The development process of this Previz cooperation project has always surprised me. At first, Sean and I thought it was just two of us working with a classmate from VFX, and then to develop a short story, mainly to create an atmosphere. A short Previz. But as more students joined this group, the content of this project gradually expanded, and eventually developed into a Previz with a short plot of one and a half minutes, with character design, modeling, binding, animation, special effects, and sound, almost full-process animation production.

In the beginning, we tried to discuss our progress once a week. This is our initial division of labor.

Firstly I worked with Yufei to make the girl. He was responsible for drawing design drawings, and I was responsible for modeling. Yufei has a wealth of work experience. He draws characters quickly and amazing, which greatly helps me. Follow-up modeling work. After that, I conducted a binding study with Murray. He is very good at communication and promptly asks any questions. Jay, I mainly communicate with him in the part of the special effects. He is very proficient in Cinema4D. At that time, I asked him some questions about C4d outside of the project, and he also patiently gave me answers and demonstrations. Although classmate Layne is in China and has an eight-hour time difference with us, he is also very serious in his work. He has drawn a lot of shots and tried his best to express every detail clearly. And after the final film, he produced very good music and sound effects, making our whole Previz look more complete. Although Evanna of VFX doesn’t talk much, she is very efficient in communication, expresses clearly, understands quickly, and has been completed on time in production, and she has her own unique ideas. Sean is a very good partner. He is passionate about this project. He often communicates with me the follow-up ideas and arrangements based on the progress of the project. He has unique insights into story expression and animation.

Later, as the work progressed and everyone’s work was basically fixed, we were in separate contact with the people responsible for related content, and then Sean and I organized and coordinated everyone’s animation special effects content.

In this process, we have been using onedrive for collaboration, anyone can upload and freely modify the assets in onedrive.

I think the biggest trouble I encountered during the process was how to distribute the work content. In the beginning, everyone has their own pre-work content, such as researching rigging, designing character and environment, researching special effects, and so on. But when it comes to the later stage, it is easy for someone to be busy but others not to work. So considering that there are many students majoring in 3D animation in the group, I created 6 scene files while making the layout, corresponding to the six students with different workloads, segmented the clips of different lengths through the cameras, and then the members who worked more make short-cut animations, and those with less work make long-segment animations. The final result is good, however, this also brings a problem, that is everyone’s animation production habits and styles are different, and the animation between clips may sometimes have inconsistencies, such as the movement of the previous shot and the next shot. Regarding this problem, I later modified some shots to block some of these problems.

For example:

This is the action at the junction of different segments made by two students. Direct connection is not possible. So I modified the shots, these are the results.

This project has also greatly improved my personal ability. In the preliminary work, I learned to make character models. This used Zbrush, Maya, and MarvelousDesigner. Among them, MarvelousDesigner is new to me. Practice really has a great effect on learning efficiency. Although the model eventually had somebody structure errors, considering the production time, I am still quite satisfied with the final effect of this model.

In addition to modeling, there is also rigging. In this project, I participated in rigging these two characters. I learned advSkeleton5, especially the facial expression rigging and the rigging of clothes, which I was unfamiliar with before. This collaborative project allowed me to learn this knowledge and skills. At the same time, the initial goal of my participation in the project has basically been achieved, and the 2D motion blur effect I want to study has also made great progress. With the help of Mehdi, I implemented Houdini to add movement to the animation.

Coming back to this project, after I understand the workflow and how to make it, the part that comes to my mind is animation and animation techniques. Modeling and rigging are also very interesting, but what I want to learn more is the animation part, how to make a better animation, how to use some techniques to make the animation look better and more stylized. The technique and animation performance will be my next step. Technology and art can complement each other. Sometimes the need for art brings new technology, and sometimes new technology can also provide unique art effects. In the next semester, I’ll learn more animation.

This is our final Previz:

PS: I am very grateful to Yu and Lucy, who have been giving us suggestions during the production of our project. It is very pleasant to learn and listen to music together hahaha

This week is the final special effects and animation editing work. I received special effects sequence frames and abc files made by Jay and Evanna.

Abc files can be directly imported into the scene using Cache->Alembic Cache, and then adjust the position and size to match.

For the effects of smoke and explosion, I imported the sequence frame into Maya as the texture, then assigned it to the plane, and adjusted the frame offset.

Finally, I exported all the animations made by my groupmembers with Playblast, edited them in Pr and matched their colors. After that, Jay added some special effects such as gunfire and glitch effects, and then the sound effects were made by Layne. I would also like to thank Frank. His Japanese line is so cool!

This is our Previz.

Animation

This week I mainly produced part of the animation that I am responsible for.

