In the later stage of the project, my tutor has been very helpful in my study of motion capture and helped me book a motion capture studio. With the help of motion capture tutor, I have a deeper understanding of animation and the efficiency of animation production with motion capture is extremely high. But the premise is that I have a basic knowledge of animation performance, and I need to plan all the actions I need to perform motion capture in advance. I did this but not very well, I only planned three movements, the most important one is a very calm walking animation, I need to express the character’s calm coping emotions before the battle.
After the completion of all the motion capture data, I found that there were some matching problems between the data and the Skeleton I rig, so I could only redirect the walking animation, but it was still enough for my final demonstration animation. So after the animation redirection was completed, I compared the walking animation I made with Advanced Skeleton before. It will be more natural, and I will learn and use motion capture more in the future
At the beginning of rigging character, I thought about several different ways to rig character. Because character are symmetrical, I chose to use advance skeleton, a very efficient rigging tool I learned in my sophomore year. The riggingg process this time has made a lot of progress compared with the rigging knowledge I learned before. At the initial stage of rigging the character, I did not properly regulate the orientation of the bones and the position of the bone points, so I reworked several times. However, after summarizing the experience, I became more standardized about the binding process. Before rigging the character’s body, I had a clear thinking process, such as rigging the character’s body first and then considering rigging the clothes to the skeleton of the body. Compared to the previous rigging of the entire character, this can avoid some mistakes about drawing the skin weight later, and I gained a lot of new knowledge in the rigging process.Whether the rigging process is standardized or not will greatly affect the effect of post-production animation, so I will choose to spend more time on the specification process, rather than quickly move to the next step.
Adding skin weights to the skin is a very time consuming process, in this step I had to make sure that all the weights were correct, because I found that many parts would affect each other during the drawing process, but I tried to animate without testing, which undoubtedly cost me double the time to re-check skin weights and re-animate. So after drawing the skin weights this time I will put the model in some strange positions so that I can clearly see if the weights are wrong.In general, in this part, I not only learned how to bind a role in a more standardized way, but also summarized many skills and experiences in the binding process, such as copying the skin weight of the body to the clothes and then modifying it will improve efficiency, instead of redrawing, and so on. I think the harvest is quite large
In general, compared with my previous experience in making FMP in my junior year, I learned a lot of knowledge, which included the consolidation of previous knowledge and the study of new knowledge. This is what I grew up in three years of college. However, while I learned a lot during this project, I also encountered many difficulties. I had always planned to participate in the production of a complete virtual animation short film in the final project, but I could not find a suitable team member, so I chose to make scenes and characters by myself in the end, which put me in a dilemma. I have to spend a lot of energy to learn different new knowledge to make better works, learn new software, new technology and new production process, which makes me feel a little at a loss. I often have many tasks to do, but in the face of so much new knowledge, I have no way to start, so I delay a lot of time. Although I have listed all the processes I will use, I also followed the process planning table, but I made a mistake when planning the schedule. I planned what should be done in each period, but I did not include trial and error and possible rework time, which led to great pressure on my tasks in the later period. Meanwhile, it was a huge workload for me to make characters, scenes and animations. However, I think one thing I am satisfied with is that I have completed all the tasks planned in Element 2, but I still need to do a lot of optimization to get a better effect in the graduation exhibition. For example, the small town street in the scene, although I have finished the production, the street lacks story, and I still need to add some models before the graduation exhibition to achieve better effects. During the production of the character model, I can actually do more research and enrich the equipment of the character, but my thinking is limited to the character design I drew before. So optimizing the characters and setting is something I need to improve after that. It is very important for me to know how to plan the project time. During the production of the project, I would think that if I give up a part and make a special part of it, I can get a better effect, but it will also make the task I planned impossible to complete smoothly. I think my choice of making characters and scenes has advantages and disadvantages. The bad thing is that I can’t focus on one part to get better quality. The good thing is that I expanded my knowledge in the junior year, especially the technology of animation capture, which makes me more confident in making independent animation short films.However, there are many small problems in this process, which I need to reflect on in time. The production process has not achieved the effect I want, which is what I need to improve. When dealing with modular modeling, I can make it more standardized, but because I did not fully learn the idea of modular modeling, I started to make it, although the final effect was produced. But optimizing my process is what I should do in the future.
