In this week’s session, we have mainly focused on correcting the walk cycle blocking, and then polishing it, and correcting a few poses left from the polished side weightshift.
Here is the polished animation graph editor:
From this week’s notes left by the lecturer, I have noticed when the ball is walking, its body part should always not be in the middle except all the contact poses.
Hence here is what I have corrected for mainly the front view:
From there is no value on transform X of the main body in its up pose:
To give itself a slightly move by following the last pose:
Which allows its body part to build up loops in its animation blocking and polishing one:
I have also corrected the weight shift from week6, I noticed from the lecturer’s notes, when the foot is reaching the ground, we should keep it flat (with no foot roll or toe roll):
And when the foot is lifting up, we can hold it for longer:
I also tried to add more movements onto its body to build up curves when it’s doing its jobs:
The lecturer’s notes of pushing its body more through the force of the movement:
By following my plan, I have polished my animation blocking under the narrative of my UE5 assignment. Also, I have learnt how to build up the fire Niagara effect in the scene.
Here is a quick screenshot of the fire from my project:
By learning how to build up the fire, I have checked these two main tutorials online:
Due to the first video needs a specific software called ‘Amber Gen’ to create the effect, hence I moved to the second video which used mainly the started resources included in the game engine:
As the video is about 10 minutes, here I am going to display my notes through study it:
Here is the interface of the flame. To explain more, the flame has three parts: fire, smoke, and debris dropping down. Only the fire and its debris have colour information added to them. As I know my flame starts from frame 1015 in the story and ends up in frame 1350– which is 336 frames and 14 seconds in total, I have changed their lifetime into 14 seconds for adding into the scene.
In the process of making the fire, I found it important to test out the level of the spawn rate and the sprite size to make sure the effect was achieving my expectations. Also, it’s important to add them casting the light by adding a light renderer under the fire part.
Due to I need to add the fire into the scene under a specific frame, and making the animation working, here I have followed this tutorial:
By following the tutorial, I understood how to add life time to my Niagara effect after I have dragged them into my animation sequence:
And so I have used a similar method and built up the animation of each flame on its own in my scene, and here is what shown in my sequence:
As I have noticed I can also key the size of the fire, I let each of them get larger by following the time moving. Also I have added layers of flame effect in my scene by following the time passes, therefore we can see the level of the fire is getting bigger and worse on my cyberpunk human:
Frame 1069:
Frame 1121:
Frame 1278:
Frame 1349:
Moving from building up the fire to the animation part of this week, I have added all those details to the robot:
I have created different quick selections to control different part of the robot:
Here is the graph editor of the camera at the same time in Maya:
Due to I have to add the focal length of the camera manually in UE5 here is my progression:
In some shots I tried to make the background more blurry therefore audiences could focus on the foreground more, although the difference might not be that obvious:
I have also debugged a texture problem of the opacity pass of the robot, for now, audiences are be able to see its empty ink bottles around and the ink materials I put inside:
Next week, I will be focusing on the animation of the robot’s dream at the beginning of the story and doing some explanation by adding music and sentences to the story, the latter will be mainly inspired by old silent films (some examples I am thinking below):
In this week’s session, we concentrated on improving last week’s sidewalk, making it polished, and started blocking a walking cycle by using the same rig. In the sidewalk correction, I have noticed the main body of the rig would lean on the straight leg side when it plans to move, otherwise, it will fall down without the natural support.
Here are my notes taken for planning out the blocking of the walk cycle by following the lecturer recording and the tutorial below:
In my notes, I have emphasized a few main points through keying the walk cycle blocking, such as the rotation direction of the main body in different stages and how the foot moves when it’s stepping forward. By combining the assignment given by the lecturer, here is my plan:
It is also important to know that the foot break should always be 100 throughout the entire animation, and instead of touching the toe roll, we should key the foot roll directly.
Due to this walk cycle having a lot of mirroring poses, the lecturer in the recording has introduced the plug-in called Animbot, by adding it to my Maya, it speeds up my workflow:
Foot swing in my blocking animation:
In the passing pose, feet are way further out, therefore to increase the number in transformation X.
In this week’s session, we have mainly looked at the control rig in UE5 and the blue print of changing or building up a character’s rig. First of all, we have downloaded the FAB to Ue5 and added its plug-in into our project:
By quickly downloading a paragon from the FAB, we were experimenting with adding UE5’s rig to its mesh.
After that, we were trying to learn the process of editing an existing skeletal in UE5 through the plug-in below, and the control rig added to the project.
Within the control rig, we could change the transformation of different joints, such as changing the root joint to three 0 in its transformation.
Within the control rig, we could also adjust the rig by deleting and adding new rigs within its hierarchy.
As the added rig tends to appear on the middle of the mesh, we can use the transform tool to drag it one by one.
After adjusting the rig, it’s also important to bind skin and check the skin weights in UE5.
After that, we downloaded a control rig pack from the FAB, it has some already rigged characters for us to play and study:
We looked at their blueprints and played with the control rig by setting and controlling the bone and controller, through following the tutorial:
It’s also important to learn the way to change the shape, and side of controllers as different characters are having different shapes:
Always remember to ‘GET THE BONE, and SET THE CONTROLLER’.
After the lesson, my lecturer gave me quick feedback on my assignment. She pointed out some shots in my animation that needed to zoom out a bit, and I needed to review the camera movement after I finished the robot animation.
Also I found some online tutorials might be helpful for me to build fire in my scene:
In this week, I start leaning knowledges of the weight shifting in animation. Here are some notes I have taken after reading the Animator Survival Kit:
To structure my blocking of the Weight Shift animation, I have followed the tutorial in the Youtube and the tutorial recorded by the lecturer.
There are some notes I have taken through learning the video:
At the beginning of the progression, I have built up a MEL bottom for my rig:
The peeling off pose I tried to learn with the rig:
I noticed it’s always to check the pose of the rig through the side view:
The foot shifting pose I tried to learn:
I have been taught the importance of looking at the arc of each joint of the rig in the animation:
Here is my first practice through learning the Weight Shift from George’s tutorial:
By noticing I want to learn more details of building the blocking, I started learning the video below:
In this video I have noticed a few important points:
The squash and stretch can be applied when the ball is moving down and up.
The position of the ball in this rig is moving drastically during the weight shift.
There should be an invisible line formed of each part of the rig in my animation.
when the foot is landing, the Y axis is reaching 0.
I can add foot roll and toe roll in specific time in my animation.
Playing the delay of some specific frames can create some specific effect in my animation.
After my two attempts of blocking the animation, here is my final result of this week:
Eventually I have also made some poses through using the character rig by following the walking reference online:
This week, I have focused on the fracture mode of the UE5 in the session, the blocking of my assignment & its rendering in the game engine.
Here is a render I have made of my own project blocking from UE5, it reflects I have made my own pipeline successful by importing the camera and actors from Maya to the game engine:
Here are the blocking animation of the camera I use and the tattoo robot in the story:
As I am ill, I am taking notes of the recording session this week, and thinking to apply them in the future in my project:
Besides the blocking animation shown on top, I have focused on doing different types of materials in the UE5 to match my story:
Skin materials for dummies, cyberpunk humans, creatures:
I have used the UDIM to shorten the working process to save time, organise each model, and use the level of roughness/ metallic to identify the metal and non-metal parts. As all of the above related to the skin, I have added a skin texture to their height map and decreased its level through a filter called ‘contrast luminosity’.
The skin texture is bought from the package in Flipped Normal as a support:
As there are a few ‘naked skin’ in my scene, such as the goblin body and fruits, therefore I have added another layer on top of their basic PBR materials to display the inner light that skin can reflect:
Within the ‘subsurface’ shading mode in UE5, the higher the opacity the lower the effect of the skin scattering happening in the scene, the colour of the latter is based upon the base colour linked to the ‘Subsurface Colour’ in the UE5 material. There will be no skin scattering effect when the opacity is breaching 1 or the above.
In addition, as I have focused on producing those tattoo effects on the model, I have projected the tattoo flash I made when I was an apprentice and added effects to make them look ugly and blurry (as a mess created by the robot in my story):
Before and after the filter ‘Blur Slope’ applied on the ink:
Details of the ‘Blue stencil’ I have added on the first layer of models:
2. Water materials for tattoo inks:
As the design of my story robot is a functional robot for tattooing, it has a circle of ink bottles surrounding its main body, it’s unavoidable to build the water material by following the tutorial above in the game engine.
The shot when its needle is dipping into the ink bottle and preparing to tattoo on the cyberpunk being in my story:
I have produced different colours of the water/ink material through playing with the node parameter at the bottom:
I am glad this week I have finished all the texture attempts in this project, next week, I will concentrate on adding details to the blocking animation I have done within this project.
In this week’s session, we have mainly focused on the material in UE5 and the function of subsequence in the animation sequencer:
In my own time, I have kept focusing on building up my cyberpunk world for my tattoo robot, I first finished some texture of my model in Substance Painter, adding projection and paint stroke to make the whole style more stylized:
As I thought the robot may make mess in its set therefore I add layers of spray on its furniture used in its set:
And also, on top of itself:
I added foliage in the set through the foliage mode in UE5:
As the tattoo robot works on the organic dummy or flesh, I have added these pictures into my reference mainly for this week:
As the organic part always combines with the hard surface part in the cyberpunk world, I have worked on the dummy model all in Zbrush, including the retopology, Z-remesh, projection and UV wrap through polygroups:
Process of showing re-topologizing & polishing on Dummy hard surface models in Zbrush:
Process of showing working on Dummy polygroups and UV wrap in Zbrush:
Process of showing working on model projection in Zbrush:
Process of showing organising UVs and Udims of dummies in Maya after finished my model build-up in Zbrush:
In addition, by making my own alpha maps in Zbrush, I can add specific pattern on top of the dummy as a decoration:
The work I have done this week above has been highly supported by the book Beginner’s guide to Zbrush by 3dtotalpublishing:
in page 153, it indicates how to work on retopology in zbrush by using zsphere:
And I have summarized my own pipeline of working on hard surface in Zbrush after refining the pipeline taught in this book, here is my note:
In the first project of the book has also indicated how to make good polygroups on a human model:
I used all these good references written by professionals to push the assignment work, next week I will be focusing on finishing the model in the set and the blocking of my main character and the camera.
In this week’s session, I fixed some poses from last week’s assignment and learned to turn my blocking animation into a spline. Here is my polished blocking play blast:
And here is my note written from the session:
While developing the tail animation, I found it important to understand how the tail can possibly follow the motion trail of the bouncing ball (body), and how the motion trail in Maya guides the movement of the animation:
In the blocking stage, I found it important to check if all the keys were not in a linear line (even for the distance):
In the end of the animation process, I can clean up the graph editor to make the curve much clear:
Anticipation is the movement before a main movement.
Anticipation is building up for force.
All movements build up by either internal or external strength.
Anticipation is the easiest way to build up an internal energy and triggers a movement to happen.
An object in motion always stays in motion, except it has been stopped by another energy.
The below screenshot shows the setting of making blocking for these two weeks blocking:
Making bottom to control the rig:
Combining with this online tutorial, it supports me to work on the blocking of the tail animation:
This tutorial mainly has 4 parts to demonstrate:
Blocking of the bouncing ball animation
Blocking of the tail animation
fixing the distance of the animation with the landing keys
fixing the rotation of the animation
The first photo below shows the graph editor of the blocking made for the body part of the rig at the beginning, which shows when the ball reaches the peak it will speed up. On the contrary, it will slow down when it’s off the floor or lands on the floor. The second photo below shows there will be a pause when the ball lands on the floor and when it restarts bouncing again, at this moment, the ball is squashing and stretching. #
There are a few main blocking poses of the tail shown through the tutorial, and I made screenshots of them. They include the tail shape when the rig is in its starting pose, the tail when it’s off the floor, and the tail when it’s on the pack; oppositely they also show how the tail rig changes when it’s landing on the floor.
This photo below shows a new bouncing circulation starts:
The z-axis in the animation graph editor indicates the distance the rig jumps in this animation (from the side view), however, there is a pause between each bounce, therefore there should be non-changed part in the z-axis as well to avoid the sliding.
In the rotation part though, we need to keep the graph in linear as this action has no pause, the rig keeps doing it during the animation.
Here is my planning draft for the blocking and knowledge learnt from the above tutorial:
In this blog I will be showing the progression of my ue5 assignment within 2 weeks and a few of my reflection.
First of all the rigging inspiration I have been taken to start working on my robot is shown on the video below:
By understanding how the author used the advanced skeleton to do the car root I have tried the similar logic to add joints in to my creation started with the root to its top:
I have given weigh painting into each specific part of this ‘tattoo robot’ as I have mentioned before, to make sure it can be walking and rotating needle in my film later.
As I was mainly working in Maya for blocking my scene and UV wrapped my model, or keying the blocking camera– the biggest thing I have learnt in the progression is to understand how to import the exact same thing in to the game engine, supported by this video below:
I noticed the main difference between these two software is the units and scale, therefore I need to scale up the mesh I want to import into UE5 by following the system indication.
Therefore, I successfully imported my rough scene and camera into UE5 as shown below, and soon will moving on to adding more models to match the look I want my project to have:
To save time, I have used Udim for my model and enabled the virtual texture in the ue5 setting to allow me apply using udim in this engine:
Here is the outcome of the main building after I had built its simple texture in substance Painter and applied it on top of the engine, I used the material as layers to separate different main parts (for example the transparent window and the building itself) of each model:
In my reference to the cyberpunk building, there are a lot of simple geometries included in the building such as squares and rectangles, therefore I have kept my mesh simple in subdivision level 1 in the scene while adding emission to the necessary parts. Also, this is a 12 weeks project, hence I won’t make them so complicated:
In the week 3 session, there are also a few notes before it has been disturbed by the VR promotion:
G is the short key for seeing all icons.
In the animation sequencer in UE5, there are some updated features with imported meshes:
possessable mesh: won’t disappear by closing the sequencer.
spawnable mesh: going to disappear when closing the sequence, easily to control, having a small icon with it in the sequencer.
