Week: 25 – 31 October

This week I continued modeling the horse character from last week and the pending unfinished crab character I did during the summer break. I want to start with the animation as soon as possible, so I have to finalise both characters quickly including the rigging, UV map, and textures.

Crab Character: Modeling

The crab character still has several unfinished parts which are the antenna and the mouth area including teeth and tongue.

I started by defining and finishing the shape of the lip and the interior of the mouth

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I then did a very quick models of the character’s tongue and tooth from basic cubes.

The tooth and tongue model were then placed inside the mouth. I duplicated the tooth into three more teeth with slightly different sizes and rotations to make it look uneven.

For the antenna, I duplicated one of the legs and modified the shape to make it look like the antenna from the sketch.

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After the model finished, I think the single antenna looked a bit weird, so I decided to make it a pair.

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While working on the modeling, I was also rethinking about the story of my FMP, probably changing to something related to student and university. Maybe the story will be about the characters going to class, similar to my reference for the crab character, which is Monster University. I will finalise the details of the idea and shots next week.

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Crab Character: UV and Texture

I didn’t planned to have a realistic or painted texture for the character, but instead to use a simple procedural textures. So I need to unwrap the character’s UV first.

The first step is to mark the seams so Blender can unwrap each part properly, and I can have the texture seams at the areas I wanted, which are at the back and the bottom so they will not really visible to the viewer.

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I duplicated the crab body parts to 2 or 3 more for color variations, so in the animation / shots I can quickly turn on or off the object in the collection to make the character look different between shots.

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Crab Character: Rigging

For the character, I built the skeleton manually from scratch using the standard Blender bone.

Skinning and vertex weight

For the skinning process, I used the manual vertex value instead of the standard weight painting method. I prefer the manual method especially when the object has a low-poly state since I can choose and select the vertices easily. 

For me it is multiple time faster to skin this way where I can just select the vertices and enter the intended weight to quickly make them following which bone I want, compared to using weight painting brush where we keep painting again and again to get the correct values for each body parts. This manual method is especially very effective when dealing with very narrow areas such as fingers. Using weight paint in this area instead can be very painful when it painted the wrong surfaces since they are very close to each other.

If I want the vertices around the character’s chest to follow 100% to the upper spine bone for example, I can just set those vertices weight value to 1.0 to that bone, and set the vertices loop between the upper and lower spine to the value of 0.2 so that it will follow the upper spine for 20% to create soft and smooth bend. It’s very fast and I can get consistent weight for all sides.

Horse Character: Modeling

After the crab character finished, I quickly worked on the horse character. The process was almost similar with the crab especially for the UV unwrap and rigging, so I will not described the process as detail as the crab character.

I started by reshaping the head and face to make it look more stylised.

I think the horse’s face look a bit fierce so I made more adjustment to the face again to make the character look more friendly. I enlarged the eye made it more round.

I also decided to reduce the number of hair on the character, and made the character to have a human-like hairstyle.

Horse Character: UV and Texture

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Horse Character: Rigging

I used the same techniques as the crab character including the IK and the manual vertex weight value for the skinning.

After using the manual vertex value method several times for both characters, the only thing that really annoying was it will not automatically normalize the weight value to the sum of 1.0 between multiple bones that shared the same vertices. So I will need to use the ‘Normalize All’ function every time I entered new value to the selected vertices so it will deduct and calculate the balance weight values to the other bones. If I forgot to ‘normalize’, multiple bones can effect the same vertices with the same maximum weight which can cause the shapes to not properly follow the intended bones.

I used the manual vertex weight value when skinning in 3dsmax as well, but 3dsmax will automatically normalize the value. I’m not sure if I can do the same in Blender but I cannot find the way yet, other than to use the ‘Normalize All’ function.

Finally, I managed to finished both characters including the texture and rigging this week, so I can start with the animation as soon as possible. I planned to finalise the story first next week.

Week 3: 18 – 24 October

After showing the character sketches to Alan last week, I’ve decided to make the horse as the second character. So I spent this whole week for the modeling of the horse character, and also finalising the previous crab character. My plan was that I must have both character models and textures ready this week, so I can proceed with rigging next week. 

I remembered that I have a quadruped horse character that I created several years back for one of my freelance works. So instead of modeling the new six-legged horse from scratch, I want to use and modify the existing model as my starting point. The original horse was made and rigged using 3ds Max, so I exported its low-poly meshes (without bone) to FBX format that can be imported into Blender.

I made a quick preparation before I begin modifying the model. In the original file, almost all objects were separated, so I combined some body components especially the hair into one because in Blender I think it’s easier to work with combined objects when editing and rigging compared to 3ds Max. 

The areas that will undergo a lot of changes are the body (including head and legs), so to make the process easier, I deleted the left half of the horse body and applied the ‘Mirror’ modifier. This will make any changes to one side of the body will automatically apply to another.

I also added the ‘Subdivision Surface’ with 2 level, so I can quickly switch between the low and high poly version to see how the final surface will look like. I then did some clean-up in the outliner / collection by organising and renaming all the objects. Now the model is ready for further adjustment.

I did a quick draft edit to see the overall look and placement for the middle legs. I lengthened the body a little and added a couple of segments to the middle part. I then duplicated the front leg and placed it in-between the front & hind leg, but much closer to the front. Honestly at this stage the middle legs look really weird. Further adjustment need to be done to make it look more natural especially at the shoulder area, and the overall shape of the middle legs should not look like a direct copy of the front legs.

After making the quick draft, I want to get the overall form of the body right first. So I modified the proportion of the head, legs and body making it less exaggerated than the original version. And below is the first iteration.

