Storyboard and character action production:

This week, Karl, Sean and I confirmed their respective progress. Before, I spent a lot of time on asset production and workflow research. Now I can basically start the production of specific content.

The first is to draw a dynamic storyboard to determine the basic atmosphere feeling.

After discussing it, we all agreed that music is a very important part of this kind of short films that are not very plot-intensive. I contacted a younger student of mine who studied music in London before, and after describing our plot to him, he shared a piece of music that fits the theme very well. The arrangement and structure of the music are also very suitable for the rhythm of the short film.

Based on this music, I made a storyboard in ps, and added notes in PR.

This is the final storyboard video:

Regarding character animation production, I decided to use the mocap animation data redirection production method. First, I listed a list of actions that may appear in the movie.

Then I searched for suitable actions in mixamo, then used HumanIK redirection in Maya, and added the modification details through the animation layer. Take the Idle state as an example. To check the action pose, I uploaded the model to the Mixamo website and adjusted the parameters to get a basic animation.

Choose withoutskin when downloading, so that you can get only the bone data.

In Maya, HumanIK first creates a character definition to define bone information.

Then create custom rig, select the controller created by advskeleton5.

Then import the downloaded mixamo data and create a new character definition.

The character gets an animation! Then bake animation to a new animation layer.

Then I created a new animation layer, modified and adjusted the details in it, and added the statue held by the character. This is the final animation effect:

After importing it into the UE4 engine, combining with the scene made by Karl, we got the first shot: