My involvement in this project:

• Storyboard – Act 2
• Techvis – Act 2; Shot 10-18
• File referencing setup and initial pipeline preparation.
• 3d models – Background
• 3d models – Space Colony
• Rigging – Space Buggy
• Simple model modification & rigging – Spaceship
• Animation – Shot 06, 07, 08a, 08b, 08c, 08d and 09
• Fixing scene with VFX rendering problem
• Full render for shot 03, 04, 05, 06 and 07
• Final video editing

Our Team and Collaboration

First of all, I want to thank everyone in the team, Emma, Antoni, Ghera, Cally, and Ben. They have done phenomenal job in this project and I feel very fortunate to be able to work with them who are very talented in their respective fields.

When we started this collaborative project, we were a stranger to each other. Even with Emma, which is on the same course with me, I never talk or meet with her before. But throughout this project, everyone gets to know and get along with each other to complete the project. Everyone was very open to suggestions and easy to collaborate with.

Group Leader: Emma Copeland
Animator: Emma Copeland, Kamil Fauzi
VFX: Gherardo Varani, Antoni Coll
Sound Design: Cally Spence, Ben Harrison

During our initial meeting when we had our storyboard ready, we set some targets for what we should at least achieve by the end of the project. Based on the storyboard, there are 3 acts (Act 1, Act 2 and Act 3) with 35 shots for the story. Technically the project is quite heavy, so we targeted to complete everything for Act 1 first, in terms of modelling, animation, lighting, visual effects, sound and music. And if we able to complete Act 1 quickly and have more time, we will proceed with the remaining 2 acts. We acknowledged that everyone in the team was also busy with their respective course assignments.

At the end of the project, we managed to complete everything that we targeted for Act 1, while sound department managed to produced complete sound and music for all 3 acts. It’s a bit sad that we were not able to proceed with the remaining acts, but I think everyone was proud with what we accomplished. The end product might not very brilliant, but the collaboration and commitment given by each team member were amazing.

If I can describe everyone on the team from my perspective, Emma is the group leader but she was very open to any suggestion. She always tries to finish her job quickly and very quick to learn new things. As you can see in my previous posts, she was active in our group’s conversation to give respond and feedbacks. She is also very good at explaining something and I wish I could be like her.

Antoni is a very hardworking person. He did many research and experiments on his own to get all the visual effect and lighting needed for each shot. He was also active to give his work-in-progress updates in our Discord channel. Ghera is the same as Antoni, and he even willing to do the animation for the first shot at the beginning of the story. The visual look that they setup for all the shots were very good. I personally love the atmosphere in the final render.

Ben is a very creative composer, and he has produced 3 amazing tracks that fit extremely well with the story. I especially like the track he did for Act 2. Cally on the other hand is a visionary foley artist with unique vision with the sound effects. When I received the audio effects for editing, some of the sound feel quite weird to me at first and I can’t imagine how it should be implemented. But when Cally did the audio mix on my video editing, the effects match very well with the scene.

With all that said, I also want to thank our supervisors, Luke, Christos and Ingrid, who has been very helpful in providing guidance and assistance throughout the course of this project.

What I Learned In Terms of Technical

I have learned several new techniques and tools in Maya. I can still be considered as new with the software and there are a lot of things that I need to learn and understand.

At the beginning of the project, I learned about how to properly setup and use referencing system in Maya. I had several experiences working with reference or proxy pipeline using 3dsmax and Blender before to understand how important and useful this method is. So when we started building assets in our collaborative folder, I quickly began testing and experimenting the feature to see how it works in Maya. I watched several video tutorials when exploring this method to check in case I missed anything. I found that the reference system in Maya is quite easy to understand and powerful to use in project. Despite that, there are small things that irritated me about how Maya project, working folder and referencing system works when compared to other software. As far as I discovered during this project, the features not working as seamless as 3dsmax where it always finds files that we throw inside the working folder without the need to ‘repath’. But maybe there are still somethings that I don’t completely understand about how to use the feature in Maya. I will explore this more during the Easter break.

