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.
In this week’s robot arm course, we were taught to make simple bindings, something I hadn’t learnt in my previous undergraduate years, to control the maximum and minimum values of the floating robot arm, a very useful function, and also learnt how to make hydraulic rods, bindings with locater and constraints to enrich the robot arm, which I will be using on my own designed robot arm.
This week I continued to refine the pacing of my film, adding some shots, changing the speed of some shots, character movements, pauses in appearances and finding some references to use in creating mood boards.
The topic I want to study is called different lighting and lens for the guidance of the audience, in the study of 3d animation, I am most interested in the understanding of lighting and lens, and learn the most knowledge, but in the exchange with friends I found that few people pay attention to some of the plot, the audience’s understanding of the characters, the character’s personality, etc., are closely related to the lens own lighting, so I want to thesis among others, to explore this point.
I found a number of papers, books that I could use as references.
Kennedy, K., & Mercer, R. E. (2002, June). Planning animation cinematography and shot structure to communicate theme and mood. In Proceedings of the 2nd international symposium on Smart graphics (pp. 1-8). ( Available at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/569005.569006 )
2. Grodal, T. (2005). Film lighting and mood. Moving image theory: Ecological considerations, 152. ( Available at: https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=qBLBSSjj1IoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA152&dq=film+lighting+mood&ots=16X3VYYeVz&sig=9Iiiy7JA-SEi6zNggVFOp9H-vzs&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=film%20lighting%20mood&f=falsehttps://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=zh-CN&lr=&id=qBLBSSjj1IoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA152&dq=film+lighting+mood&ots=16X3VYYeVz&sig=9Iiiy7JA-SEi6zNggVFOp9H-vzs&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=film%20lighting%20mood&f=false )
This week I continued working on the small arm part of the robot arm, learning some new tools in order to be able to create more details, such as the command to make the face round. After the class I made a simple material for the arm and added some wires to the connections to improve its finish, for the material I used a self-luminous material, for the lighting I used surface lighting and added hdr mapping.
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.
For the direction of the thesis and the choice of topic, at first I always considered whether to choose the direction about technology in short films or about art theory. After asking the teacher’s opinion in class, he suggested not to limit myself only to the project and not to the technology, so I started to think about recent topics about 3d animation, I needed something new and creative, such as animated films as a branch of cinema? I came up with this topic from some articles, but I have a lot of doubts and need to keep refining it later.
This week’s robotic arm started by creating a quick selection for all the fingers, which makes it easier to animate the character in the future, and added the palm of the hand, using a basic modelling approach to make it work.
This week I made the video below of the story I most wanted to do about love, got the camera moving, gave the characters some simple character animation and added some shots, the story is about 50 seconds long in total and now I want to work out some effects about the story.
This week I continued to enrich the story with more footage based on the last idea,,, especially for the new ideas, I made a lot of footage to describe the story, and also found some difficulties in the process, such as how to make special effects, etc. The two ideas that I want me to continue making now, one about love and one about space, are both topics I really want to make, and of course the difficulties are both Special effects, the first story was inspired by a quote, please let the meteor, the nuclear bomb come a little later, because I met the person I love, I enriched this quote and finally came up with this story.
