This is a video link to my YouTube channel where i have put my Final Movie for my specialism.

After presenting this final piece i was able to get some good feedback from my lecturer and my piers which will aid me in future projects i undertake.

I loved the creation of this project, however i feel that i took on to much for the time limit that i was allocated, looking back i should have made something more simple where i could focus entirely on the animation rather than developing a story and trying to create a short film that covers all bases.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfsyMoPHQC0&feature=youtu.be

Specialism

Trevor's Travels

Final Evaluation

This assignment is the one I was looking forward to making throughout the entire course because this gave me the chance to have complete creative freedom for anything I wanted to make. With that being said I had the full intention of creating a short animation from the start as this is the area that I aim to head into for a career moving forward. I wrote the story for this short tale years ago, it's about the connection between a little child and a balloon and the happiness the child feels when they have the balloon to play with, however that feeling soon changes when she loses grip of the balloon and it floats away however this tale is from the perspective of the balloon and the journey he takes after being lost by the child.

For this assignment I started off by watching short movie clips and gathering images from Disney shorts I chose to do this as within these short movies the film is carried entirely by music and animation without the use of dialogue, from this I wanted to test myself to see if I could capture emotion from an inanimate object the main inspiration for this story was gathered from Disney's The Blue Umbrella.

Before I began the creation process for this animation I already had an idea on how I wanted the creation of these characters to go, the real thought provoking part was to give these characters emotion for my target audience to connect to, the target audience for this piece is aged 5+. I watched TV shows from when I was a child like Rollie Pollie Ollie and used this as inspiration for the blocked out shapes for the landscape and buildings.

I began the research for this assignment looking at all sorts of games to see how the animations worked within the cutscenes to capture emotion from the player's I also aimed to dig deeper to find out what rig these companies used to animate there characters Biped, Bones or C.A.T. But the trouble with this was these companies obviously keep their creation information locked up tighter than a drum, the main thing I found was an article from CD Projekt Red where they mentioned the rig for Geralts knuckles to grip his swords from The Witcher 3. I also looked at several YouTube videos which spoke about the creation process behind some games such as Uncharted and more specifically the animation within the game and how the physics worked to make the characters maintain their realistic motion, through the write up of my research I tried to separate it into sections where the start was a different assortment of games cutscenes both in gameplay and trailers this was to see how these different scenes can work to capture the audience and draw them in evoking all sorts of different emotions. From this is would then move onto a more detailed part of my research which is where I focused more on what I planned to make for my final assignment and from this I looked at the blue umbrella which is the centre point from where I got my inspiration for my idea. After I had gathered some information on the points I wanted I looked at more information from the creative side of animations so from this I then looked into the different rigs that we can use to give a character its movements and found that bone rigs where the standard in most forms of animation.

After all the research I started on the creation process for this piece by creating a storyboard and the animatic, I enjoyed the creation process behind the storyboard part as I began to see the characters I had envisioned from my idea drawn to paper and the story visually coming together. During the creation process of the animatic I added a base soundtrack to the background to see how the story would work being carried solely by the songs and the emotion the characters could invoke from my audience, once I had the animatic finished I showed it to my target audience to see what they thought of the layout of the story and they really liked the idea, personally I feel once I was able to see the finished animatic that it worked nicely to see a rough copy of what I hoped to be my final project and furthermore I saw what I had created in a digital form and from what I saw it was going well.

Once I had all the pre-production paper work finished I had to decide what art style I was going to use to make my final film, my original intention was to make a traditional animation and hand draw the film scene by scene, however I soon realised that this wouldn’t be possible due to time constraints with other units and there deadlines coming up throughout our progression in this unit. So from this I decided to make it in 3DSMax I began by creating the main protagonist through this tale and that would be Trevor the balloon, during the creation process of him I looked online at how other animators bring life to an inanimate object as this was going to be an issue with the creation of my animation because my main character was a balloon that doesn’t speak and I hoped to draw in the audience through the use of the characters eye’s alone.

I then made the remaining characters and the scene’s that the short film would take place in, for the buildings and world space I got a lot of inspiration from the kids TV show Rollie Pollie Ollie, I chose this because this show looks nice in its simplicity with the blocked out characters and landscape and this seemed appropriate for the younger audiences and so from this I chose to make my models with that art style in mind. As the development of my scenes began to progress I liked the way they were looking and through this I had to think of ways to add motion to my background to give the scene some extra life and I decided to model some 3D clouds and stars which would slowly move across the scene as they progressed I was very happy with the way these look in the scenes, not only does it achieve the goal of adding life to the background of the scene but the way they were modelled fits perfectly with the remainder of the scene. I originally found the animation for the stars to be a little tricky because I wanted to find a way to make them look like they were twinkling and I chose to make them differ between rotating and scaling which gave me a nice twinkling effect that I was looking for.

With the creation of the balloons the trouble wasn’t so much in the modelling as I found that to be quite simple when I achieved the correct shape, which I then simply added some eyes and eyelids to convey emotion on my characters, however this is when the main troubles began to arise with the balloons, I attached the eyelids to the eyeball and the eyeball to the balloon but because the eyelids were created from duplicating the eyes there was a trouble with the clipping of the eyelids through the corner of my eyes and the position I had them in worked the best because if I moved them forward it made the character look misshaped and if I moved them back the clipping issue obviously was worsened. This issue however wasn’t something that I seemed to notice when I began to animate as the way the character moved on the screen was favourable as to not see the clipping issues.

I then began work with the human character models which went smoothly and no trouble appeared until the creation of the models were done, this is where the troubles began to arise my original intention was to add some clothing to my characters, from what we had been previously shown on how to use garment maker which I aimed to use to make mine, I followed a step by step tutorial online on how to create them efficiently and all was going well until it came time to stitch them together this is when the garments I had made couldn’t find the object even after I selected it through the both the side toolbar and the model itself. To counter this I decided to try a different approach and chose to try the push modifier for some clothes and so from this I selected parts of the body where the clothing would have been featured and used the feature to create some clothing this worked like a treat until I added a cloth texture to the object, gravity and some other physics to the object I kept finding that when I simulated the physics on the object the material all went crazy regardless on which I chose, I once again looked online for a guide on how to fix this problem and found that everything I did was right I think it must have been a problem with the model itself. This was then worsened by the time remaining in this unit so I had to make the decision to keep working on this part of the object or proceed to get some animation done and I would have returned to this later if I had the time left to play with it.

All in all I have thoroughly enjoyed this unit generating my ideas for a short animation film, I was able to choose from some short stories I wrote from when I was a child watching Disney films and drawing my own characters and creating stories, this felt like a bit of a dream come true in some respects as I was able to have complete creative control throughout the making, I have also shown the finished product to my target audience and they really liked the story and the animation and so from this although there's a few major thing I would like to improve upon I am glad that I pleased the my audience.

With this unit I was able to have creative freedom on the animation, the story and everything that I wanted to make, there have definitely been many problems in the creation process along the way such as clothing not working with my models, time constraints with all the other units throughout the year that we had to do alongside this one, the aim was to also have no dialogue in this piece as I wanted the characters to evoke the emotion from my audience with some music running along in the background to carry the tale along, my original intention for this was to create my own music and have that play in the background of this tale however this was something else that I wasn't able to achieve because I fell ill and was hospitalised for a little while at the end of this unit and didn't have the time to make it, I was offered an extension to this unit but I didn't want to take it I wanted to get it finished for the original due date, anything that wasn't complete in that time as horrible as it would be I would put it down to a learning experience and I need to make sure I manage my time better next time, finally the research while I understand why its required I managed to write 37 pages and over 11000 words and all this time I spent on gathering information from other animators who inspire me, as interesting as this was to read and collect to see how these professionals work and how they make their creations, I felt that it heavily cut into my time in the production of my own piece. Given more time I would have spent more of it on trying to fix these troubles providing I didn't have many other units coinciding with this one, I do feel in some respects that what I originally intended to make here was too much for just 1 person to make.

As much as I have enjoyed this unit I feel that moving forward I need to focus more on making something that is doable in the time allocated rather than aim to big.

Current problems faced through the creation process in my specialism.

During the modelling stages of my project I have had a lot of trouble with the cloth modifier on my clothing and had to move on due to time constraints, the issue was that the physics were not working, I also tried the garment maker modifier to craft my own clothing all went well until I went to apply the cloths to my model, the cloths didn't pick up on my characters and so I couldn't get the stitching to work.

Furthermore as I began the animation process the animation wasn't too difficult they had part was to try to make Trevor and Macie look realistic as characters, this was tricky as the story was aimed to be carried from a tale about 2 balloons on an short adventure and from this animating 2 balloons to keep their realism whilst making them captivating to an audience was challenging. The hardest part I found in the whole animation process however was at the beginning of the tale when the little girl and her father approach the hut to collect Trevor, I wanted the walk cycle to look as realistic as possible and I found as I was moving the characters they seemed to straddle their legs and I found all tips and tricks online were mainly using biped variations for their animation tutorials however for my animation I chose to use bones which I found restricted my freedom in the movements.

Specialism

These are the images of my current progress so far, i currently have all the models and scenes done all that is required is to add them into the scenes and animate them, the backgrounds in a couple of the scenes are animated so that the scene has something happening to bring the scene to life.

Child character:

Macie the female balloon:

Male character:

Trevor the male balloon:

Inside the little girl's bedroom, where Trevor will reunite with the little girl and the female balloon:

Outside the house, where Trevor will fly through the window:

Hut scene where the father will take his daughter to get Trevor:

The first travelling scene, Trevor will begin his adventure here:

Second travel scene this will be where Trevor will meet Macie:

This will be one of the saddest parts of the story when Trevor will lose his friend on the spike on top of the house:

This is my first scene for the story this will be where the little girl will find Trevor, this is one of the scene's i showed to my target audience and they like the look of it. For this project i drew a lot of inspiration from Rollie Pollie Ollie as i like the simplicity of the show using simple 3D shapes to represent the scenes. My story will aim to have a similar art style and i want to carry the story through the use of music.

 As mentioned before Rollie Pollie Ollie is where i got the inspiration for the artistic style of the story, i chose this because i feel there is something nice with the simplicity of the TV show and the younger audiences seem to enjoy it so i would like to make something equally heart warming.

This is going to be the travelling sequence in the story and i aim to move the clouds and have some birds flying around to add life to the world as Trevor is on his journey.

This is going to be a sad scene within the story where the balloon that Trevor meets on the journey will meet there demise on the spike on top of the building.

This is the balloon shack where the girl and her father will find Trevor and this will be where the journey will begin.

Trevor will fly through the window at the end of the story to be reunited with the little girl.

For this bedroom scene i still aim to add things to the background such as a picture of the park to give the bedroom a nicer look.

This is the updated version of the bedroom scene I feel that it still looks a little bare bones and I may add more to the scene, however with the little girl in the scene, Trevor and Macie in the animation sequence I don’t want to draw the attention away from the center points of the animation sequence.

 Bone structures for animation, within the creation of animation characters must first be rigged and skinned to be able to create the motion this process begins through the use of 3 different rigs those are as follows CAT, Biped and Bones. A CAT rig or Character Animation Toolkit was the base method used within 3DSMaxx for animation. The next one we can use is a biped rig this gives you the base of a human body to skin the model this is considered to be one of the easier ways to rig a character and finally we have the bone rig, this is a process of adding the bones to the body which will then need to be skinned making the character move with the body.

 Looking online for the different animation processes within the industry was hard to find as the information seems to be hidden for the companies, however I did find some information on animation pipeline which enabled me to collect some information on the process and as I was looking around online I came across a channel on YouTube called New Frame Plus, this is a channel that take apart animations in games to find things that they could improve on for example the Skyrim mining animation, they try to change this into something more dynamic than the current animation cycle that is used for this process because the animation that is played is very simple and repetitive. I also found a channel called GDC which talk about animation in games from animators who have worked in the industry for many of years, finally I looked at No Clip a channel in which they talk about the whole creation process.   

 Through watching the GDC channel I came across a video talking about the physics for the animation in Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. In this video they talk about a rigid body and each one of these have associated joints, a body mass to create the weight, friction, restitution which aids in the bounciness of the body and finally an inertia tensor which helps in the rotation of certain body parts along any axis the higher the inertia tensor is makes the model more stable. Linear damping reduces the linear movement of an object over time and angular damping is the same for the rotation of the object, there are 2 different constraints for animation those are hinge which is mainly used for elbows and knees and the ragdoll constraint which is for the remaining body parts this is used to create the most realistic motion for a human body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-_vuoKgR4

 As my final film is a short story about a little girl and her lost balloon I aim to look at different animation shorts where an inanimate object was used as the center piece of the movie, I have already looked at shorts like Disney’s The Blue Umbrella as this is where my main inspiration comes from. Disney’s Paperman was a nice short story about love and this was made just from the clever use of a paper plane and from watching this I liked how they made the paper plane the center focus of the film with the animation, however they were still able to keep the realistic motion of a paper plane.

 

 During this process I have pitched my animation idea and shown some of my scenes to my target audience this being younger kids of 7+ and from this I saw that they have thoroughly enjoyed what they have seen so far and are looking forward to seeing the final product.

Group Game Project

Project Carbon

 We started off this process by pitching idea's for the gameplay mechanics.

From this myself and 2 other members of the team got together to create the story behind our idea, we then all broke off to make a start on the GDD's after we were assigned our specified roles within the creation process.

My GDD

Project Carbon

Game Overview

 Philosophical Point 1 -

Philosophical Point 2 -

Philosophical Point 3 -

Common Questions

What is the game?

 For this game we aim to make a twin stick shooter with randomly generated enemies and areas to keep the game fresh. The player will be able to play using a mech suit and through the use of a hacking system.

Why create this game?

 We chose to create this game with the intention to create something with a twist on games that share the same gameplay mechanics. A few members of our team enjoy playing these games and feel that there is room for ours to thrive.

Where does the game take place?

 The game will take place in a scientific facility where the AI system went rogue and took control of the area. The room will be surrounded by science equipment and in some of the rooms depending on spawn point turrets and camera will be mounted.

What do I control?

 Throughout our game you will take control of a hacker whose aim is to shut down the system, however during the playthrough the player will have the option to use hacking to stop the AI systems.

How many characters do I control?

 The player will play as a hacker who has the option to gain control of a mech suit and who can also jump out of this suit and use a hacking system.

What is the main focus?

 The player’s main focus for this game will be to descend through the various levels of the game to the core of the programme which will then enable them to close the system down.

What’s different?

  As far as my research goes I believe that our game is the only one that provides the player with option to change between 2 different types of gameplay both heavy combat and quiet stealth.

XYZ Appendix

 During this segment I will break down the contents of our game listing off all the objects and important details that are required for the production of our final game.

 I’m going to be begin with the objects which will be listed below:

·         Weaponry

o   Guns

o   Baseball Bats

o   Knifes

·         Turrets

·         Science Equipment

·         Computers

·         Debris

·         Totes

·         Barrels

·         Wires

·         Lights

·         Doors

Character Rendering and Animation Appendix

Story Appendix

Character Animation Appendix