In this week, we start thing about the potential topic with our assignment. Then I wrote the Arcane Style essay (3D+2D) last term, and this arts performance style I really like, expecially character and the world view design (background, Character skills, Character performence and after effect), So here is my choice:
I want to explore character performance in 3D animation.
and knowing what kind of 3D characters can become popular( for example Jinx in Arcane). I also want to understand how characters express well in emotions. They use body language, gestures, and facial expressions.
Today there are new technologies for character performance. Motion capture can help characters show human emotions more naturally. Facial capture can create detailed facial expressions. Unreal Engine 5 also has a tool called MetaHuman. It helps artists create realistic digital characters.
These technologies are widely used in modern 3D games and animation cinematics. I want to learn these skills and understand how they work, because it can help me understand the workflow of popular 3D games, especially in character production.
This week we learned the facial as well and I got lots of feedback from Ting and Mariana, one is the eye brows, This is my first to know that: When people feel emotion, the eye brow should be always connected in the middle, it would be like the flexible line, not separate the two parts. Also, I watched the tutorial on YouTube. I get a lot of information from there. Like when we move the teeth, just hide lower teeth is fine, don’t move the upper teeth, it would change the character appearance.
I think if we need to animate a natural facial expressions, that will be very technical and hard for me. so I need to learn the muscel move on the face( face muscules). and watch myself’s face in the mirror. Some time my check move to much and easy to clonus or Induce more ocular wrinkles. QUQ
For my Heavy object
This week I got lots of problems on solving Maya for the aniamtion looks more like natural human action and gravity.
Hand overrotate ( no 90 degrees) and floating without holding when the body moves to the other side
when it tries to stand up, the shoulder should be a bit up.
when character want to hit the heavy object, the timing should be adjusted, and the angle of body mechanics should push more before hitting down action.
I think those are very tiny fix will change the whole animation to look more natural and believable.
week5 homework
For my facial pose
This week we use Yulong image. Here is my feedback
When the character smiles, the dower eye lid should be up to cover the eye because the cheek would follow the mouth go uo and squash up, also need to focus on the facial shape angle like > or <.
When the character moves feel strange. The face length will more long, cause the jaw would down. and upper eye lid would follow the eye brow more higher. and mouth change should be larger.
In this week we lean the topic with the fundermental face meaning in Maya and the principle in Ting’s class, which is people is usually more asymmetry in reality and there is the same in animation. but the more animation is when character is angry or mad, there are more symmetrical to show the one emotion. Also, I learnd the three tips for facial aniation those are：
Asymmetry
Shape
connectivity
I think asymmetry aims to stimulate the natural human’s physics, too much symmetry would not look like the real person but look like a robot. And the connectivity means every muscle movement cause a chain reaction in neighboring features rather than moving in isolation, every muscle is connected. also keep eyebrows are a fluid line
Week4 facial homework
Here is my feed back
After feedback I realise:
the faicial is quite hard for me at least now, So that I need more practice for muscel movement and facial group change. like when the mouth moves up, the cheek should move up too, because they are connected! and all the facail expression should follow the line curve for more obvious emotion and shape change. expecially the proportion of a face angle. be like < or >. and to avoie looks like robot, their is a word Volume: any compression in one area must result in a corresponding bulge or displacement in another.
This week, Seiya and me got group feedback for Ting. The problem in my part was that some of my shots ( one shot) contain too much information in it without another shot to help (did not cut to another shot). That makes the audience focus on too many things at once, so they can’t really get the story. You could try using a POV shot — like a first-person angle. The camera should capture emotion, not just run after the action. The main thing is: don’t show lots of angles in just one shot. A good example is the Lord of the Rings shot the teacher showed us in class. Also, some of my shots had no clear focus, or the focus was off, so the audience ends up looking at something meaningless.
I’ll learn from that.
This week’s class I felt like quite challenging that too much new things to learn, like “how to tell a clearly story and attractive”and how to use the five principle ”The actstructure” ‘Hero’s Journey” “storycircle” and “Five-Actstructure”, “Kishotenketsu”. These point are so important to tell a good story that need to research and Internalized within myself.
Five principle: and follow
”The actstructure”
‘Hero’s Journey”
“storycircle” and
“Five-Actstructure”
“Kishotenketsu”.
Also we leand the prefessional camara langurage” rank”, and the relationship between: Story, Act, scene, shot and beat.( From Ting’s class)
After that, I spent considerable time organizing the shot and sequences. The main challenge was the excessive number of keyframe controllers between each shot, which created significant confusion for me. Then I just fix one by one until the end and reach a good sense. Just try my best to fix it.
Also during the class we should use Maya parent set to create stich’s tea party, and self study, but it is quite hard to understand for an begginer to learn parent set in Maya, so many problems just pop out. and ting forgive us and undertand our “Maya level” hahah, thanks a lot, that we can get more time to learn it and get use to do it.
Please remenber story should follow the KISHŌTENKETSU (起承転結) that will be a good one for audience to enjoy
This week, Nigel taught us some ways to develop a potential research topic and identify resources to assist in our research. I mean, this is quite unique and sometimes I need to find bunches of article or posts to inspire my research topic, even watching different kinds of animation, movies, drama, etc.
I was find some article like aesthetic and design in animation, which is from online resource. Actually, i am a bit surprised that it’s easier than other complex articles to understand the meaning. And I watching many Japan Animation this weekend: like movie animation :アキラ，AKIRA, 2D animation《Free!》. Trying to find some angle of my topic choosing.
In this week which is the first week to comeback study, Nigel tough us more clear understand and introduce the structure and content the thesis requires. We look at the proposal assignment and discuss potentials for developing topics for the thesis.
Like choose an objective and topic, and this is a good way to ask yourself and better pick up a topic for FMP.
Does the topic motivate you to research and discover?
How might the research impact present , Are there potentials to apply new learning?
be able to fulfil and evidence the outcomes outlined in the assignment?
Second is establish the audience group
Audience: who and what is the study for?
Purpose: what do you want them to know?
Next is the structuring the thesis before completing all necessary research and some critical review of literature informing the research and used sources to investigate the topic and achieve objectives.
I know it really hard for me expecially I am not good at essay and writing. but is till value to try.
In this week 1, I am leaning lots of new knowledge about Layout, composition and camara langurage. Learning how to put a camara in sence make sence or make story more meaningfull and more thinking inside, so many new words like: FOCUS in camera language including apeture, Focal length, Distance to the object( Depth of field in focus), it means that useing the focus distance. and they are seperate with some type of things, like deep focus, shallow foces,and rack focus, which can guide the audience’s view to the director wants to show them.
and in the class and before the class, we drawing some storyboard and learning how to use camara or the structure in your film.
When I doing the Maya homework, I feel like so special, this also is my first time to use camara design in Maya, and we need to use the camara reference inside. I don’t even know how to adjust the camara view like, I didn’t really know how to find the controller and set up different camera shot effects, so I asked my classmate Songyue for help. After that, I got a much better of how to use the camera and managed to adjust five different shots.
To be honest, I still can’t fully remember the names of all the filming techniques yet, but I think I’ll get the hang of it soon, I will get used to it.
I don’t know how to hide this, they teach methis is my homework week1 mayaStoryboard and camara location with a specific bar
For this project, I used over 600 assets to create a first-person animation that moves from a fancy atmosphere into a magical one. Through this semester’s learning, I’ve become familiar with the UE5 animation workflow, but I feel that I still have a long way to go, whether it’s environment art, atmosphere design, UE sculpting, foliage painting, cinematography, animation, or light baking and rendering. Each step requires much more time and practice to truly master before I can create a polished, complete animation in UE5.
Maya:
This semester has transformed me from a complete beginner who didn’t know how to use Maya into someone who can now comfortably create simple animations with it. I’ve gained so much and learned many new things. For example, it was my first time realizing how important timing and framing are in animation, and that most movements can be thought of in their simplest form, like imagining them as a bouncing red ball. This makes it much easier to visualize the timing and speed, helping me create stronger animation clips.
Whenever I ran into problems with animation concepts or knowledge, I turned to our “animation bible” which is The Animator’s Survival Kit. Honestly, this book guided me through every animation I made this term. Whenever I felt stuck, I could open it and find answers or inspiration.
I faced all sorts of challenges while working on assignments. At first, I didn’t even know how to select the main controller in Maya. Now, I can use the Graph Editor smoothly—all thanks to the patience of my classmates and the dedicated guidance of my teachers. I’m truly grateful.
There are still areas I need to improve, like managing my time better and avoiding last-minute work. I hope to make progress in this next semester. I also plan to watch more outstanding animations and films to learn more about visual storytelling and camera language.
This week I worked on animation and rendering. The animation part was quite challenging for me. Many assets, whether downloaded from the official Fab library or other online sources which part often had issues. For example, some models were imported without proper skeletons, only placeholder rigs.
I had a small bird that I wanted to animate in a cute but slightly startling way. I felt the bird alone wasn’t enough, so I also looked for a butterfly material from Fab. When I opened its mesh, I was surprised to find that its body and wings were separate! Even though I searched for tutorial videos to learn how to merge the two bone rigs together, when I tried to import it into the Sequence for animation, it still didn’t work. With time running short, I had to give up on animating the butterfly.
To ensure the rendering quality, I did a test render before adding all the animations. The result was very disappointing, the video looked heavily aliased and jagged… So I adjusted the settings again, following tutorials online. Finally, on my fourth attempt at rendering, I achieved the result I wanted.
Then I continued adding animations. I felt my fairyland scene was missing something magical, so I wanted to add elements like a school of fish flying in the sky, but I couldn’t find the fish model I had in mind, and time was tight. Instead, I used a cute little demon character. At first, I wanted it to follow a spline path in Blueprint, but when I adjusted the coordinates, the spline wouldn’t generate new points correctly. So I had to abandon that idea and just animated and rotated it directly within the camera view instead.
Finally, I worked on camera shake. For a first-person animation with running sections, camera bounce is essential. I looked up how to create a camera shake system in Blueprint online, adjusting the right parameters to get the effect, and placed it into the Sequence. I kept adding shake throughout according to the story’s rhythm, which gave me the final result.
Reference and Process screenshot:
butterfly cannot connectI try to connect rigs
Butterfly rigs connect tutorialJust leave it animation in bluemapcannot move
In this time, fixing the animation is very hard than I expected. I need to adjust the timing and the angle of left and right hand post( make sure their difference) , spine angle and arms and so on.
This week, I focused on smoothing out the hip’s bouncing curve and making the hand gestures look more natural. I also had to decide which of the two animation versions from the past two weeks. Even though every animation when I doing that I could find new problems, the biggest challenge this time was animating the speed and angle of the poses until they felt right.
Finally, while adjusting the head movement, I noticed something: Before jumping, a person usually looks ahead to judge the distance and direction. At the highest point of the jump, they tend to look down toward the ground, and when it landing, the head drops slightly again because of physics.
