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.

This week I discussed the current storyboard with Jay and Layne, and we are a bit slow on it. But we have clarified the basic issues. The main issues are the rhythm of the fight and the continuity of the shot.

This is our first version of the storyboard. It can be seen that the content of many shots is not clear enough, and there are still some controversies about the ending and some shots changes.

Environment:

I talked with evanna about the production details and style of the buildings. We still hope that we can refer to the style of Overwatch and make some buildings with clear shapes and simple structures.

This is a building I made.

To put it in a more straightforward way, it is to add geometric depressions or protrusions in the building and add some pipes. It is also noted that all geometrical turns have rounded corners.

This is the new scene made by evanna:

This week I mainly did the modeling of female characters. According to the efficiency, I decided to modify and add some models on a basic human body model to achieve the effect quickly.

I found a Dva model on Sketchfab, which is very suitable. Because our concept design mainly refers to Overwatch. Using such a basic girl model can quickly grasp the overall shape. And there is a more convenient that the topo of this basic model is already very good, which can save time for Re-topology.

Firstly, I split the model into several parts, the face only needs to be refined, and the topo does not need to be changed. Then the hands, which can be used directly, and the main things to be modified are the body and legs. In addition, I also decomposed the facial features to make them easier to modify later.

I did the most modeling and adjustment in Zbrush. This is the model after modifying the body shape and topo.

About her hair, I found a very suitable Zb brush. In Zb, all the brushes with Cruve in the name can created geometries attach to the surface of the model, which allows me to quickly make good hair effects.

For the production of leg armor and underwear, I use the extract in Zb. By drawing the Mask on the surface of the model, I can get the model of the same shape. After simply adjusting the edges and wiring, I can get the rough shape.

There are also mask and facial metal details, which are also made in the same way.

Next, Jacket is very important. Considering the details of the folds of this jacket, I decided to learn to use Marvelous Designer. This software is really amazing! Simple and fast, this is the effect I finally achieved in MD.

Then modify some fold details in Zb and retopo, and finally simply add basic materials in Maya.

This is the final effect.

Last week, everyone’s work was fairly smooth, and some drafts were made for the storyboard; a design drawing of a character was also completed.

According to the storyboard, the basic layout of the scene is also produced.

A visual effect test result is good.

This week I group the members again so that everyone can switch to try other tasks.

The environment has been basically determined, and Layout will use the current scene project to make camera animation.

In addition, about the solution of 2D motion blur. After I consulted Mehdi, I have a preliminary plan in Houdini. Analyzing the whole effect, combined with the second week tutorial of Houdini, I thought of this idea of ​​making the model change its trail.

First, there should be a part where you can select the vertices you want to deform, then you can get an offset direction by getting the position of these vertices in the previous frame, and finally set a control value to control the current position of these vertices and the position of the previous frame Blending (like Blendshape).

This is the current motion blur effect:

It can be seen that the way of selecting vertices by normal still needs improvement. I have learned that there is a node called Drawthemask in Houdini. I will further improve this 2D motion blur solution.

Regarding the theme of the cooperation project, it was originally the idea Sean and I came up with when watching the spell return battle. This is a popular animation recently, which contains some very cool fighting scenes. We all liked the fighting scenes and soon decided to make a previs with fighting as the theme

Before convening the cooperative members, in order to ensure that the participants are interested, we first need to set some visual styles and background stories. Our idea is to merge according to the points of interest. For example, Sean likes mechanical design, and I prefer the action performance of human characters. So after searching many references, we decided to use cyberpunk as the main visual style. For reference, refer to the rules of Overwatch in the design of characters and scenes.

So soon we have a basic concept.

Concept overview:

In a street, a masked girl fights a cyborg man.

It’s an open collaborative project where you can add whatever you want to create. You can try all kinds of work in the project and have unique research content.

At present, it includes the research points of stylized rendering(like overwatch) stylized visual effects, simulated 2D motion blur in 3D, and programmed modeling.

The ultimate goal is to create a previs for 1-3min. It is still in the concept stage. Here are some styles so far.

For this concept, I also used PS to make two concept pictures to show the general idea:

After the project was released, we soon received contact from some students. They are from 3d computer animation, VFX and illustration. So far we have eight students participating in this project.

In the first week, all of us had a short meeting. After discussing the learning direction we were interested in and our thoughts on this short film, I made a more detailed setting draft.

Time:Near future, related words: postmodern, science fiction, cyberpunk

On a clear night, the light of the moon when it is not blocked by clouds can cause shadows to objects.

Location: A deserted alley in a modern city with several small stores or signs.

Characters: A girl whose profession is a bounty hunter and a cyborg man whose profession is a killer.

Event:

The cyborg man was destroying the robot in the alley, hitting it vigorously and smashing the wall out of the hole.

Then the man threw it into the trash can. There were some robot limbs scattered around the trash can.

The mechanical man took out a cigar and lit it, took a deep breath, and then raised his head to puff out smoke. Looking up, she saw a masked girl holding a short knife standing on the roof. The girl squatted and rushed towards the mechanical man. The man dodged hurriedly, and the cigar was cut into two pieces.

The girl fell and rolled, her back turned to the man.

The man stabilized his flustered figure and spit his cigar aside.

The girl slowly got up, revealing the sign behind her.

After seeing this, the man showed an expression of disdain and said: “bounty hunter.”

The two faced each other in a stance, calm before the battle.

…

Background:

In the future era of high-tech and low-life, the emergence of smart machines will bring new contradictions to society. The renewal of the government’s judicial system can hardly match the development of technology. The solidification of social class further leads to chaos, and excessive chaos brings new order. The intrigue among the upper-class society has also been brought to the table, and professional killers seem to have become an indispensable role for every upper-class power. And the bounty hunter system acquiesced by the government has given the people at the bottom a new way out, allowing society to maintain a stable but cold state to a certain extent.

The masked girl is a bounty hunter, eccentric and agile. She grew up in a slum and was influenced by hip-hop culture. Dress more freely, there will be many cultural elements on her clothes, and she uses a short knife. When performing tasks, the attire is more capable, and she wears a mask to hide her face and does not speak.

The cyborg man is a professional killer with a strong body and a cold face. He is usually responsible for handling some people or robots that they hate for the upper-class people. Frequent killings made him brutal, and while this job brought him money, it also took his arm, but fortunately, he could use a high-tech metal arm instead. The metal arm has stronger strength and defense.

Character and scene design:

Pay attention to the shape and silhouette, the color purity is high, and the texture expresses the details. A few Asian elements such as China and Japan.

According to the points that everyone wants to learn or participate in, I divide everyone into five groups and discuss and share with each other to ensure the cooperation smooth.

After the first meeting, we decided to work out our own design drawings or reference drawings in groups and communicate with relevant personnel in time. We will have a collective meeting next Friday to discuss the progress and the next idea.