Finally we finished this animation, models are fine, riggings are good, the whole scene are designed well, sounds are very good, but the animation…Doesn’t seem connected after we linked each part together, probably everyone have different animating style. Evanna as our collaborator from VFX, she was not only creating the good effect but also build nice good looking scene. Our collaboration is very well-off.

I have done my job, I have learnt some basic hard surface modeling and rigging skills, very proud and happy to see my own character moves. At the same time I found some problems in the working process, for examples my model’s topology wasn’t normative enough, it cause so many problems on the weight painting and face rigging. There were also some issues on the arm rigging that delayed the starting date of animation process. But the good thing is our team have solved all those problems in time, I also learnt a lot from it. I will bring these experiences into my next project.

My character hasn’t finished yet, I will keep make it looks better, do the texture, mapping and try to make another solo animation for it, then do the rendering. I will keep posting this process on the blog. For the next term, I will continue to learn more about modeling, rigging and animation, these things are what I’m decided to do in my future industry life. I will keep learning some new things like Xgen, muscle system and advanced creature modeling and animation such as some animals, monster and dragon. But it doesn’t mean I will stop learning Houdini, I have very high interests in procedural modeling and visual effects, I sure these things will also be my direction in the future, even I will spend lots of time on it.

Final video link:

Finally the animation stage. Each of us will be allocated with some layout to do the animation. We only have 11 days for it because we have spent so much time on the modeling and rigging. But 11days is good for me to do the previs animation, not sure about the others.

The layout that I working on is a action showing the girl dodging the bullet from the man’s shooting gun. For making it looks more attractive, I redesigned the action and the camera movement. I let the girl hits the bullet with the sword at the same time she dodges the bullet, then jumps to the air and spins the body to arrack the man. I personally really like this way of attack, fast movement, crazy body pose and coherent shot, I may have been effected by anime.

Switching the IK to FK is fun but quite annoying.

For making the shot looks more exaggerative, I scaled the bullet to make the crazy perspective.

This week is for rigging part. Murray is working on the body rigging, I will be working with the mechanical arm.

I’m totally a beginner on the rigging area, so I have to learn from the basic knowledge before I start. Through the tutorials from Luke and some Youtubers, I’ve learnt how to rig a man with the clothing and mechanical structures in a short time. So I can get into my character very quickly.

I rigged the mechanical arm first. I only used the constrain instead of joint. I think just for a mechanical arm, using the parent constrain between the machineries is more convenient than the joints, and no need to worry about the weight problem. For those openable structures I also give each of them a property to control the transformation, and setting the driven keyframes to control their animation. In the end, I gave a big controller to constrain each of them in order to let the structures can be open together.

Then I started to help Murray doing the body part. He was stuck in the clothing rigging problem, so I helped him to get this done. Yann will be helping me with the weight painting and face rigging.

In this week I want to keep improving and adding more details on my character. First is the wrinkle of the clothes, I found some leather jacket and trousers photos as my reference. I tried not to make too much wrinkle, keep reminding myself it’s not a full realistic character.

The second thing is to make the arm looks more powerful, I just basically scaled the head of the thrusters, and let them rotate while they open up.

The last thing is the colouring. I tried to give him a darker look, even the mechanical parts are also black iron colour. But I added some emissive light in some detail, let him look more cyberpunk.

On the one hand I have to catch up with my modeling, on the other hand I still want to create some good design, but I don’t have enough experience of designing so it really slowed me down on this project.

I tried to do less detail but more focused on the outline shape looking. I redesigned the arm and chest, wanted to make him looks stronger and powerful, at the same time I still need to make sure the way he open the arm thrusters is not too weird.

Finally I came up with this:

It’s not the best solution but at least looks more concise and reasonable. Also I added a belt and make the coat as a normal leather coat, because the previous design was ugly.

I continued doing my character design this week. Very lucky, I got another man helping me doing the design, he is Yufei, yay! The image above is what he came up with, nice drawing skill and good colour palette. I can’t deny he has a strong sense of design, but what he made is deviated from my design idea, it looks more like thunder god Thor instead of professional killer. But I still choose to use his mechanical arm design, because it looks so much better than mine. However there are some unreasonable design structures on it, also I need at least two openable structures for the thrusters, so I came for him to let him to do some redesigns. Unfortunately, Yufei said he can’t do it so I have to do it on my own.

I stated the body modelling first. I chose a free male model, adjusted him to a tall and strong body proportion.

Then I sculpturing his face, tried to make him look like a 40-year-old man, and emphasized his contour lines of his face, don’t want to make him looks too realistic.

Next step is making the clothes. I dragged the body into Marvelous Designer and made the coat and pants, and imported them into Maya.

The image above is the basic looks of this character. I simply made the shoes, the mechanical face, arm and body, and also get rid of some useless designs. For example I simplified the body and shoes, got rid of the bullet belt, cause I don’t these messy and unimportant details appear too strong on the total looking, the mechanical arm should be the strongest part. The model on this stage is for doing the layout, also can let Murray to practices the rigging. I will continue next week.

After I finished my part of the storyboard, I started to do my character design. at first I tried to find some research:

Because I have a basic image in my mind, so I only found some face and cloth references, they are enough for me to make the design. The basic character style will be close to Overwatch’s characters, but also more realistic. Because I personally want him to be a cold-blooded professional killer, dress like a normal gentleman, a calm veteran without over strong individual style. Therefore I picked some characters from overwatch as face reference and Kenny from Attack on Titan as the reference of total image for my character.

These are some reference of mechanical arm, some of them are realistic style and some looks more cartoon, we will see how we can mix them together. Consider with this killer’s ultimate, I decided to add some thrusters in order to let him make a hard punch attack. So we will make some openable structures on his mechanical arm.

This is my character design so far on this week, I ‘ve just mixed all my initial ideas together just wanted to see what it would look like, including the mechanical half face, left arm, shoes and body, also the gun, the bullet belt the knee caps and this strange looking one-side hemline coat mixed with dust coat and jacket. It looks weird and messy on the whole, But I will make more changes on next week.

The work we want to do for this Collaboration project is a fighting animation, which Yann and I have planed weeks ago. He wanted to do the experiment of motion blur in Houdini, I want to learn hard surface modeling and how to rig a robot. Therefore, we have discussed about the story and came up with a concept art:

The story background is in cyberpunk world, a killer meets a bounty hunter girl in a alley, and start fighting for some reason.

The next step is to find people and make a team, we got Evanna from Ma Vfx, Fly, Murray, Jay and Layne from Ma 3D animation.

The division sheet about showing what different parts of this project. We will start from storyboard, characters and scenes design, is for pre-production. Murray can start learning rigging and lighting from now, Evanna and Jay can learn physical vfx and particle vfx while doing the scenes design. So everyone has their own job to do in the pre-production stage.

Storyboard:

The storyboard is all i have done on this week, it covers about 48 second of the story before the fight start. I have tried to used as less pages as I can to show the enviroment and feature of this two characters. The man is a professional killer, around 40 years old and cruel. He has a gun, a mechanical eye and a mechanical arm, got strong power but low movement speed. The girl has two swords and has high agility, the badge on her coat shows her identity, a Bounty hunter.