This is the  layout:

The most important part of this is the backflip of the girl. This is the reference I found:

There are also many conversions between IK and FK. First, when the girl steps on the man’s chest, the feet’ IK is converted to FK, and when it is landed, it is converted from FK to IK. At the same time, because the knife in the female character’s hand is held by a man, the girl’s right hand has to be changed to IK, and then switched to FK again after leaving.

This is my final animation clip:

CyberMan Rigging

This week I helped Murray and Sean create and modify the rigging of the male character. Our missions are like, Sean is responsible for the rigging of the man’s robotic arm, while Murray and I are mainly responsible for the rigging of the character’s body and face.

Body Rigging

This part of the operation is basically the same as that of rigging that female character, but it is worth noting that the character’s clothes have a long hem. This part cannot be simply bound to the legs, it looks very strange. Considering the previous method of using influence, I think that the skeleton that follows the Hips part can be directly created here. In this way, in the early stage of rigging, it is possible to determine which parts of the clothes are controlled.

This is the final joints:

Because the metal arm is bound separately, the left arm joint automatically generated by advskeleton5 needs to be deleted. This is the actual skinning part:

After modifying the skin weight, (this process is really troublesome)

we can use copy skin weight and parent constraint to bind some props of the character.

Face Rigging

The face of this model is also a difficult problem. First, it is a non-symmetrical face, but the mouth is still symmetrical, and the left eye should not be bound.

After realizing these problems, I found that the previous method of binding female character expressions cannot be used directly, but to enable Non-symmetrical in advskeleton5. After that, we will get the left and right columns, and we need to select the vertex or edge of the left and right faces respectively.

Although the left eye does not need to be bound, advskeleton5 still needs to select some basic elements of the left face. After selection, it will still be blocked by the left metal eye, so there is no problem.

Finally, the robotic arm and color materials are added.

Pose Test

This week Jay and Layne finished the storyboarding part, and they gave me a storyboard to make the layout.

Considering the time, I decided to allocate the clips made by everyone in the process of making the layout. I imported the simple bound model into the scene and created six scene files, corresponding to six 3D computer animation students in our group.

It took a long time to make, but I also learned a lot about the attributes of Maya cameras. The one I use the most is Focal Length. It can also be used in the Attribute Editor of the camera. The focal length of the camera. Increasing the Focal Length can zoom in on the camera lens and enlarge the size of the object in the camera view. Decrease the Focal Length to zoom out the camera lens and reduce the size of the object in the camera view.

In addition, there are Near Clip Plane and Far Clip Plane. This property can control the camera’s cropping range. It should be noted that if the distance between the near clipping plane and the far clipping plane is much larger than the distance required to include all objects in the scene, the image quality of some objects may be poor.

This is my final Layout video:

This week I mainly made the bind and skin of the girl model, which are mainly divided into body rigging, face rigging, and cloth rigging.

Regarding the body rigging, I have several important functions to record:

Mirror skin weight: When modifying the weight of a symmetrical model, you only need to modify one side and copy it through this function, which is very fast.

Hammer skin weight：In the process of modifying the weight, especially the joint part, the problem of incorrect weight is often encountered. At this time, this function can easily modify the weight of the selected part to make the movement inside the joint look more reasonable.

Smooth skin weight: This smoothing function is better for smooth operability than directly using a brush, and is more suitable for handling deformations outside the joints.

Copy skin weight: Because the model has many equipment attached to the body, especially the legs, it will be troublesome to apply the weight separately, so this function can easily copy the weight of the internal body to the body equipment.

Face Rigging：

AdvSkeleton5 provides a very convenient process for facial binding. What needs attention here is the location of each part. Because the wiring of the face of this model is very good, it saves a lot of time for face rigging.

Another problem is that the face of this model has some accessories, so the weight of the face needs to be redrawn.

Cloth Rigging：

Because the clothes are bound to the body, the clothes move with the body. At this time, if you want to control the clothes individually, in addition to creating a new control bone separately, you also need to use the add influence function.

Polygon Smoothness

Specify the matching accuracy of the smooth skin point and the given polygon to affect the object. The larger the value, the more rounded the deformation effect. Set a value between 0.0 and 50.0. The default value is 0.0.

NURBS Samples

Specifies the number of samples used to evaluate the graphical influence of the NURBS influence object. The larger the number of samples, the closer the smooth skinning is to the shape of the affected object. Set a value between 1 and 100. The default value is 10.

Weight Locking

Specify that you want to avoid indirect changes to the weights of the affected objects, which is usually caused by weight normalization during weight drawing and editing (see Locking smooth skin weights). Maya keeps the weight as “Default Weight”. The default is off.

Default Weight

Specify the default holding weight when Weight Holding is on. The default value is 0.000.

Direct binding will cause this problem:

After binding, I noticed an unexpected effect. During the weight drawing process, the model produced an effect that seemed to have abdominal muscles when bending over. A surprise hahaha.