U71 and U73 3D Animation and Character Animation
IDEAS
My first idea for a animation is based of the game i have been working on with my college/freind Sammy ToyTrip the same 1 as the early demo made for U9. I had a idea in my head for a little while before given the task to create a animation. This was a short intro sequence that would explain the game and set the tone for the game in as short and clear way as possible while also being enjoyable to watch. The animation idea it self is inspired by the intro to Sid Meier's Railroads and a F1 animation I found years ago.
The plot is a child playing with a toy car and places it on a piece of hot wheels track and sends it on its way. It dose a loop the loop and fires of a jump and flies over the child's bedroom or playroom and out of a open window. when outside its jet engines and glider appear and activate and the camera dose a panoramic around the flying car with the world below now resembling a simplified version of the game world to show the variety can colour of the world before cutting to a scene of the car landing on a road and driving of into the sunset with the games title screen following it.
the character part of the animation will be the animation of the child's hands and arms and maybe the body depending on what I decide for the final idea.
other animated parts will be the cars wheels as they rotate as well as when off the ground will drop a bit to give it a bit more character as it fires to make it look less rigged. also the glider appearing and opening and closing will be animated and the jet engines and there partials.
CREATION
Planing and story board
Concept Animation
After I had down the story boards i created a concept animation as practice and to experiment with now the final piece would work. (Sorry about the glen miller music in the background of the animation)
this demo animation was good for me to test scale and positioning of certain items in the space before i build the final room.
When creating this I used and updated the Car model I made for the game demo. I improved the roof of the car and remodelled the insides of the lights to help with the lighting when rendered. I also redid the UV map and made brand new textures using substance painter. this was fun to do however I did find using the weaker collage computers caused slow downs and instability when using substance painter. Things improved compared to the old textures are more natural glossiness, windows that pop out from the car itself using hight maps and added details like body panel seams and things like fuel filler caps. Finally I got rid of the old wheels completely and modelled a fresh as the old ones were of sub par quality and I felt they could be improved drastically. I went to great effort to improve the level of detail as well as to cull unneeded tris. I also used the sub-surf modifier in blender for a lot of the work for the 1st time which was very useful but it was easy to go over the top on tries.
Old Car
New Car
modelling the room
when modelling the room i used the scale units tool in blender to work in meters to allow me to make a room to scale. i then used the environment around me and some references i found online for room sizes to help plan and build the room to a usable and believable size.
most items in the room were very simple shapes cubes plans etc. the most complicated models to make were the bed and the covers for the bed to make suer it looked right. once again all textures were done in substance but i had to separate the walls into separate plans to make it easier to texture and import the model in small parts into substance as the collage pc i was on could not handle the full thing causing it the lock up when trying to import and texture all at once.
I was trying to make a room that felt like a typical child's bedroom but with a bit of decoration that would fit the theme and not look out of place.
modelling the jets
The next thing i worked on was making the small jet engines that would go on the car for the animation. these were based of a model jet engine called "JetCat"
The engine was fairly easy to model and texture and animate due to only having 1 moving part.
and lastly for the car was making it fly. ok more i modelled a couple of wings for it animated them with the jet engines to create the part of the animation for the wing and jets coming up and the car transforming.
The wings were inspired by Fixed wing gliders but would compact them selves like a old car aerial kind of design.
This was also the first time i had worked with bones in animation and my college Sammy helped me out greatly learning how to make them and animate them and the final result came out rather well.
The arms were tricky to model due to me never modelling a human or humanoid creature before so i ended up getting a lot of help from my friend Sammy we started of we a human model we had from the Dropbox drive and went from there in the end though every part of the model was redone in some way. the hands themselves took the most time but I'm fairly happy with the result. when it came to rigging the model that took a little while but Sammy helped teach me how to rid a humanoid model in blender which in the end didn't take too long.
once the models were rigged it was onto animating this in the end I got done surprisingly fast with the vast majority being completed in just a couple of days. while I had to use some camera trickery to cover-up some animating sort cuts like the car not being rendered at times while in the child's hand it worked out well. and the car part of the final animation was fairly simple since I already done most of it and practiced doing it before doing the final animation.
EVALUATION
Over all i am happy with the outcome of this project sadly I had some technical limitations when it came to rendering the animation meaning i had to lower the quality alot just to mean i could render it at all. even at the level I set it to it took around 16-18hours of render time. and this was using both CPU and GPU in blender 2.8 beta to try and speed things up.
I'm a little disappointed i was unable to do scene 2 and 3 of the animation I had planed. However I feel that may have been a good thing in the end due to the mentioned render time.
Things i may do in the future if I ever do a animation like this again is to do the rendering ether in a game engine to speed up render time or use eevee renderer in blender while both of these do have technical problems of there own it would mean a final render could be done on modest hardware in a short time frame with a decent level of quality even if its not as good as a path traced render.
The last part of the project i'm not happy with was not being able to UV unwrap all the models and texture them properly. e.g arms/hands the window frame the curtains and the outside of the house.
