I knew that this project was more on the creative side, so naturally I thought it would be slightly more challenging since it would require to come up with something unique and new. When I had first designed my character, I did think that it was a unique character, but I wasn’t able to sketch it out properly so I ended up scratching that idea. I ended up with a military fox, which even though was an original idea, it ended up resembling the fox from Zootopia quite significantly which I fund quite annoying but since the sketch I had drawn out was so perfect, I decided to stick to it no mater what the haters said. Physically creating the character physically out of wires, foil and clay was probably the most fun part of the entire process. Using photogrammetry, I ended up with a digital model of my character which I then put in maya and used quad draw to retopologies it. We were finally put into the motion capturing suits that we had been hearing about for a couple of weeks. The replications of my movements done by the humanoid on screen were uncanny. I felt like a child who had been given access to the greatest toy that had ever existed, I was enjoying myself way too much. Despite being presented with the opportunity to wear the mocap suit, I was in the early stages of my character and had not finalised what I wanted my movements to be so I ended up wasting the one opportunity I had because little did I know that I would fall extremely sick for the next few weeks and miss the other mocap sessions. By the time I had recovered, the second and third years had become busy with the room so the only option I was left with to record my animation, was to shoot a video with a device and create an animation using the Rokoko app like we had been taught in the first mocap lesson. After spending various hours recording in various locations, I found the perfect location on an abandoned park. After putting the video in Rokoko and exporting it and putting it into Maya, I had to proceeds to work on the most annoying, exhilarating and tedious process of this entire project, the character rigging. Its basically where you give your character a skeleton and make sure all the joints are perfectly assigned so there’s no weird movements. The next step which was to skin the skeleton to the character so that when you move the skeleton, the character moves with it, was taking a toll on my mental health and patience because Maya simply refused to skin and repeatedly showed the same error which had no fix or solution that I could find online. After taking help from my classmate to fix that issue, I configured the animation from Rokoko onto my character. I finally gave the character some texturing, created a simple forest scene in unity and exported the ready animation to finally finish my project in record time. In its entirety, I would say that despite the various challenges I faced, the various methods used, animations wasted, I was just glad that I was able to have an animation which did not include the character putting his own arm through his head. When it comes to my satisfaction, for this project specifically, I felt like I did the bare minimum and was just desperate to finish it and I think that was visible in my project. Therefore, I was only moderately happy with what I had come up with, because I knew the potential it had but I was unable to fully display the vision I had in my head, but having said that, I do think that I managed to grasp the basics of creating an animated character with an animation recorded by myself and make the character copy what I did. I leaned how to digitally recreate a physical object, how to use rigging and animation in maya and got to try on the mocap suit and experimented with it. I know that it’s not right to blame it on an excuse, but I strongly believe that the reason my project was done so hastily was because I ran out of time as I lost crucial weeks right before the deadline being sick, which I had planned to spend working on the project instead. It was just unfortunate timing but again that could have been solved if I was a little ahead and when I had put on the mocap suit for the first time, if I was prepared with my animations then, I would have saved quite a lot of time. It just shows that like always, my procrastination got the better of me, and even though this time I had in fact planned out my project a few weeks before, I became unwell for that exact time period that it almost felt like a curse. That being said, I managed to push my creativity and technical boundaries, overcame all the problems I faced and came up with a decent result. Looking forward, I am excited about the potential implementation of these skills in future ambitious projects. As the years go by, I hope to hone my skills even further, incorporate new technologies and produce a well-developed and refined project. Seeing how at the beginning of this year I had no idea what a complicated software like Maya even was, to completing an entire animated project which included two such engines, I have come a long way and am proud of myself. Can only gain more experience from here onwards.
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