The process of making skin textures is tedious and can easily confuse my mind because only the head and hands of this character will be visible to the player, the rest of the body is covered by clothes, so I focused on making textures for these two parts after taking these factors into consideration in this part. Before this project my knowledge of skin textures was limited to basic colours, I hadn’t thought much about changing colours and roughness, or using some very simple skin texture balls. In the process of making this body material I was analysing the logic of the skin material step by step, and then overlaying the effects. Each effect is very weak, but all the effects overlaid together will make the whole skin effect look more realistic. After the first step I thought I had made a good material, but I didn’t, only the basic skin colour and some blood colours are not enough, I need to draw a lot of other colours to be superimposed, such as the shadows of the skin, the colour of the pores and the roughness of the changes, they are not uniform, so all these effects need to be drawn in a reasonable position and there is no way to achieve good results through some material balls. effects. In the hand texture process, because of the ronin’s frequent fights and wandering around, the hands will be quite dirty. I’ve already sculpted the veins and folds in the sculpting process, so I need to consider the colours of these effects when painting the texture. I’ve gained a better understanding of the underlying logic of materials by working on the skin material this time.
In the process of baking, there are some problems, the normal effect and AO effect of many close objects will affect each other, which is similar to the problem of baking the body. However, this problem is difficult to be solved by using the software marmoset, because clothes and belts are tight, and it is difficult not to affect other body protection. So in order to speed up the progress, I directly bake the equipment of several different UV sets separately and add materials. The advantage of this is that there will be no baking problems, but it is impossible to observe the overall material effect when adding materials. I have to import all the materials to the Unreal Engine to view the effect and then modify it, which may take a little more time. However, the final result was achieved which I think is more satisfactory
Some of the factors I need to consider before making the material of the clothes are what kind of fabric the clothes are made of, which determines which fabric textures I choose to overlay. After further research on some fabric references I have looked for before, I think the fabric of the character should be mainly cotton and hemp. Therefore, in the early stage of material production, I need to determine the basic color of the clothes and the texture of cotton and hemp based on the character design drawing. On this basis, I will consider the character’s experience of fighting and wandering for years, and combine the damaged details carved in zbrush to further draw the dirty marks and wear in the material. Some mask effects in substance painer work well, but they can’t generate dirt marks and scuffs where I want, so I have to draw these effects manually when making fabric. For example, the junction of folds is very prone to dirt marks, so I will focus on deepening these effects in this part.Since the equipment of this character has many fabric materials, after all the material effects are made, I will make these superimposed material effects into a material ball of my own, and apply them to the other fabric parts of the equipment. After learning the logic of this set of fabric production, I just need to make some adjustments to the other fabric.
I Find a suitable leather image on pinterest while i am making leather, and make it into a usable texture map at Substance Designer. I used a transparent map for the cape, because the cape is the most vulnerable to damage in combat, so painting a damaged effect is more suitable for this character.
Using xgen to make CG hair is something that I have been afraid to try, because I thought it was very complicated before, but whenever I encountered some areas that I was afraid to learn, I always remembered the words of my mentor, don’t stay in the comfort zone, so by actively learning this skill, I found that it was not so difficult to understand the operation of xgen. After two days of learning, I was able to manipulate maya’s xgen board to make hair by myself. I just need to understand the direction and logic of hair growth, which is also where I learned many important knowledge and skills in this blogger’s instructional video
When making the two parts of hair, I think it is more important to observe the direction of human eyebrows and eyelashes. In the early stage of production, I just made a tuft of hair without any trend or distribution, which does not look natural. After observing the real eyebrows, I referred to the head features of the characters I referred to when sculpting before, and I found that the eyebrows were divided into many groups. The orientation of each group is also different. After watching the teaching video for many times, I added some noise and beam effect to make it look better. The most important point is that I can’t just make one eyebrow and copy it to the other side. So I’d rather spend a little more time and do some differentiation so it looks more natural.
