The next one is a small statue which is shows one the beginning of the story. It needs to be mysterious and creepy. So I found some references:

Through the discussion with Yann and Karl, they both like the left one:

So I started to create a similar one. I started with a ball in Zbrush, using various of brushes to sculpt the shape. In order to build the feeling of a human writhed painfully in the bondage, I made a screaming face inside a thin film, struggling in pain.

For my solo project in term3, I was going to do a Attack o titan character animation base on the ziva muscle simulation, but I don’t have much time left for the solo project in this term, But I’m sure I will continue it in my FMP.

Here is the original asset, it’s a very realistic anatomy

I adjust it to a titan size, small head, long neck and arms.

face modeling:

Set these bones as ‘ Bone’.

Then it comes with a solver:

Select a piece of muscle, set it as ‘Tissue’, then it become:

hit play

looks bit soft, then we can change some setting here. By adjusting some values, I can make the tissue more harder and won’t swing too much.

quick select tool:

Muscle fiber and Action line:

the red lines on the surface are the muscle fiber

if the fiber directions are uncorrect, we can paint the fiber to fix it

After that, we need a curve to drive the muscle contraction, so I click the Create the Line-of-action Curve to generate a curve. Then using Rivet to bone to connect the curve to the bone.

select muscle and the curve then click the Muscle line-of-action.

The next step for this church is to adding more details. Karl wants to make anything looks as realistic as possible, so I need to bring to files to Zbrush to create more details.

It’s my first time to do the building modeling. There is video I found very helpful:

Making those little cracks and breakages was taking me so long to finished. Even though I don’t need to do that much, I still wanted to make it looks better.

However, after I finished, I found I have made two big mistakes. One is those cracks was made too deep, it caused some problems on the normal map when exported. Also when placing the normal map on sub-level 1 model the cracks will be getting blur and dark. So I have exported the model in sub-level 3 to make it looks better, but it increased the polymesh counts.

The second mistake is I have split the polymesh group into different parts in order to do the sculpturing more easier. But I didn’t noticed spitting the polymesh group will remove the UV. I found it out when I tried to export to normal map, it was blank.

So I have to fix it by projecting the details or sculpturing it again. Then I exported the AO, displacement and normal maps to Photoshop to fix the details. The whole process took me 2 weeks to finish.

For the term 3 collaborative project, I have chose to work with Karl and Yann. I’m very interested in Karl’s idea, the theme is about Cthulhu, he wants to create a real-time animation in Unreal engine to show this theme. I really like the myth of the Cthulhu, and I’m also very interested in Unreal engine, I wish I can learn some knowledges and the production process about the UE4, so I joined their team.

Karl has already made the storyline:

The explorer discovered an abandoned village. The village was obviously abandoned for a long time. The interiors and buildings in the village have some elements of Cthulhu culture. There is a church in the village. The church has obviously been remodeled, and the gods once believed in are shattered, replaced by a statue of a terrifying Cthulhu monster, and the body of worshippers in the church. The explorer walks to the back of the church, and a strange sound comes from the dense forest. When he pushes aside the bushes, there is a huge eye oncoming him.

So I just need to find some references as he required.

My first job is to create a big church, it needs to be a catholic cathedral. Because the main scenes are mostly happen in the church, and there will be a giant Cthulhu statue inside. The church should be big and stately.

Therefore I started to looking for some free sources of church models. However most of the church assets online are scanned models which can only be view in distance. Finally, I found a almost 1:1 model of Notre dame, this is a huge file with lots of polymesh around 300 million faces. And my job is going to reduce its polymesh count and make it doesn’t look like a actual Notre dame.

This file looks perfect but there are so many overlapping surfaces between the mesh, It’s so hard to clean them, it’s painful. But I chose to stick with it, I spent some time dividing into several parts, like root top, spires, walls windows, doors etc. It will be more easy to edit and Maya won’t crash.

Then I do some damages on the root top, I made a big hole on the top showing that there was a huge monster crushed the church roof to outside. Finally I added some details by inserting the damage rebars on the root top.

In order to make some differences. I made the towers more higher and add more spires, deleted some prominent structures to make it doesn’t look like Notre Dame.

Because in the story, the character will be open the main door of the church, the camera will show the whole scenes of the front door, it requires more details. Therefore I need to arrange its UV into more quadrants to let high resolution texture map can be shown perfectly. The UVs of the rest of the parts on the top will be simply merge into the first quadrant. Because we can only see them in distance.

On the last part, I wanted to add more elements of Cthulhu on the front door. I found a skull head of Cthulhu, it’s exactly what I want, I placed it one the middle of the wall.

I’m inspired by the pictures of Cthulhu lamp, I found a tentacle model and make it higher taht can hang a lamp.

The last step is make the door looks like wood door, just extrude the mesh little bit. Then I was looking around some pictures of the church door, I saw there ware always some metal patterns on the door. So I found a picture of Cthulhu logo to make the pattern.

I continue with my personal project I have started last term. The character concept:

face model is Anya Taylor Joy

I will learn Xgen and make the nice hair for the character.

Starting to do the animation

Set the camera axis on the center of the scene, move 360° surrounding the character to get the whole view.

In term3, I’ll still continue with my term 2 project, but I’m not going to do any animation on the last story, I will fix some rigging and modeling problems of my character, then do the texture maps, finally I will do the animation of character’s skill show like the Play Of The Game in Overwatch.

texture map:

Render:

Finally we can do the advanced creature animation, I chose a cat model to do the animation. There are some reference video below:

I think it’s much more harder than the human animation, it has four legs and a lot of controller on its muscle. The important thing is the cat and human’s body structure and movement are completely, so we can only watch their law of motion to learn instead of use our body to feel the motion, so that will be much more harder to the people who first learn the creature animation.

After watching the video I kinda figure it out how the cat walking, left front leg–right hind leg–right front leg–left hind leg, then repeat.

Of course there are many muscles move together while the legs are moving. There are lots of controllers rig the muscles, I need to watch many reference videos to understand its movement.

Choose the characters and set the pose. Both characters need to have face rigging.

Blocking: