By receiving the feedback from the technician Shihong in late week, I have split all my shots into individual files; which are in two separate groups: matching the imaginative world and the forest park scene.
Basically, I have turned the body movements of my characters into splining and fixing every moment, which looks unnatural with the previous feedback and my reference. And so here is my progression of the week:
I have also fixed all the Gimbal lock happening in my scene by checking if all the rotation X and Y of the elbow is turning back to 0, but only driven by the X,Y,Z rotation of the hand with the Z rotation of the elbow.
In Unreal Engine 5, I have updated all files in rendering by importing individual cameras for each shot, and then connecting them together in my film.
As I had adjusted the timing of the camera during the time I fixed each shot, a slight difference in the shot frame will appear between Maya and Unreal Engine 5, hence here are my notes of each shot and the necessary assets to be exported & rendered in each shot:
Due to the prop, underwear has several constraints; hence, I have used the Alembic file for exporting them from Maya and importing them into the game engine. To make sure I can assign texture to these models properly, I opened the UV sets when exporting.
I have also added the scale animation of the underwear to make sure the one in running is the shot needed for:
In the following week, I will keep fixing each shot with the feedback given by Ting and also add the hair/facial animation into my characters by unmuting the layer. So hopefully next week I can hand in a version with fixed body movements and splining facial expressions.
This week starts with fixing the rest of the blocking issue happening in my scene:
The camera should always move after characters move
When my male character falls onto the ground, his lower body shouldn’t twist at all
When my male character gets up, I have changed the camera angle to make the animation more fluent by hiding the difficult weigh shift
I have make the shoulders and arms of the male more straight when he tries to apologize
After I have fixed most blocking poses, I start adding in between to my poses and splitting the scene into numerous files by matching the shot number. I studied from the technician Shihong of how to build up animation layer and so I can make my working pipeline much clear.
Beside, as I am considering the time limitation, I have started editing the showreel for this unit to show my behind the scene file and experimentations. I hope they will be helpful to support my progression in the future.
My texts for the audio:
After splining the animation, my focus of each shot is becoming condensing and refining the movements by getting rid of the unnecessary keys. I will be keep doing it for the following week and run another render test in Unreal Engine 5 to make sure the project can be completed properly.
Based upon the feedback I received from the lecturer and the technician, this week I am focusing on condensing my animation, changing camera angles and fixing more blocking poses.
Here is my current updated version:
To save my time, I have edited down the walking cycle at the beginning of the story and started with a long shot showing the male character waiting in the park by reading his watch.
When my female character is showing up, I switched the camera into a mid shot for focusing on her upper body movement, and her facial expression.
When they start walking, I adjusted the position of the camera, and put them closer to my characters for delivering a better atmosphere between this couple.
I adjusted the position of the camera when the male character falls down and so build up a better composition.
Poses side, I stop my male character bending too much when he just falls over the ground where most joints should be stiff based upon the painfulness. I remove the female character from the shot as there need to be more space for him to perform.
When the female pulls her underwear out from from pocket, I relied more on the IK of her controller instead of the FK. And more references were being taken during the class.
Turning poses are being updated with new reference shot during the class with Shihong:
Due to the shape of Male’s cloth is looking so swollen, I have adjusted it by using the sculpture tool on my referred models in Maya.
In the imaginary scene, I have edited out the shot below and cut directly into the underwear kiss, which is the climax of this story.
I have added more poses when she turns her body to make the shot more fluently.
I stop her from changing position in the last shot to make it less confusing and more clear.
After I receive the feedback from the lecturer this week, I notice my next step is to fix key poses with more knowledge in the following days. And I will be listed materials which inspired me, my notes, and how I start with the imaginative scene.
I got no further ideas beside my recorded reference videos, so, I think it’s a good time to review my shots, camera movements and character poses (examples of fix given by Ting below).
From this filr Ting has shared me, here are my notes:
Torso normally doesn’t bend, but the lower back and the neck do, mid torso is super straight
the shoulder is a floating joint, only connecting to the sternoclavicular joint. As we raise our arm, we raise up our shoulder; the clavicle needs to get involved (otherwise it is wrong).
Pushing poses should include my clavicles, similarly to the pulling back poses. Pushing a pose means knowing limitations of the anatomy that can be pushed, and making it believable.
FK Arms: We cannot move our hand in without our shoulder internally or externally rotating. We cannot pivot from the elbow as our elbow only goes up and down.
My progression of this week by fixing a few key poses and arms animation:
In this week while I was waiting for the feedback from the lecturer of my progression of the animation work, I am meanwhile fix the texture of my characters and my sets.
For my characters, I adjusted the roughness of their clothes to make them looking less reflective in an unreasonable way, I built up the substance surface shader in unreal engine to make their skin become more transparent by absorbing the light.
Here is the tutorial I have watched to build up the character skin shader, to make it adjustable, I created material instance in Unreal Engine 5 to be playing around.
Beside in the imaginative scene, I have added niagaram particles to emphasize its dream like feeling, and below is the tutorial I have studied through the learning process:
In the first week of the final term, we have arranged the presentation to report the progression of our work over the summer holiday, and here is my PowerPoint below:
Since the holiday started, I have concentrated on finishing the character models and the set models in Zbrush &Maya, I retopologied models exported from Zbrush and assigned them flat UVs.
Due to the efficiency and the requirement of finishing a draft render version in September within the unit, I have started with a relatively simple pipeline by referring every file into my animation file. In case if I have enough time on October, I can polish and replace any of these models in the render software Unreal Engine 5.
Meanwhile, I set up scenes in Unreal Engine 5, which is matching to what’s happening in Maya, and every naked animation file is ready to be replaced by an updated one anytime to build up the convenience.
Beside, over the summer to make my animation working from blocking, a few references have been shot and edited with my supportive friends, and most of the poses are referring to the clip. As the previs was finished within the second term of the course, hence I was following the same camera movements for this final major project:
Before the feedback has been given by the lecturer I am currently focusing on the material/texture fix of my scene, as I want to emphasize movements of my character I try to keep the background colour pure and low-saturated. Which follows the principle of my case studies shown in the power-point and emphasize the emotion I want to deliver at the same time:
To consider, future weeks are still busy on polishing the animation work, I will be keep learning and improving my skills through the journey. And the video below is my recent draft render version, with my previs and the reference.
This week I have my final feedback session with the lecturer Nigel before I submit my work, and I have perused some resources which have been mentioned in the online journal I have read.
I have doble checked the way of citing an online journal without any date, and here is what I found in the UCL website:
In this week, I have reviewed an online article talking about the ability of children anthropomorphise obejects when they were younger and how they identify things are weather alive:
And here are my noes:
P4 • baillargeon scott, & Bian, 2016: infants treat any non-human agent that displays animate motion patterns as human-like but gradually understand what is alive and what is not • How children anthropomorphise inanimate objects: -infants can categorise animates and inanimate by the end of the first year (Rakison & Poulin-Dubois,2001) -infants can categorise animals and vehicles through dynamic information rather than morphology or color (Caramazza & Shelton, 1998l Leslie, 1994; Mandler, 1992; Premack, 1990)
P8 Young children tend to accurately categorise animals as animate and artifacts as inanimate but struggle to classify plants as living.
P13 • there are a number of cues that have been shown to trigger anthropomorphism and animate judgments toward non-human agents. (Based on how children anthropomorphise, and treat agents as depictions of social agents.) • 1. Gaze following: following the gaze of an agent is in itself low-level anthropomorphising. -p15: 2. Goals and intentions: -p19: Mental States -p23: Morphology plays an important role in children’s judgements of animacy. -p23: Learning: A prior research examined weather children can learn from non-human social partners. -children can recall the non-verbal behaviours such as eye gaze, body positioning and vocal intonation presented by robots. Therefore it’s an essential part of the design. –robots can trigger the ability of children to improve the language ability through emulating themselves, children can attribute their perceptual abilities to robots to learn novel information. -p25, imitation: both human and non-human agents can lead to over-imitation in children. -p26; children are more likely to treat a robot as knowledgeable if it behaves contingently by engaging and looking at them through the communication. -p27 conclusion: people react to inanimate objects as how they react to people in the same situation. There are a lot of ways to trigger anthropomorphic behavior in infants such as emulating, studying and following their eye-gazing. -children anthropomorphise robots is dependent upon both the robot’s behaviours and whether the robot has human-like morphology.
“Anthropomorphic behaviors in infants”（婴儿的拟人化行为）是指婴儿在与非人类的对象（如毛绒玩具、动物、物体）互动时，会赋予它们人类的属性或意图的行为。 简而言之，这种行为体现在婴儿把非人类对象当作有生命、有意图的伙伴来看待。比如：
In this week, I have focused on reading an online journey about the anthropomorphic characters in pre-war and computer animations, and I have made some notes for my thesis proposal:
P247: 6th century Greece, anyhropos=human, morphē=shape or form, -anthropomorphic personification = animated aesthetics [Patrick Power (2008: 37)] –animation is evolving, while the frequency of anthropomorphism never had been destabilised. Especially there used to be a strong anthropomorphic approach to test out the matching functions and visual possibilities. -computer animation helped the anthropomorphism to reach an extraordinary level. -these characters function as narrative agents to deliver informations in the digital worlds, creating ‘fullness’ through their existence and residency. -contemporary consumer-brand culture –main stream computer animated film are more broader than the pre-war era animation on the anthropomorphic side. Where audiences can identify human traits in animal figures directly with a mix of fantasy and reality. -the connection between the digital constructs of anthropomorphism and diegetic world.
P248 -article argues how computer animated film exploited the non-human morphe elements of its character. -aesthetic exploration, dilution, exaggeration, satirising of the machinations of the human condition through devices of allegory and analogy, symbolism and signification. -‘pragmatic’ solutions, ‘anthropocentric’ explanatory concept. To show how humans are able to make sense of the deeply enigmatic and often hostile world in which they inhabit through the ascription of human connotation.
–>political animation films -anthropomorphism adds attribution of human like qualities to non-human characters, and so they move seamlessly in an animated space to connotate implicit meanings. Animators kept reviving them to evoke audiences empathy and compassion. 与动画中拟人化的能力（作为视觉现象或拟像）相关的，是赋予非人类（通常是动物）角色以人类特质的含义集合。这种特质的赋予让这些角色能够有意地行动，并在动画空间中无缝地融入其中，一直被理论化为角色设计的一个基本要求。拟人化是一种再现策略，不断被动画师复兴以激发观众的认同、兴趣、同理心与同情心，从而更好地观察所看到的动画形象。 这段话的意思是：
Cognitivist Torben Grodal (1997:89), for example, argues that: When watching a visual representation of phenomena without any centring anthropomorphic actants (characters), we often ‘lose interest’ owing to lack of emotional motivation or the cognitive 感知的 analysis of the perceived, a fact which many makers of experimental films have discovered when presenting their films to a mass audience
Anthropomorphic actants help to build emotional motivation, cognitive analysis of the perceived. Especially this had been proved by experimental film makers. –>the build up of gags
251: -the assumption of human activity is the blueprint of non-human objects are being altered by computer animated film, as the latter focused into the morphe as an essential for, It takes the centre stage, and formed the magnetism of the morphe itself. (Beyond traditional performance styles) -examples: cars 2 -anatomical coherency/ projection of emotion, personality, charm -support our emotional investment over the course of a feature film
in computer animation, the anthropomorphic character tend to build up their authentic form of the non-human, but also shed any acquired human like characteristics or identity, which embraces their true morphe.
252 –Therianthropic comes from the Greek “thēríon” (wild animal or beast) and “anthrōpos” (human being). It refers to the blending or transformation between human and animal forms.
255 -animated film unravels the tensions and connections between anthroposophy and morphe, the animate and inanimate, subjects and objects. -focalization describes the angle of vision ‘from which the life or the action is looked at’. -it helps to create a world that is aesthetically and stylistically anecdotal, a virtual reality emphasises the anthropomorphic individual’s activities, movements and viewpoints. -the anthropomorphism in the computer animated film era enfolded in a wider discourse of fictional world creation, transmission and representation. -its diegetic consciousness is inflected by it’s morphe, which is as a non-human to build up the world.
256 “…function of the anthropomorph as a focalizer of the action in soliciting such narrational modes.” –>翻译： “因此，每个片段的视觉体验源自于事件在叙事层面上的即时性，并通过拟人角色作为行动的聚焦者的功能，激发了这种叙事模式。” 解析： 这里强调，拟人角色不仅是故事的参与者，也是推动叙事的焦点，让观众更深入地体验故事。 –morphe eyes central to how the scene is transmitted, their own specific focalizes angle of vision is animated to be the spectator;s own viewing position as a privilege. –virtual camera in computer animation: it can be operated in anywhere it chooses, an intangible and abstracted presence (Jones, 2007:236). Due to its status as physical apparatus, it permits the relocation of subjectivity onto the anthropomorphis ‘eye’ in the direst instance, it brings an animated self-consciousness to a non-human character. Also, it could define time and space, or ethereally beyond it.
257 –the point of view (eye) of anthropomorphic characters created through virtual camera becomes a navigator of the virtual space. –breaking with the normal conditions of human subjective experience allows the audience to achieve an open flow of ‘hallucinogenic 引起幻觉的’ perception that can be said to be experienced by objects that are situated in their position of uncontaminated objectivity . -a pure vision from the object without being distorted by the human objectivity. • Giuliana Bruno (20o2:56) virtual tour ‘cine city’ the spectator is shifted from a contemplative to a mobilized anthropomorphic state in a virtual space
-Ratatouille & Bee movie -involving multiple sequences -spetacles derives from a boundless shifting composition and the connections between multiple diegetic points. -William brown (2012:268): the gaseous movies focus on the unsold perspectives, escaping from human perceptions, emphasising the momentum of subjectivity as both de-centring force and chaotic impact.
259 “With human characters and their perspective featuring as merely a component of the image, the attraction of computer-animated film anthropomorphism, then, involves the spectators’ ability to momentarily reject their own ánthrōpos, cross species, and take an embodied (rat’s-eye or bee’s eye) tour of the virtual world in the skin of another kind.” • 在动画中，人类角色和视角往往只是画面的一部分，因此计算机动画中的拟人化吸引观众的地方在于：观众可以暂时放下自己的“人类身份”，跨越物种，像老鼠或者蜜蜂那样“代入”，以“非人类的皮肤”去体验虚拟世界。
“Through the animator’s exploitation of non-human morphē over that of the figure’s human connotation of ánthrōpos, the anthropomorph of computer-animated films ultimately becomes the pinnacle of putting ‘perception into things’ into ‘matter’, the pure vision of a non-human eye (Deleuze, 1986: 83).“ • 通过动画创作者将“非人类形态（morphē）”置于“人类特征（ánthrōpos）”之上，动画中的拟人化角色最终成为了“把感知放进事物中”的巅峰，即转化为“物质”，成就了一种“非人类之眼”的纯粹视角。
260 The passage highlights how computer-animated films use “plasmatiness”—a term rooted in Eisenstein’s ideas of fluidity—to emphasize the dynamic interplay between anthropomorphic characters and their fictional worlds. This allows human and non-human elements to merge, shift, and constantly reconfigure, creating new power relations and fresh storytelling possibilities. (Eisenstein, 1988: 21)
-it allows film makers to express the digital world without impediment, in a range of proximities and observation points, by letting the spectator to see things differently through the inhabiting and embodiment of space and place. -the fictional world is turned into an open, multi dimensional state of omni-directionality in which no angle is privileged. -Eisenstein’s notion ‘plasnaricness’. Anthropos and morphe can intersect and collide to form new power relations and anthropomorphic constructs. -dynamic digital space has been included by the anthropomophism
-the “plasmatiness” of digital animation (where boundaries between human and non-human, animate and inanimate, can constantly shift) allows the spectator to experience the virtual world as fluid and constantly changing.
Rather than passively watching, the spectator actively navigates the space, shaped by the anthropomorph’s shifting viewpoint.
