Wendy's Animation Blog

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Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

Week 5: Social and Political comment in animation

In this week’s session, I looked at some films and animations related to political messages from the real world. Such as the concept of the an-ti colonialism displayed by the film Avatar and the animal rights considered by both the audiences and the producer of the film Planet of the Ape (1968).

As I am ill this week, here is my note being taken by following the online recording and files:

After the class, I did some research on animation which tries to tackle problems related to social issues of equality, diversity or social injustice:

The creator of this independent animation has talked about her bumpy experience of getting surgery to remove lumps in her uterus in California. As more and more states are banning abortion in America, it triggered her panic about taking a prescription from the doctor to treat the disease in her uterus. She has talked about abortion as not only relating to a baby, it can relate to removing any tissue from the uterus, but no matter what type of DNC that a patient is taking, the lawmakers are ignoring the reason for it which could send the doctor to trouble or the receiver.

This animation has greatly shown the importance of a necessary DNC for an ill woman can rescue them from suffering from the perspective of a patient, and it has also reached 3.8 views on YouTube and over 30k comments.

In addition, I have also looked at some animated documentaries and did some analysis:

This animation Waltz with Bashir 2008 below, brought me to think about the implications of using animation can visualize the more abstract scene discussed by a person. The contrast lighting and colours can deliver strong emotion with the voiceover played in the film. It expanded how the audiences imagine and review the history, remembering it and seeing it from a more detailed side.

The film Sinking of the Lusitania (1918) below shows the tragedy happening to the boat Lusitania through frame-by-frame pictures, it visualises the moment the ship torpedoed and sank by the German submarine. The animation of this documentary, I think it cleverly reconstructs the scene with low-budget material which the live-action and the other media cannot really approach.

Within the film, A Is For Autism (1992), I found the camera movement applied to the hand-drawing animation beneficial in representing the narrative of autism. As the narrative is more like a mumbling, the cut between animated scenes seems easier to apply compared to the other media.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental immersion

Week 5: UE5 Fracture Mode + Project Progression

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:

  1. 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.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental immersion

Week 4: Session + Project Progression

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.

Categories
Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

Week 4: The Auteur + Modern Art within Animation

In this week’s session, we have been introduced the concept of the animation auteur in the class:

Looking at films or animations directed by a specific director makes it easier to understand what could make an Auteur. They can be built up by the director’s vision through the mise-en-scene mixed up with the genre, which audiences can then identify.


One of my favourite auteurs is the film and animation created by Tim Burton, all of the characters within his design or direction have a specific type of make-up on their faces, a gothic style of costume, and structured by a wacky story. Below are some of the examples within the horror genre:
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Beetlejuice (1988), and Frankenweenie (2012).

In the after-session reading, I concentrated on how fine art inspires animation techniques and exploration in material ways, and how animation could modernise the former. for example, the film The Tale of Tales (1979) used a lot of Rembrandt lighting to indicate the character’s journey in its set:

Here are the notes I have taken by reading the forth paragraph of the book Animation: Genre and Authorship written by Paul well:
Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental animation

Week 4: Polishing the Tail Animation

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:

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental animation

Week 3: Tail Animation

A few quick notes from the class:

  1. Anticipation is the movement before a main movement.
  2. Anticipation is building up for force.
  3. All movements build up by either internal or external strength.
  4. Anticipation is the easiest way to build up an internal energy and triggers a movement to happen.
  5. 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:

  1. Blocking of the bouncing ball animation
  2. Blocking of the tail animation
  3. fixing the distance of the animation with the landing keys
  4. 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:

Categories
Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

Week 3: Understanding basic experimental animation

In week three’s lesson, we looked at some main examples of experimental animation from the past to the contemporary centuries.

The scanned pictures below include the notes I have taken in the class, at the weekend I will be reviewing those short films and taking contextual analysis from them by relating back the structure of my draft essay:

Over the weekend, I concentrated on the fourth paragraph of the book Experiment Animation — from Analogue to Digital to look at different forms of animation that appeared within experimental animation, and took some notes. Also, I have analysed two short pieces created by Balazs Simon, reviewing the journey written by Len Lye and Oskar Fischinger from Experimental Animation — an illustrated anthology:

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental immersion

Week 3: project progression + class notes

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.

Categories
3D Computer Animation Fundamental animation

Week 2: Pendulum planning + feedback of the bouncing ball

During this session, we have been introduced 12 principles of animation:

  1. timing and spacing
  2. anticipation
  3. appeal
  4. squash and stretch
  5. exaggeration (pushing the motion)
  6. overlapping ( e.g. moving hairs, jewelleries)
  7. arcs ( for animation looks organic instead of robotic)
  8. slow in and slow out
  9. staging
  10. straiht ahead and pose to pose
  11. secondary action (how the secondary action giving meaning to the shot)
  12. solid drawing

We have been concentrated on making overlapping animation through the pendulum, as there are mainly three parts of the pendulum and they will be working in different time:

As I noticed, the more frequent pendulum is shaking the less strength it will get in the end, and the slower it will become in the end with more key frames. Also, the energy of the secondary and third pendulum main joints should always be transferred by their primary joint on the top, they should.t be more powerful by the latter.

My working interface in Maya:

At the end of the session, I also developed my bouncing ball animation from the first week by fixing some squash and stretch issues:

During the weekend, I have planned out my own pendulum animation through sketch and supportive videos:

Also, I have been to Tate Britain to do some life drawings:

Categories
Design for Animation, Narrative Structures and Film Language

Week 2: Essay structure + weekly exploration

This week’s session talked roughly about the brief and the structure of writing an essay with 1500 words, before picking up a topic it’s essential to think of a research question first. As the critical report needs to be straight, it’s always important to refer to or quote from other resources or authors to support ideas. Also, it can be essential to add movie clips or illustrations to support my topic, and then put my word into context.

There are several types of the resources:

  1. the primary: film festival, gallery, exhibition
  2. the secondary: paper, books, news

Several sites are good for finding resources, by learning from them, I can paraphrase the content and adding into my own essay:

  1. https://scholar.google.com/
  2. https://www.jstor.org/
  3. https://www.ebsco.com/products/ebscohost-research-platform
  4. https://blog.animationstudies.org/
  5. school library

When structuring a report, there are some important parts:

  1. Title/Subtitle
  2. Acknowledge – optional
  3. Abstract
  4. Key words
  5. Contents page
  6. Introduction
  7. Literature review (how does the journey or book support our report)
  8. Main body of the text
  9. Conclusion
  10. Image list

At the end of the lesson, the lecture challenged us to find an old animation that displays the animator’s hand inside, the French animated film Fantasmagorie (1908) below shows the animator’s hand drawing the first character in the first few shots.

In my free time as I am reading the book Understanding Animation by Paul Wells and aiming to produce an essay comparing abstract animation and orthodox animation, here are my notes from learning the second chapter ‘Notes towards a theory of animation’ and the third chapter ‘narrative strategies’.

Meanwhile, I am trying to review and summarise main points through what I have read to construct the structure of my essay:

Next week, I plan to look at more case studies of each orthodox animation and experimental animation, as I will be able to indicate the difference between them through specific media.