its context.

State your Thesis

Finally, include your thesis statement. The kind of thesis you include depends on the type of paper you are writing, but, in general, your thesis should include:your specific topic; your main point about that topic; the points of discussion you will include in your paper. Your thesis should be clear, and easy to find. Most often, it is the last sentence of the introduction.

Conclusion

Is about what you want the reader to understand and take away from your research. Begin with your rephrased thesis statement to remind your reader of the point of your paper. Summarise the points you made in your paper and show how they support your argument; tie all the pieces of your paper together. Tell your reader what the significance of your argument might be.

An effective conclusion paragraph should ultimately suggest to your reader that you’ve accomplished what you set out to prove.

OBJECTIVES

It is important not to use the conclusion to simply summarise the discussion in the section or paragraph. The critical objective is to provide resolution to the findings. It should bring closure to your discussion alongside broader meaning and any implications for other topics.

Mishaps about conclusions:

Avoid phrases like “in summary,” “in conclusion,” or “to sum up.” Don’t simply summarize what’s come before. For a short essay, you certainly don’t need to reiterate all of your supporting arguments. Avoid introducing brand new ideas or evidence.

Literature review tips on structure

The literature review becomes the spine of the thesis; it becomes the central point of the thesis. A literature can be an end in itself (an analysis of what is known about a topic) or a prologue to and rationale for engaging in primary research.

•Organize the literature review around key topics of concepts. Use headings or topic sentences to convey your organizational principle.

•Tell a story about the research. This will assist you with your organization.

•Be selective. Incorporate only studies that are pertinent to your subject.

•Synthesize and evaluate.

•Use a summary to assist the reader to relate every section to the wider topic and to clarify your argument’s movement. Where have we just been and where are we heading to?

•Do not just point to the existence of literature on the topic; compose about methods or results in the studies you discuss.

Frameworks influence the conclusions that we draw. the conclusions you draw in your research may influence the reader so we have to be careful about the conclusion that we draw.

Frameworks are the lenses we chose to investigate our phenomenon, and it influences our conclusions and outcomes.

How to find a framework:

  • Get to know your project:

Title, problem questions, literature

  • Highlight keywords
  • Google your keywords adding frameworks at the end and select images.
  • Is this a real frameworks: supported by valuable literature
  • does it really speak, validate the frameworks

It is crucial that you also mention those studies that contradict your stance. In other words, mention some dissenting studies and explain why they deviate from your thinking.

Week 8: Projects Development

Miro board link:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/

This week I have been trying to add fur to the cat to experiment. I have found these videos where they use Xgen plug-in in Maya. XGen is an instancing tool most commonly used for creating hair or populating a scene with instanced geometry. There are two primary methods of using it, depending on what you want to do.

This is a screenshot of my first attempt of using xgen, unfortunately when I have applied the xgen collection to the cat geometry it took a very long time to load and when I tried to adjust the lengths, the width and the distribution of the fur it did not affect the original fur at all.

X-gen not working:

Since the first attempt of xgen did not work I tried to remesh to quadrangular mesh from triangular mesh which may have taken off the level of detail of the mesh and fur would have been easier to create.

However, I have attempted to apply fur to the remeshed polygon but the fur would still take too much time to load and I was not able to edit it either.

texturing and rigging the rest of the props

Regarding the fisherman project this week I have added some textures, especially bump map values to some of the props that are part of the scenes. Especially for the boat which will be an important asset for the animation

This is the first attempt of the texture, however the texture was not seamless and appeared to be too stylised.

So I have opted for a much simpler pattern which suited better the boat and the effect I was looking for.

This week I also rigged the fishing rod and studied more which movements it would have to make and rigged the object starting from this reasoning.

For the handle I have just grouped together the main parts of the engine and set the origin at the centre so that when I rotate the handle they would rotate on the same pivot.

As for the main “body” of the fishing rod, I have created some joints which I will after apply some set driven keys to make it brand forward and backward.

Week 8: Case study- Luca Zanotto

Lucas Zanotto is an animator, director and designer from Italy, based in Helsinki. Zanotto’s 3D and kinetic sculptural loops, posted through his Instagram, consist of the short movement of simple shapes that cleverly bring characters to life. In their simplicity, and their character-fullness, that they’re so mesmerising and powerful: they speak to the importance of playfulness and the big impact that the simplest design – when done right – can have.

This week I have tried to recreate one of his works using maya.

I first modeled each item I would use: the face/ball that would rotate on itself, the cylinders that the ball would roll onto and the features of the face as well.

I after animated each component: the ball would only be animated on the Y axes and the cylinder on the z axes making the ball moving onward, which is just an illusion. The goal was to create simple animation that look elaborate.

I after set up the lights to render after the scene and assigned different surfaces to the assets recreating the aesthetic of Luca Zanotto.