During this term I also learned more about rigging in Maya. In this project, I rigged the space buggy so I can animate the vehicle with moving wheels and suspension for one of the scenes. I also did a very simple rig for the spaceship model so all the 3 spaceship’s doors can be animated.

What I really explored deeper about rigging in Maya was when Crystal asked for my help to rig one of her group’s characters for their game demo project. I’m not fully involve in her group but only to help her with the rig. I have done various character rigs in other software before to understand at least the very basic of it. But I don’t have experience to do a full character rig in Maya, so I did a quick research and watched several tutorial videos to understand the tools and process. I found that the character rig in Maya is not very hard to understand. So in this regards, I’m very happy that I learned so much things with Maya rig from placing bones, controllers and weight paint. The only thing was that I’m quite slow while doing the rig as I’m not yet familiar with the tools in Maya.

Throughout the process, I was actually very concerned about the rig will break when imported into a game engine. I have faced and learned many character rig problems since I was working in game production for almost 3 years. I knew that a lot of things must be setup properly like root, bone directions, and parenting for the rig to work correctly in game engines. I know what I should prevent and do in 3dsmax and Blender, but feel clueless when I rig the character in Maya. The rig I did works properly in Maya but it’s not guarantee will work in game engine. I don’t have much time to test it as I also had other tasks with my group project. Unfortunately, what I afraid turned out to be true when Crystal mentioned to me that the character legs broke when imported into Unity game engine. She said they proceed to do another rig themselves as she don’t want to interrupt me again. Even though the rig was not use in their final product, I’m so grateful that I have learned so much in this matter. I may want to revisit this again during the Easter break so I can understand more about rigging in Maya and how to prevent the problem.

There are a lot of other technical aspects that I learned with Maya during this project. So to list a few; I explored more about modelling, properly separating and combining meshes, grouping, modifying Arnold materials, lighting, using layers, understand more about outliner (which is something I’m quite confused during the last term), creating and using ‘Quick Select Set’ feature which is very useful during the animation process. The most important was, I learned how bad Maya 2020 is! So I’m going to stay with Maya 2018 as suggested by Luke.

Reflection

I have learned a lot throughout this project. One of them was I’m improving one of my behaviours which I think can be pretty bad sometimes. I’m a bit too perfectionist person where I always concern about everything must be done precisely and organised accurately which can cause delay to my works. One example is you can try to save any image and video in this blog to see that I even renamed everything properly, which nobody will actually care or see. In the past, my obsession was much worse. I will measure every 3d object and align vertices precisely to not have any random decimal in coordinate when I do 3d modelling, even that kind of measurement was not needed or necessary.

But as I work more and more with other people during my previous works and in this collaborative project, I learned to control and apply this behaviour for more appropriate situations. I can see perfection can be useful but too much picky can cause problems to the project. This is something that I continue to improve more when working in this project. I managed to accept and weight which things are more important. One example was I’m not become too fussy when I saw minor inconsistency in render quality between different shots. In the past, I would reject it and will ask for re-render again and again. I know that everyone is learning as much as I am. I feel calmer when I managed to do that and grateful this collaborative project happened. I still have this obsessive behaviour, but it is much, much better now.

I also realised that I communicated more with my friends whether using text in our Discord channel and verbal in our weekly video meeting. They were all very nice and there are times we become pretty chatty in the channel and make jokes. I joined the conversation whenever possible since I really want to improve myself to write and speak fluently in English. Sometimes I had difficulties when I want to explain somethings quickly. I admit that I had a lot more to learn but this collaborative project has somewhat helped me in this regard.

I talked about my thinking for future path in my first post during the first week of this term, https://kamil.myblog.arts.ac.uk/2021/02/01/self-reflection-and-future-path/ . My heart was torn into two. I’m very interested with cinematography and character rigging (and animation). To be honest, after doing this collaborative project, not only I still cannot decide which side to focus, but it was getting harder to determine. I did a character rigging tasks and animations, and also attempted to do my animation shots with cinematic elements. Although probably what I did with these areas was not very much in the project, I genuinely love to do both of them. I will have to do more thinking more about this during the Easter break since I have to decide and blog about this in the first week of the next term. Maybe I will also need to ask Luke for his opinions and suggestions for this.