Zenith

Introduction:

Zenith: the time at which something is most powerful or successful. This project, fittingly dubbed the Zenith Unit, is the final major project we undertake at Freestyle, and its aim is to demonstrate to others what skills we have learned. This can be done in a variety of ways through a variety of mediums such as music, animation, film, drawing, building something, etc. For my project, I originally wanted to create a 1-minute animated video underwater, however, there were many challenges and drawbacks to this. For instance, underwater animation is an incredibly complex subject in addition to the fact that the characters I modeled were unusual and difficult to animate. As a result, I opted to make a comic book style rendition of the animation.  This project was important to me because I wanted to demonstrate that I was a capable animator like the rest of my classmates and I felt that through this project I could show my worth.

This project proved very challenging because of the reasons I listed above and because of quarantine. We had to way of getting direct help from Mr. Cho, so for the most part we were left to fend for ourselves. Of course, we reached out if we needed help, but he couldn’t give us direct input while we were working in order to continuously improve upon our work. In addition, being in a home environment offered many challenges, such as easy distractions without being told off.

Overall, I’m proud of the finalized product. I worked hard to create the 60+ shots and compiling them in Adobe inDesign and I feel that my effort paid off significantly. It wasn’t easy trying to work around all the problems I encountered, such as bugged models, lighting problems, and rigging models manually, but in the end I prevailed and showcased new skills and old ones. This project demonstrates my ability to manually rig unusual models that function properly, my ability to overcome problems without much direct help, my own ingenuity by overcoming them, and my creativity in creating this storyboard. I hope that in the future I will learn from the mistakes I made and continue to improve upon the skills I learned through this project.

Process:

Final Results:

Reflection:

      I chose this project because I was always fascinated with sci-fi and fantasy themes, and had studied them extensively for years. This project was an opportunity for me to put my skills to the test in 3D rather than 2D. I had many ideas about what I wanted to do, but decided to try something completely different than I had intended when I first started brainstorming in November. I wanted to showcase my 3D skills rather than 2D skills, so I felt that this would be easier accomplished by making a 3D style project rather than changing my old projects into a 3D project. I decided on my storyboard by brainstorming how I could use already created characters and models to make a story. I did this because it would save time on concept designing and allow me to immediately begin creating the props, set, and story.  However, soon I found that there were many problems with this project from the start, the first being that I found very little feedback. As a result of quarantine, I was unable to contact my other classmates in order to get feedback. Though I got plenty of feedback from my animation teacher, Mr. Cho, about how to improve models, I found that I couldn’t get other feedback from different sources. Though, Mr. Cho helped me explore different ideas and helped me polish my models by teaching me different skills about Maya and also editing my designs. When the designs were all set and done in Maya, I began detailing them in ZBrush and Substance Painter until I had my fully completed models. Though, soon I found another challenge to my idea; rigging the models to move and animate. I had intentionally designed rather unusual models in order to fit the sci-fi and fantasy ambiance, however in the process the models had proportions that Maya couldn’t deal with using a QuickRig. A QuickRig is a fast way that Maya developed in order to allow a model to be rigged and fit to animate. Because of this dilemma, I had to learn how to manually rig models and animate them that way. As a result, I spent a large portion of my time learning, practicing, and rigging. Though in the end it worked out, I also found that I couldn’t animate the models. There were many problems with trying to animate them, such as controller and joint issue, so I resorted to changing my medium of conveying the story. Instead of an animation, I created a comic book style story. This way none of my original story would be lost and I could continue without much setback. Though I did experience more hardships in the process of finishing Zenith, it was through the help of Mr. Cho that I was able to finish. He was always able to give suggestions and feedback to the numerous questions and problems I had. If it wasn’t for his dedication and helpfulness, I doubt I could finish on time. However, even though I finished I cannot say I’m completely satisfied with the outcome. I felt that a lot was lost through the comic book and that it lacked the emotion and value I wanted to place in it. Though I am pleased with the outcome, I wish I had done things differently. This project taught me many things, however if I could try again, I would be careful not to make them again. One mistake I made that would affect the entire project is my story. My story contains two extremely difficult elements: advanced rigging techniques and underwater animation. Underwater animation and manual rigging are incredibly difficult and complex subjects that take years of practice to fully optimize. As a result, I would experience many problems in trying to finish this such as being ill-equipped to handle this major task and not knowing how to proceed. Another mistake I made was not accounting model sizes when modeling. In some models, there is a subtle lack of scale that makes it off-putting once you notice it. I felt that when modeling, I should have been more mindful of how large things are in comparison to each other and to the other models and sets. Though, even with all these setbacks, I still felt like I accomplished two major feats. One accomplishment is that it ignited my passion in modeling and rigging rather than animation, because when rigging, I was having fun figuring out where I wanted to put certain joints and seeing how they interacted. In the future, I would like to continue pursuing character modeling and rigging. Another accomplishment I made was improving my skills as an artist. As I have stated previously, I learned many new skills and lessons during this project that have overall improved my abilities as an artist. I learned time management, diligence, accountability, and problem-solving skills from this project, skills that I can employ later on when I continue through this line of work.