Author: Jixuan Chen

I am also responsible for the lens design in this graduation design, because I am a film fanatic, so I will refer to the lens language in some classic films when designing the lens, and use some special lenses to enrich the view of the film.

The fact that we have established a good shot position is helpful for character animation, we can more quickly know the length of the character animation and the rhythm, as well as silhouettes in the shot, so as to better modify the character animation, but also for the later in the UE in the shot animation to lay a good foundation.

It’s funny, I also tried motion capture during the FMP production, it was the first time I used motion steps, and I also worked as a motion capture actor and interpreted it for many days under a green screen in a motion capture costume.

The animation of the monster getting up and roaring after being knocked away is my first motion capture animation, I didn’t understand the process of modifying the data of the motion capture at the beginning, which led to the production of a very long time, and the effect doesn’t seem to be as good as the animation produced by myself, while the motion capture has its advantage of being fast, I’ll continue to learn about the related use of the motion capture in the future, and of course, I’ll still produce my own character animation, which is irreplaceable.

Continuing with the character animation this week, in addition to the flying flap, I needed to complete the animation of the monster fighting on the mech and then being knocked away by the cannonballs, this is an interactive animation, I created the fight animation of the monster first, and then created the key pose for the mech’s body to take the hit animation first.

The two crashed through the wall immediately following the flying lunge, dropping down to the lower level of the battle area.

Here are the character animations for the battle.

According to the video collected and filmed last week, I started to create the character animation this week. For the character of the monster, I encountered some difficulties during the process, for example, it has huge arms that are different from those of normal people, so I repeatedly modified it during the key pose stage to make sure that the silhouette is aesthetically pleasing in the shot.

In the character animation section I was in charge of there was a monster flying at a mecha animation, which I think was the most difficult one I was in charge of, so I still looked for a lot of references upfront because there was no way I could do this animation on my own.

This week we started the production of character animation, which is also the part that we learnt the most when we came to UAL. Compared with the undergraduate time, the process of producing character animation is more standardised now, and the process is more familiar and smooth. I am mainly responsible for the character animation of the monsters and mechs in the graduation design, and some of the animations in it are the first time to be produced, which is challenging.

Firstly, I found loads of videos to use as reference, such as animations of the Hulk, Iron Man and other characters that made perfect sense.

Of course, I also recorded my own animation, and for better understanding, I would like to thank Mr George for designing the movements for my animation reference.

This week I continued working on the textures for the battle area, which is very important as the final battle scene between the two protagonists, and I made sure that each texture echoed the style of the corridor textures, and as before I started by gathering a lot of references, mainly from the mine, and the launching silo textures.

In the production of material mapping, the main use of metal as well as stone wall materials, want to make the whole scene looks very solid, plus some old details, such as: scratches, edge wear, so that the whole scene style looks harmonious and unified.

This week my job was to create a material mapping for the corridor part, the utility is substance painter, for the style of the corridor mapping I looked for a lot of references and picked some films like: the opposite sex, star wars. The main material of the corridor is metal, with some old and sci-fi elements.

We end up rendering in UE5 with 2K parameters, so the accuracy of the mapping requirements are relatively high, most of the mapping is 2K mapping, and 4k mapping is used in some close-ups, and I try to use a variety of texture overlays as well as masks in the texture, to ensure that the texture details are real and rich.

This week is mainly for the corridor model and battle area model made in the previous two weeks for the creation of uv’s, because this time in the creation of the project, we have reached a consensus to use UE5 for the final rendering, so our production of uv’s is very different from the previous rendering in maya, first of all, I deleted most of the back of the model, in order to reduce the calculations in UE5, and second, for the texture, I zoomed in on the texture that would have close-up portions of the main scene, and the rest of the uv’s were placed in the same uv, to make sure that the uv space is of the same size, and that not a pixel grid will be wasted.

The second week’s main task was to create the most important battle scene in the film, where the fight between the monsters and the mechs takes place, so this scene was crucial.

Similarly, we first designed the design of the battle scene, confirming the scale and size, and we strictly agreed on the style so that it could blend perfectly with the corridor.

In terms of design, the battle scene is more like a mine shaft with a high depth, and I added a lot of props to the scene when modelling to enrich the details.

This week began to produce works at graduation, in the preliminary stage, I am mainly responsible for the scene of the model production, in the first week I mainly produce the film in the fight scene between the little monster and the soldiers, the corridor, the production tool for MAYA.

First of all, we will first draw up the design to determine its style, the scale and size of the corridor according to different angles, and how to lay the complicated pipes in the corridor.

In the modelling process, we mainly used inorganic modelling and learned to use two modelling plug-ins in MATYA – cable and plugls, one is specially designed for making complex pipes, and the other one adds details to objects, such as bumps, buttons and so on.