Skip to main content

Further Research


Unity

Over the last semester, Cassie has primarily been looking at Unity and the processes needed to bring our Virtual Reality project to fruition.  Due to the heaviness involved in researching unity and trying to learn the software, it is a necessity that the remaining members of our team, including myself, learn various aspects of unity.  This will help when it comes to piecing together our final version of the project and will maintain a shared and equal dispersion of work for each team member.

I have begun looking at how our models and textures work within unity.  Cassie gave out a document she created which helped us to understand how we could plug in textures and values into unity to get our textures to appear within the unity scene.



In addition to this, as I will be taking on some animation roles within the next few weeks, it is important I have an idea of how we can transfer our animated Maya scenes, into Unity in an effective, non-corrupted and productive way.  I have found various information on this mainly via online chat boards and through some youtube tutorials but we may need to bake our animations so that this transfer can be done correctly.  We are using IK based rigs and on initial research, it seems that IK rigs may not be compatible within Unity.  If this is the case, we need to find a round about way of getting our animations into our scene.




Substance Painter

I began researching further into Substance Painter and the opportunities and depth it could help us gain towards achieving our visualized style. Through the Allergorthic Training site, I was able to begin looking through tutorials and adding to my knowledge how the interface and work space setups functioned. After this, I was able to take in basic models from our environment and begin playing around and experimenting with the many presents available within the software. I made a list as to the main textures being used throughout our environment and was able to link the models that will be taking on these new attributes - Leather Models - Stool, Seats, Booth Seats Wood - parts of juke box, tables, counter, frames, Ceramic - cups, mugs, plates Plastic - floor, ketchup, mustard, parts of Juke Box, Metal - coffee machine, cup holder, napkin dispenser, cutlery, parts of Juke Box, chair legs, table legs Glass - juke box, coffee pots, windows I have continued to look at various references both contextual and conceptual as I have modeled and textured. It is important for us to begin to really nail down the final look that we imagine for the set. Hopefully through these precautions and measures of actively seeking out research and then relating back to our early concepts, we will be able to achieve this ideal style. Once the models have been textures to a specific likeness of our team, the textures will be exported using the Unity 4 present in Substance. From here, Cassie will take the exported texture files and link them to the environmental models setup within the Unity scene she has imported from my Maya file. From here, Cassie will be able to begin looking at more finalised lighting set ups and get a better idea of how the textures respond to the light to give us the best possible look within our scene


Matthew Hamill

We received a guest presentation from former Animation Belfast student, Matthew Hamill.  Below are the notes taken throughout his talk which was primarily focused on the workflow and production line of projects in animation -

Research - style

Full stop and comma keys - use to go frame by frame through videos

Reference - you have to shoot reference.

Shoot your own - specific, good craic, be aware of your limitations

YouTube - endless, references, kwonkicker, exercise tutorials, parkour videos, 100 walks

Movies - inspiration

Reference + Image Plane = 😂

Video - Google Drive - Premier Pro (editing software) - import into Maya

Need to call the file a certain thing or Maya won't read it.

Export - Media - PNG sequence - "name of video"

Full stop before numbers, not underscores. E.g. "yawn.0001"

Encode Sequence

Maya - select camera - attribute editor - environment - Image Plane

Hold down control for more control

Prep to make animation easier

Viewport + graph editor

Everything starts in the hips -
HIPS DONT LIE - work out from the hips

Find your golden poses - Blocking Pass

Keep it Clean - all keys on one line each

Breakdowns - spaces in between poses
Refine tour timing - think about spacing - is it snappy or smooth?

Jamaal Polish Pass Check List

Add Overlap / Clean your curves /
Clean your arcs / check for symmetry

When Do I Ask For Feedback? After blocked out animation - ALWAYS

TIPS - when you first get a rig, pose it. Put it in weird poses. Makes us familiar with the rig and know where everything is.

Learn how constraints work - joining things to other things - eg. Weapons to hands - mugs etc

Use Plugins - Animbot / Pose Library/ ZV - Parent Master

USE REFERENCE

listen to podcasts - lanimate / game developers conference / the Joe Rogan experience

Mail other animators

Script Editor - History - Echo All Commands

Create Buttons - clear history, do the thing you want to make a button for - copy and paste to bottom area, create a button and name it appropriately.

TweenMachine

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Optimising Models

To optimise our scene even further, myself and our Director, Cassie, decided to start deleting faces for various models in our scene that are never seen by the user.  These are mainly on furniture, large counters, table items, counter items, fridge and kitchen door.  In this blog, I will post the videos of a few of the newly optimised models, some images from the process and explanations from other blogs and videos I watched as to how basic models need to be to ensure our scene is optimised as much as it can be. I found the article from Evermotion on optimising scenes to be very helpful in giving me the knowledge and understanding of why optimisation is such a large part of a project such as ours.  The real time rendering that we will be using within unity is processing a lot of information at one time.  If a project has a lot of textures, geometry and animation, this can be described as an expensive project.  Not that it costs a lot of money, but rather i...
Post a Comment
Read more

CV and Business Card

Before heading into the big bad world of employment and potential freelance work, it is essential we leaving Undergraduate level with a professional portfolio of components we can use to sell our skills and help put us on the industry map to propel us towards a future career. This is in regards to two main pieces of self promotion.  The CV and business card.  It is important we have these designed, printed and accessible on the night of our end of year show so that company reps, directors and other industry members can view our projects and then take something tangible away from it to remember who we are and what we are capable of. When it comes to CV, I have always been taught through my years of business orientated education that it is simple, clean and not overly creative.  I was always taught that colour is tacky, images are resented and icons are acceptable but need to remain minimal.  When I approached this initial design stage of an updated and a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Expressions and Animation Testing

As key posing and refining animation have begun and have progressed, myself, Lorna and Megan who are animating our narrative, decided we needed to gather a larger collection of research.  For this research, we wanted to gain both primary and secondary assets that could be used to assist us in giving our characters life, personality and attitude.  We knew that the best way to do this, yes, is the way the voices are recorded and spoken, but from an animation perspective, it all comes down to body language and emotional expressions. With this in mind, we set out to gather our own, and trusted research material that could be used as reference for us as we develop our animations.  Firstly, we captured images of our own faces portraying various emotions as we see them.  Secondly we were fortunate enough to receive a book full of expressions and references from our tutor Henry, and this was so valuable to us and we took many photos of the emotions and shared them on ou...
Post a Comment
Read more