Playblast video:

I after rendered the animation and imported it into after effects and composited it with a sound that I have downloaded from Freesound when the ball rolls.

Final Animation:

Week 8: Project development process

This week I focused on animations: I have completed the animations I have started last week adding some details such as the fingers/feathers movements and the eyes too.

I have also created the idle movement for seagull a as well for him to move when is not busy in particular actions. I made the bounce of the body of the character sync with the theme song designed by the BA sound design students.

I after set up the new scenes to be animated creating new animation layers to be assigned to each control that I will b e using.

I would always animate the two characters one at a time to keep things organised

This is a playblast video of all the interactions I have worked on so far

This is the next interaction I have worked on set on the pier. for this animation I also used the voice recorded they are going to be played in the game. As always I start by assigning each control to a different animation layer for different for each character.

I also use the story script to get more detailed information about the context of the animations I was working on.

the following is a playblast video for the interaction 6 set in the pier after that the player has played the mini game where he has to get as many ice cream as he or she can.

For this scene we also needed a child crying since that all the ice creams fro the cart were eaten by the player and the seagulls so I have used a child from the university library and animated a child crying.

This is a first gameplay captures with the incorporated animation as well

I have also created a fly animation for the seagulls which might be needed for transitions in between scenes.

Unfortunately we had some issues with the mesh of seagull A in unity, even though we tried different techniques but none of them gave the desired result. It could be a problem of computing power or a defect of the program, because for the other seagull everything worked as it was supposed to using the same techniques (Convert a smooth mesh preview to polygons).

Week 7: Projects Development

Miro board link with project pipeline:

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOKHnfj0=/

This week I have been working on both of the projects main rigs: the fisherman and the cat.

Fisherman:

On Youtube I have found this channel which explains thoroughly how to rig a humanoid characters adding the main and basic features that a model would need. This sets of videos are different according to which part of the body they are explaining.

Feet Control

This video explains how to rig the feet of the character to add foot and toes rolls and how the hierarchy of both the controls an d the rig would work

Following the video I have applied these notions to my character

I have created the IK handles for the foot: the ball and the toe

This is the hierarchy of the foot in the outliner: I have grouped each IK handle and nesting them within each other according to the movement of the foot I after parent constraint the main group to the foot control that I would use to move it.

I have created two attributed to the foot control for the foot and toe roll

Legs Controls

This leg control video was useful to make the legs bend but sticking to the ground at the same time which is very useful for a walk cycle

For the leg Ik handle I have used the following settings checking the sticky options which allowed me to make the feet sticking to the ground when the legs bend.

The video also showed how to created a pole vector to point the knee direction which is made bu selecting the pole and pole constraint it to the leg handle.

Spine Controls

Differently to the legs the spine follows a FK control and this video explain well the dynamics

I have created three controllers and parent constraint them to each joint of the spine and nested them to follow the movement of the parent.

Arms Controls

The arms also follow a FK system where the shoulder joint is the parent and the elbow and the wrist are the child and the wrist itself the child of the elbow joint.

Hands Controls

In order for the fingers to curl I have created a set of driven keys using attributes belonging to the wrist control one for each finger where the top joint, which is parented to the others, curl when the attribute is activated (on 1)

To create the keys I have used the set driven key editor where I have created an attribute for each finger

Head Controls

Following this tutorial I have created a control for the head and parent constrain it ti the head joint to allow the character to roll the head and twist it too.

Eyes Controls

the face controls for the characters are the following: one for each brow, one for each moustache and the eyes controls one for each eye and a general one: the eyes are aim constrained to the controls to have his pupils moving along having the head still. the eyes controls are going to be nested to the main body control directly so that when the character moves the eyes won’t be still.

If when I will import the character into the main scene I will have to adjust his size I can scale it with the main body control using constraint scale

outliner clean up

This is the final groups arrangement for the character.

paint weight head turn

After each control was assigned and working I polished the character movements with skin weights, in the following picture I was skin weighting the head making sure that the shoulders were not influenced and the ears as well.

Cat project

Cat rig

following the same process that I use for the fisherman, I adjusted the main cat rig.

structure of the rig

Feet won’t stay attached to the ground where the chest or hip controls were pulled down because the feet controls should not be parent to them but to the main body control.

Controls in the leg to sit

rearranged the controls FK

rearranged the controls FK to help the cat sit and move better: at first I thought that the cat body hierarchy was going to be different compared to a biped one, however I have experimented with it and I have found that parenting everything to the hips works just as well, apart for the feet so that they will stick to the ground when the hips are bending.

Binded the skin using these settings

skin weight on the spine adjusting the influence for the joint controls

do the skin weight for the legs especially the rear ones, was very challenging since they are going to bend and stretch very much especially when the cat will sit down

Just like I did for the fisherman I have created the eyes controls where I have also created the eye blink using the set driven keys editor

I have also created an attribute for the foot roll which will help for the walk cycle

For the eye blink I have created two sets of eyes, one open and one closed and keyed their visibility to create the illusion of an eye blink

I have also created the whiskers for the cat by modeling and scaling down a cylinder and duplicating it.

Foe the skin weight I have found to be more accurate the colour ramp which uses a range of different colours where red is where the joint has more influence on and dark blue the least influence on.

I have also skin weighted the brows which will help to add expressions to the character

Same for the mouth corners which will move independently from each other

Week 7: Project development process

Animation

This week I started the animation and since we are going to be using the animation layers I have done some research to understand better how do they work. I have found this video which O have found very explicative:

Following what I had just learned on the video I have started the idle animation for seagull B, assigning to each part that needed animation an animation layer:

I also imported the sound of the game inspired from spongebob theme song to sync the idle of the character to the music. On each animation layer I assigned a different key colour to differentiate them and also attached each control (wings, neck, body) to the correct layer.

I then started animating the seagull according to the inspiration I used as a reference which is the “Finding nemo” seagulls from the film (As I showed in the previous weeks). This is the final video:

Speech Bubbles

This week I also created the speech bubbles for the dialogues for the game according to the design made by Esme: for the black outlines I have used a cylinder extruded the top and bottom faces and edited the vertices to create a wavy frame for the speed bubbles; For the white background I have flattened a smoothed cube polygon and finally created a 3d text (ink free) which resembles the texts used in comics. I after animated the different components so that they would float around at different rates.

Player wing update

I also rearranged the player wing model according to the outliner hierarchy which works in the fox export for unity: the geometry, the controls and the joint should be individual parts of the same group.

Eye blink solution

The previous process I had created for the eye to blink (set driven key) was working fine when the character was in the position I had set the keys into, however when the body of the neck control position changed the eye blink would not work as well. Instead I thought of another way still employing the set driver key tool Which I have used and came up with in another project (the cat project): this time I have created another set of eyelids but closed, I have created two sets of attributes in the eyes controls, one for the open lids and one for the closed ones; I have saved the visibility of the eyelids instead of they rotation, so that when both the attributed are on to 1 the closed eyes would show and when the attributed are set on 0 the open eyelids would show.

Animations

This week I also started animating the interactions occurring in the game where the two seagulls talk to each other and to the player too: I have followed the animation layer video as before to assign to each control of each seagull an animation layer to work on and to keep everything organised. I have imported in one scene, which in this case is the Beach interaction 3 (according to the animation shot list), all the assets: the speech bubbles and the two seagulls an started animating the seagulls according to what they are saying in the scene also using the script as a reference especially since movements are included.

These are all the animation layers I have been working on

these are the animation which I will further clean up:

Week 7: group meeting

During this week meeting we talked about the final developments to take care of in order to close-up the project:

The students from BA Sound Design shared some more sounds they have been working on both ambient and action/effect sound.

The VR group members demonstrated the part of the game they have been developing, and they let us play the game in VR as well.

This is the to do list that we came up with for next week meeting:

Week 6: Project development process

The game is going to feature a child crying since that the seagulls stole the ice cream

I have used a model from the University library to animate

Since that the movement is going to be looped I created a second long animation with a very emphasised action showing how much the child is disappointed and sad about not having ice cream. I have also made him point to a direction since that, in the game, he is going to call his dad to tell him that the seagulls stole the ice cream.

This week I have also created a grab animation for the player wing to complete the actions in the game

Esme added more joint to the legs rig to create walk circles and also integrated a knee pole using the pole vector constraint; she also included in the attributes of the feet roll controls and toes roll control so that the paws could roll as well which will facilitate a walk cycle. She shared the new rig with me and I after binded the mesh to it.

After binding the skin I started do the skin weight concentrating on the legs first: part of the leg joint influenced the body as well so I made sure that it did not happen.

After I focused on the wings starting from the base making sure that they did not have any influence on the body

Regarding the fingers/feathers of the model I edit the influential of each individual feather focusing especially on the thumb and index to make them separated. To be much more detailed I selected the individual vertices of the feathers mesh and flood the skin weight

I then checked if everything was working fine with the rigs and I noticed that the set driven keys I had previously created weren’t working anymore so I created them back:

first for the fingers to make them curl separately

then for the bottom beak to making it close and also for the eyelids to create an eye blink

Export into Unity experimentation

When exporting the rigged model at first that was the result however that was due to the fact that the history of the mesh was not deleted. However, after figuring this out the mesh was showing but it wasn’t attaching to the rig but the animation existed in the Unity file. Esme did a test export with an animated boney character and that worked. So she replicated the outliner the structure of the groups and replicated it for the seagulls. Then baked the animation onto the rig group, and the animation has to be created on an animation layer as well.