The students will have a chance to apply the Campus Recruitment in their graduate year if they want to have a job in China. But the Chinese companies usually hire students on-campus in Autumn, it’s conflicting with my graduate time in UK, I probably should be focusing on my FMP and thesis. However, after some reflection, I decided to take part in China’s Campus Recruitment. After all it’s the last year to find a job in China before I graduate, I really want to give it a try.
- Because I have met some problems when I was doing the walk cycle in the Cthulhu project, so I decided to make a proper walk and run cycle first. Very careful with the feet controller and make sure the knees don’t shake. Paying more attention on the follow-through and overlapping action like the hair and arms. Also I haven’t done many running animations before, so I found some pictures as references.
walk cycle:
Run cycle:
2. During the preparation of the showreel, I also received a freelance job from a film company. They said they need to make face capture for their Si-fi TV series. I very interested and said yes, so they gave me a 10 second source video and character face rig.
The software I used is Faceware, it is a great face capture software and easy to use. First I import the video intto the Faceware Analyzer, to locate the eyes, eyebrow, nose and mouth. Then start tracking, and export the file of the tracking data.
Then import the file into Faceware Retargeter. Follow the instruction to set up the 44 facial movements, give it the data of the extreme movements of each sense. Finally I can add at lease three key poses and start the auto capture. The more key poses I chose, the more accurate face capture I can get.
But this test didn’t pass eventually, I will use this as a part of my showreel even though it is not much relative to the animation.
3. I also finished my performance animation from last term, because I have only done the blocking in term3. All I do just spline the animation from blocking. Personally I don’t want to make the facial expression and body movements too exaggerative. I just keep the action in a moderate move just like the way I act.
4. I have done a character modeling in term2, and started to make a simple display animation for it. I wanted to put it in my showreel as well, so I decided to continue with it.
The main weapon of this character is his transformable mechanical arm. Therefore, I made a shot showing the arm transforming then show around his body when he is attacking. For making a sense of humor like ‘I’m just kidding’, the character suddenly stops his action and starts laughing, then stands up, closes his arm and finished the action.
As for his laughing, I can’t find any tutorials for the laughing, so I looked for the laughing scenes from animated films and games, even I do the laughing myself. And I have found some rules of the laughing. The character makes the laughing voice, his chest and neck will bend little bit forward when he starts open his mouth, then back to the original position and repeat. All the actions is very quick and small. I also noticed that the shoulders of the characters didn’t move too much, whether they were laughing secretly or heartily. Most of the shoulder movement was carried by the chest.
In order to make it looks more better, I spent quite a lot time on adjusting the lights and textures, and render it on the render farm. However, the colour display of my monitor is very bad, always feels too bright whatever how I adjusted the colour mode. So the color of the animation looks darker on the other devices. Aslo, as I applying for the 3D animation job, I should have spent more time on redesigning the action and add some short fighting scenes insid instead of focusing on the lights and textures.
But time is short, I need to get my showreel ready before the September, so I came up with my initial showreel here: