Narrative Animation
One of the biggest projects that I got to work on was the Narrative Animation Project. This was a collaborative project where I got to work with my group members Blanki, Jenna, and Orlando. The group member of our project was Blanki and she was in charge of dividing the work between us and helped organized the story plot. The main roadblock initially was that we needed to decide the setting and what characters were going to be included into the storyboarding process. It was decided that we would use all of the characters we made in the previous project. My character Billy would play the part as the toy store owner, and he would be offering a job position for the mascot of the store. Eon, Dria, and Luffy who were made by my other group members would go through a dance competition for the job position, but things get out of hand and a fight breaks out. Watch the video to find out how it ends. 🙂
Character Biography
In my second year of animation, we switched from 2D animation into 3D animation. Following the tutorials provided by Mr. Cho, we learned how to make basic shapes in Maya which is the 3D modeling program that we used. Many animations you see on entertainment streaming platforms that use 3D animation incorporate the use of Maya as a part of their process.
As a part of my learning process, I started t learn how to make cubes and a basic fire hydrant model. As I became more experienced, I learned how to build a whole table and a weapon. The practice would help lead us to make a more complex model completely from scratch with the tools that Mr.Cho taught us students.
Animatic
The animatic was made so we could see how the story would play out before we created the scenes in Maya program with the 3D models. Using the storyboarding outline, screenshots were taken for each scene. Then using After Effects, the screenshots were compiled together into chronological order.
Practice Models Made
Basic shapes were made in Maya program when first starting out.
Advanced to make environment and building as for us next challenge.
Making a fire hydrant seemed simple at first until I began the process of actually putting the fire hydrant together. It required a lot of shapes that were not easy to make because there was a lot of crevices to take into account of.
WEAPON
Final weapon design was made in Maya but to get the actual color and textures required anther program. We used Adobe Painter which provided all the necessary textures and colors that needed to be put onto the base shape of the weapon. The use of Zbrush also made it easier to make a more complex shapes and allowed me to create the design in white that you can see on the side of the weapon. Zbrush also allowed me to add more texture on the handle to get a wood texture.
TEXT
There were multiple mouth shapes that needed to be created in order to make the lip sync animation. Then all the mouth shapes were linked to the main model of the bear. To sync the movements with the audio I turned on the waveform setting to see where the sound spi9kjes and dimed down. This way the mouth shapes could be more aligned and timed correctly.