Category: Advanced and Experimental 3D Computer Animation Techniques

The revision of the final design continued this week, with the main change being to add mapping to the final phone screen to show the most important phrase of the whole film on the screen.

Work on the graduation design continued this week, firstly changing one of the camera angles, bringing the camera closer and changing it to an elevated view, with the meteor moving from off-camera to the golden line of the camera; and secondly, again changing the speed at which the meteor recedes to make it slower.

This week’s final project continues to add shots and revise speed. Firstly a shot of a back looking at a meteorite in the sky was added and secondly a first person view of the meteorite was added to change the speed of the meteorite going backwards.

Drawing

In Maya

Full playbast

This week’s learning was to create character animations for the robotic hand and match them to the classmate videos provided by the teacher implementation.

1.I started by making a plane, assigning the keyframes provided by the teacher to its mapping, and checking the use image sequence, so that I could see the video reference in Maya.

2.The robotic arm model will be placed in the right position and the character animation will begin.

The final playbast.

This week has seen the continuation of changing the footage for the final project, I have completed most of the video, building on this to change details, speed etc, for example based on the teacher’s comments. I stopped the missile as well as the meteorite going backwards, I modified it to stop at a very slow and slow speed instead of stopping completely, deleted some shots to make it more perfect.

This week I worked on the design and production of my own robotic arm, because the style of robotic arm I did in class was sci-fi, high class, techy, so for this arm I wanted it to be the opposite, in a steampunk, shabby style, I also used the hydraulic rods taught in class, as well as binding, and finally spreading the uv in maya and texturing in sp.

The model drawing in maya, some wires were made and rig to them.

The material mapping was done in sp, using yellow worn metal with some red and black metal.

The final rendering of the drawing in maya.

The most difficult part of the final project was the special effects, the meteorite and missile effects which I hadn’t come across before, especially for the flames, smoke, explosions etc. I collected some instructional videos online as a reference.

For the two main characters in the story, I found some references to use in designing them.

For the male character I modelled, I wanted him to look not too young and have a melancholic feel, in keeping with the apocalyptic setting of the story.

This week I started by adding some elements to the robot arm that I liked, for example I made the small arm into a model that can be opened and simply bound using the set driven key taught by my teacher and added a gun inside the arm, controlled by a hydraulic lever that can be popped out of the arm, I really like this design.

During the class, the teacher continued to work on the large arms and enriched the details, most importantly the use of the ret driven key to control the movement of the shoulder armour so that it could follow the movement of the arm and not go through the mould, which was a new learning for me.

And more control loops have been added to bind each joint.

This week the changes continue to be made to the section on the final project, with more refinement to some shots, such as some of the missile shots, where I combined the split shots into the same shot, from the missile flying out to following, and modified some details, such as the timing of the main character turning his head.