The UV split of the character’s body is a very delicate issue, I need to consider which line to cut both to ensure that there will be no errors in baking after the face is unfolded, but away from the player’s centre of vision, so I chose to cut a line on the back of all the parts of the body will be enough, the advantage of doing so is that even if there are UV seams, it will not affect the overall material effect of the character
The most important part of the UV stage of the character’s equipment is whether the UV is flat and the utilization rate of each UV set is as high as possible, so I set the UV of the entire character’s equipment within 5, which is also the estimated number of UV assigned to the equipment by some 3D artists when they split the UV when I was researching the grid topology,Since the character is the visual center of the player’s control, I choose to spend more time in this part manually splitting the UV and arranging each UV shell properly to get a better effect, which I can control, rather than using an automatic UV splitting tool,Before FMP started, I did some exercises without considering the number of UV sets and the rationality of UV splitting, but this year’s learning experience made me grow a lot and have a deeper understanding of UV splitting
Before I start topologising the high poly model I need to have a clear idea of the direction, distribution and number of low poly models for realistic game characters, so that I can make my character model as in-game usable as possible. So I collected some pictures of character mesh displays from character artists on artstation, and I refer to these mesh lines to re-topologise my character’s high faceted model.Analysing the mesh of these artists’ low-poly-count models reveals that they processed most of the mesh first and then did some mesh processing on the details and folds to make sure that the mesh distribution of the character is even enough and that a very good fold effect can be achieved through some triangular surfaces to ensure that there will not be any baking errors in the post-baking process.
Topogun is a software specialized in retopological grid that I accidentally found. I tried to learn this software through the tutorial published by this blogger to get more professional topology knowledge and skills. After fully learning the basic operation of this software, I combined the low poly grid distribution of roles analyzed previously to make the process more efficient.
Because I used zbrush’s base human body for sculpting, it saved me some time when doing the re-topology, I only had to switch the high poly model to the lowest level of subdivision to get an okay mesh result, but because the mesh is still a little bit problematic after a lot of sculpting, I still imported into Topogun to do the mesh modifications because I had planned to bind this character in the beginning, so I had to make sure that every joint place mesh was correct or else it would be hard to go back to the step of re-topologising after processing all the post-processing changes. I planned to bind this character at the beginning, so I have to make sure that the mesh is correct in every joint, otherwise it will be hard to go back to the re-topology step to make modifications after dealing with all the post-processing, which is something I need to take into account for the process in this project.
After combining the topology knowledge and software operation skills learned before, I used the quadrilateral drawing method to re-topology most of the clothing in topogun. In the topology process, I need to consider whether the polys of the overall clothing model are uniform. An important point that greatly affects the topological quality is that after ensuring the mesh topology of the joint part is correct, the triangular surface is used to add lines to the fold turning part, which can not only ensure the correct silhouette, but also make the baking effect better. I have never considered this before, which is some important knowledge I learned in the topological stage.I think zremesher is more suitable for the wiring of wrist guards, leather and mantle, because I will add fabric simulation to Unreal Engine for the cloak later, so zremesher wiring is just enough. When carving the wrist guards, because the wrist guards are relatively hard edges, Therefore, when dealing with high poly model, I have already dealt with the problems of hard edge and hem, so the wiring after zremesher can match the high poly model well
In the process of carving the mask, I found some problems. I forgot to hollow out the mouth part of the mask when carving, so that the character would look more natural when wearing the mask. However, I found this problem only after the carving was completed, but it was difficult to correct it. I still need to plan the overall carving process before I start carving. In the modeling process, I refer to some other types of masks, because after reflecting on the problems I encountered in carving foxes last time, I think more research on similar types of models will be helpful for carving, instead of limiting myself to finding models with the same theme as the things I make. In the later stage of carving, I referred to the patterns of these real masks and increased the details of the masks. After getting familiar with the software Topogun, I basically used this software to carry out all the topological processes, and the masks were no exception. However, during the topological process, there were many turning points on the faces. Drawing polygons in these places and maintaining the bumps and bumps of the mask are a problem that needs to be thought about while topology. Before this, I thought that topology only needed to cover the model with polygons, but to topology a better mesh effect, it is still necessary to think about the direction of the topological lines and so on
Because I topologized the eyes of the mask and the mask itself together when topologizing, the mesh could not be separated, so I needed to determine the ID map before baking and then make the material. I thought it would be better to make the material separately to get more diversified effects
