This assignment was described to us by Kelvin, our teacher, as more of a creative project in which we had to let our imagination run wild. In the first few classes we were taught about character design and the theory behind the shape of the characters and how the industry designs characters in games and movies and the process behind it.
Initial stage
After being briefed on our assignment we were made to design characters off the top of our heads. I came up with some random stuff which included a hybrid of a human and an octopus. After going home and doing research, I realised that a similar creature already existed in mythiology called Cthulhu, so I decided to design new characters sitting at home. I came up with two more but the the second one, even though it was more complicated, it looked cool the way I had designed it so I decided to go with that. It was a fox as a human with human features and and dressed somewhat like how a human would dress.
After designing the character, we had, in my opinion, one of the best classes of uni yet and physically modelled the character using clay and wires and foil. It put my poor clay handeling skills to the test and challenged me to create a character that could stand on its two legs by itself and it wasnt as easy as it sounds. After making a model that had balance and a legs strong enough to stand, we were going to use photogrammetry, scan the physical model and edit it in maya after inputing it in metashape and getting a base model from there.
The reason the model is not fully complete is due to the images not being taken properly and not overlapping each other well enough to create a closed model, so I had to retake the image of the model in my room and put the images in the software again and finally had a full model.
After saving the model made as an obj, I imported it into Maya to work on it from there and needless to say it looked awful at first glance.
Once that was done, we used a tool in Maya called Quadraw and drew over the model in quadrilaterals to give it a better and smoother shape. I naturally messed up my first quadraw attempt and made it too complicated which was pointed out to me by Kelvin that if I re-did it it would have been better for me later to make any changes I wanted
After the second quadraw the model was looking way better in smooth mode which was how were were supposed to work. I realised I had not added ears so I built them on, added a nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, nails and changed the way I wanted the body shape to look like till I was happy with it.
The next thing to do was UV mapping, which included cutting, sewing and loads of unfolding of random shaped objects, and even though I tried my best to cut and sew the model into proper objects, some still remained irregular.
Next stage
I had the opportunity to participate in some exciting motion capture (MoCap) sessions. These sessions allowed me to understand how to record videos and upload them to rokoko to creat an animation, but majorly the session I atttended when I wore the suit was basically looking at a 10 year old who had been given a toy, I was ecstatic.
It recorded realistic movements that could be applied to my characters in Maya. Despite being the perfect way to record my animation, at the time I had worn the suit, I had no idea what I wanted my character to do, and I fell sick after that so I missed the other sessions. The timing couldnt have been worse I was quite agitated. After recovering, the mocap room wasnt available any further so that meant I had to record a video on my own. I first needed a script talking about what my character was meant to do. I had gone into this project creating a fox who was going to be a military man, so it was pretty clear to me that I had to make him march and salute among other things.
The above includes the script that I finalised and how the scenes proceeded.
Next I needed a suitable location for my video footage. I spent hours exploring various environments, finding different angles to record from and searching for the perfect place to shoot. I did various takes in my own room, the hallway, and the lobby too.
I had to leave the building and go into a colony area to finally shoot my video.
Despite finding the ideal location, I encountered an unexpected issue. The character’s feet were not being properly rendered and it was casuing my animation to crouch the entire way, causing instability in the motion capture data. something was bound to go wrong eventually. I decided to proceed and work with the best footage I had.
Back in Maya, I realised my character looked quite dull, so I gave him colour and eyes to make him look more realistic. Since my UV mapping was messed up, I created several materials, assigning different colours to them and chose the faces I wanted to colour and did it that way. Uv mapping would have clearly been ideal, since it would have made designing my character much more simpler, but I have realised through experience that nothing goes perfectly in these maya projects.
Once I was happy with how my character looked, I began the process of creating a skeleton and rigging it to my character. This crucial step allowed the character to move realistically and fluidly. However, I faced several challenges during the skinning process due to the same error over and over again.
I spent various hours on youtube, google, even reddit, to find the answer to my problem, but was unsuccessful, the animation had already been imported from rokoko, but I had nothing to attach it to since the my character was not moving with my skeleton and I had pretty much hit a road block where I was unable to procees with my project.
Then came the great lord and saviour, my classmate, Rithwik. Understanding my predicament, he graciously offered his assistance. We spent countless hours on call, troubleshooting and refining the skinning process. His expertise and patience were invaluable, his roomate said that I owed him big time for this and I agree. Through the magic of the universe, he managed to skin my character and suddenly my character was able to move with the skeleton.
once the character was successfully rigged in Maya, it was time to bring it into Unity. Following a simple YouTube tutorial, I created a large field in the middle of a forest. Unity’s extensive variety of tools and features allowed me to construct a visually appealing environment that was simple to make yet convincing.
Ofcourse even though my world was finished, it was not going to be that simple and I encountered yet another obstacle. The animation from Maya was not exporting correctly. Either only the character was getting exporter, or only the animation.
I was unable to import both together even though I followed the settings that were needed while exporting. Since I was going to uni to present on the day of submission, despite the judgement I would get from Kelvin, I knew that the only option was to ask him then and there on how to fix it hoping it was an easy solution since Google was proving to be useless. Well as much hope I had put in kelvin, turns out he’s not that advanced at unity since thats Eric’s department who wasnt there in the morning.
Final stage
I was still optimistic that I’d be able to figure out how to add my character fully. I searched up some more on google and finally was able to export everything perfectly.
The last thing I wanted to do was to add the same animation another time but not the full thing so I did that by copying and pasting the animation once in the animaiton editor and deleted all the key frames that were not required in the second animation.
I was finally done. After feeling like I had been through hell, I had managed to complete my project in its entirety. After presenting, Kelvin asked me which field I saw myself working in and even though I have not decided since Im still exploring, that question has gotten my mind thinking about my future endeavours in VR so I thank him for that.