Category: Collaborative

This collaborative project lasted for 5 weeks, during which we experienced various difficulties, and finally we succeeded in making this short film, which was a great sense of achievement. Just like our film, when you keep working hard, it will always blossom and grow into a big tree with stars hanging on its branches.

Everything is difficult at the beginning, and the script was the most difficult part at the beginning. We overturned countless scripts, ideas, forms, styles, just to find the most suitable, best looking technique that could be done in time, and finally we created this script based on our theme.

My job in the group was storyboard, modelling, texture mapping and final UE rendering, I had 4 years experience in animation before so mid-production wasn’t too complicated for me, the use of UE was one of my biggest difficulties.
I’ve only used ue once before, 3 years ago, so I’ve learnt the basics of ue now, but the final rendering did have some regrets, some of the more advanced shots and colour manipulation made it impossible to render the image perfectly.
I believe that after this experience, I will be more familiar with ue in the future.

In conclusion, I would like to say that for everyone who studies 3D computer animation, group work is a necessary path. No film is made by one person, it has this team of hundreds of people who have polished it over several years before finally presenting it to the audience, and it contains more than 2 areas of expertise, probably dozens, so I treasure this collaborative project, I have learned a lot from it and look forward to the next encounter.

We completed the final 3D animation, a short film, called starry tree.

In collaborative projects, my division of labour is, storyboarding, modelling, material mapping, UE rendering.

The final short film wrap-up took place this week, with all the model movements going into UE, where the shots were built and the final renders were made.

Shots in UE

Rendering in UE

This week’s group project was to integrate and import all the models into ue. I was responsible for the trees, which I first exported as fbx files in Maya and then put into ue for rendering.

These are two different ways of mapping trees.

Today’s lesson started with learning how to use ue5, importing the models from the previous lesson into UE5 and tracing some of the five senses on them.

This week we also used a brand new website for next generation character modelling, it is very developed and has pre-defined character faces, every organ shape and just a simple click to create a brand new character.

This week I exported a MAYA model of a tree I made as an FBX file and imported it into UE to see how it looked in the UE scene.

For this week’s group project I completed the final tree, which was different from the initial design in that I changed it to a pink color so that it would look better with the blue glowing lawn in UE4.

In the group work session, the teacher taught us to use a new software which was amazing, it used a recorded video and scanned the characters from the video and turned them into 3d models.

Step one, import the video and scan it, the model will be rough at first and the background at the back will look poorly finished because there is no information.

Step two, select the extra unwanted parts to remove so we are left with only the parts we want.

Step 3, round off the model so that the face looks more comfortable and has more detail.

Step 4, apply the decals, which will be automatically generated in the video.

Step 5, finally I exported the model as an obj file and opened it in maya and the decals were still available. This made me feel like I have more ways of making models and I can learn more about this software in the future.

This week we have started to paint our own character design. The main character of the story is a 6 year old boy, we want to try different styles of characters, for example, refer to the Little Prince, make the model angular, set the material to wood, paper, another important scene prop is the tree, we want the tree to be full of stars at the end, this we will try to achieve in ue.

In the last session on Friday I learnt the basics of using unity, such as how to import models, how to animate them, how to play them etc. This was my first time using unity and I thought it was interesting, I knew a little bit about it before that and I am very hopeful that in the future I can use what I have learnt about 3d computer animation and combine it to make a vr or game.

This week saw the first presentation of the collaborative project, so far we have decided on a theme, script, style and have started character design, modelling and scene building in ue. I am mainly responsible for the model of the tree in the story. I have used different models, from lowpoly to perfect, to show the growth of the tree, before that I looked for references and some pictures to inspire me.

Reference：

Model of trees:

In addition to the model of the tree, I also made some of the props that the main character needs to use.

This week we are talking about the theme of the collaborative project, the story, the software used, the style, slowly determined, first of all our story about a child planting a tree, and finally grew a sky full of stars, is about the cause and effect of a theme, mainly using maya and ue these two software co-production, now the difficulty lies in the weather system and special effects, we want to make the animation like experimental animation a little, not pure storytelling, but can make people think. We wanted to make the animation a little bit more experimental, not purely storytelling, but something that would make people think.