It’s time to continue with my FMP project. The idea came from Attack On Titan. The picture below it’s what I have done so far.
In term3, I made the choice to working on the muscle simulation with Ziva. I also want to learn more about rigging and the hair simulation, then make a short animation and put it into Unreal engine to do the real-time rendering.
However, the whole processes above are not too much about animation. I was really struggling about what kind of FMP should I make and what I am going to do in the future. I like modeling. I really enjoy the feeling of creating your own character from scratch, so I like to spent much time on sculpturing the human body in Zbrush. That is the reason I’m very interest in Ziva muscle simulation. At the same time I really want to learn Unreal engine. Therefore, I decided to do this proect.
However, with the tasks I did over the summer, I gradually changed my mind.
Apart from animation, my personal work is very limited. Therefore, I could only combine the animation works I made during this master year into a showreel, and all the jobs I applied were 3D animator or Previs Artist. In this process, I gradually found that I didn’t have a clear goal for the future. Since I got into 3D software in the last two years, I want to learn everything, but I have never seriously considered what I like, what I should do in the future, what aspects of things are really suitable for me. After finishing some tasks for the companies and talking with my friend and tutor Alan, I gradually got my direction. I decided to focus on 3D animation. I like any form of animation, and my undergraduate study is 2D animation. The reason why I learn 3D animation is that I want to learn more things, but gradually lost my direction in the process of learning various 3D softwares.
I’ve made it clear that I still want to do animation in the next few years. I need to do my job. I need to shift my focus to the animation. Such as facial expressions, body movements, rhythm of action and shot design, etc. I know there are a lot of things I’m not doing well, so I need to improve myself quickly and make changes.
Therefore, I changed my mind of the FMP project. I paused the project ‘Attack On Titan’ and planned on a fighting animation. The reason I want to do a fight scene is I need to prove myself that I can design some smooth fighting actions and that I can work as a game animator. And I need the creature animation to show that I can do more than just biped animation. So my initial idea was some warriors fighting with a ancient creatures, a dragon would be the best choice.
The music usually gives me the inspiration, also is the quick way to start. Espacially the battle scene, you can imagine and arrange the way of fighting following by the rhythm of the music. I always really enjoy this process. For the battle scene, I had to find something exciting. There is a music call ‘KINGDOM-合’ which I listen quite a lot. It’s a soundtrack from an Anime and it was used on the battle between two armies. But I think it will also fit to the fight between a man and a dragon.
The part from 0:00-2:20 is the best part of this soundtrack. I will pick this part as the background music of my animation.
I only got two months left for my FMP and thesis. But in fact, 2 minutes and 20 seconds are quite long, I shouldn’t do too long for the animation. I might couldn’t finish it porperly before the deadline. But I wanted to make some big changes, I didn’t want to do just game animation related or just cartoon animation. I need to do some work that can challenge myself, hoping to prove that I am suitable for different animation positions through this work. Therefore, my idea is to focus on making a new showreel to prepare for the future job application, rather than making a small work in the remaining time to deal with the final major project of this semester. So I will spend more time on it after the deadline until it is completed, maybe until February. But I will try to make a proper Previs before deadline, and the prototype of the entire animation will be shown before then.
Therefore, this work contained many aspects that I want to learn and practice for, such as storyboarding,character’s action design, long take shot, creature animation and so on. So I got all my ideas done, now starting to do the pre-production.