I brought and showed the first iteration of the horse character to Alan in class this week to get his opinion. And as expected he said that the middle legs look weird and like it just unnaturally connected there. He added that I need to think about the internal anatomy like the bones and muscles, and how it is possible to function if it exists in the real world. Alan then pointed out from one of my references that the shoulder of the middle leg overlaps a bit at the top shoulder of the front leg.

After getting the feedbacks, I proceed to fix the middle legs in class. I forgot to bring my mouse to the class and struggled with my laptop’s trackpad to navigate inside Blender. Alan let me borrow his mouse (thanks Alan!) so I spent the time until the end of the class modifying the horse. Before I went back home, I showed the second iteration of the character to Alan again and he said it was much better but more adjustment needed to make it looks natural.

Week: 11 – 17 October

I didn’t do much for my FMP this week as I’m busy focusing on the thesis to balance the progress on both works. However, I managed to find some time to do a minor update to the crab character model and did some sketches for the second character.

I planned to make the second character to have totally different anatomy, and contrast to the first crab character. The crab character was based on the insect anatomy with exoskeleton (external bone) and segmented body parts. So for the second character, I want the character to have seamless body parts or skin, and probably to have hair like a quadruped animal.

I quickly referred to the creatures from the Avatar (2009) film by James Cameron, which I also refer as a case study for my thesis. The film featured many six-legged creatures which were designed based on a real quadruped animals such as Direhorse (based on a horse), Thanator (based on tiger or panther) and Hammerhead Titanothere (based on a rhinoceros).

Although I’m referring to the creatures from Avatar, I wanted my characters to have more cartoony or stylised look than the realistic appearance of the film. I’m interested with the animal character designs from several Disney films. I think a horse named Maximus from Tangle (2010) and a dog named Bolt from Bolt (2008) are really suitable for my animation. So I made several sketches based on those characters but with six legs.

I showed the crab model update and the final character sketches to Alan when I came to the class this week to get his opinion. He was okay with the designs but a bit concerned because they are very similar to the references even though they have six legs. I explained that it was my intention to make a parody of those characters, but I want people can still recognise where the characters came from. So Alan suggested me to make small adjustments to the design and to have something that become identical for the character, like the Bolt character that has a lightning symbol on his body or Maximus that has a star symbol on his neck.

Regarding the story idea, I told Alan after thinking several days about the idea he gave last week, I planned to abandon the idea of lip-sync for my animation as I think it will consume too much time before the final deadline to design the dialogues, recording voice and making detail facial rigging and animation, where I should actually focus on the body animation as it is more in-line with my research. My new idea is to make a commercial-like animation titled ‘Six-legged Olympic’ that focus on body animation only with different characters doing practices like walking, running and jumping as preparation for the upcoming sport events. The animation will still featuring the original idea to have 3d characters on a real footage. I was thinking to have the characters practicing at several landmarks around London such as the Tower Bridge, Hyde Park and Oxford Street.

Week: 4 – 10 October

After a long summer break, the term 4 begun this week. The university and classes have been opened, so some of my classmates and I went to the class physically instead of online like the previous term. This is also the first time I met with my classmates face to face.

There are 2 classes in the term 4, which are FMP and Thesis Development with new professors; Alan Postings and Nigel Mairs. During the first class with Alan, we were having some discussions regarding the FMP and then each of us shared the progresses of our project so far.

I showed the six-legged ‘crab’ character that I modelled several weeks ago to Alan. I also told him that I still don’t have a concrete idea for the story. Initially, I planned to make a short animation with 2 or 3 different six-legged characters doing something together or having a conversation while walking and running to demonstrate the animation studies of six-legged creatures that I’m currently doing in my thesis. The short would be some kind of comedy sketch with a cartoony animation style.

Alan gave a suggestion for me to make an animation about the characters being interviewed by a TV reporter, similar to the concept of the famous stop-motion animation by Nick Park from Aardman. I used to watched this animation since I was still in school, so I really like the idea! I probably can make the characters being interviewed while they working out in a gym with some of the characters doing the jumping exercise, walking and running. I will think about this and finalise the story as soon as possible.

On Friday, we have the first class with Nigel. Everyone gave a brief introduction of our topic for the thesis and projects to him. During my turn, Nigel told me that I have a lot to research as my topic probably don’t have many resources. He also shared that he once animated a multi-legged creature (crab) and mentioned that it was tricky.

Week: 1 July – 3 October

During the summer break, I accompanied myself with 3 major works; FMP & thesis related, working with my friend from Malaysia to update our PC and mobile game, and continue involving with the Indie Film project that I blogged in the previous entries.

Indie Film Project

When the term 3 came to an end, the Indie Film project was still in the post-production phase. I’ve completed all my tasks for this project (camera tracking and animation) and not involve in the post (lighting and compositing), but Luke messaged me if I could continue helping with the project to take over the lighting tasks from Mariana as she is very sick. I quickly agreed to help since I can learn new things especially to improve my lighting skills, which could be useful for my final major project, plus the lighting and compositing part was led by the external tutor, KK Yeung from MPC.

Long story short, the works took about a month to finish which involved several lighting retakes, car model reference replacements, rendering problem on the farm and compositing. I’m not doing the lighting from scratch but by using and modifying the templates created by KK, and re-setup the layers and render passes for the animation files. I learned several new things especially in the technical aspects when using Maya for extensive model reference with different object categories, lighting, materials, layers and passes. I also learned and understand more on how to use Nuke to composite all the layers even though I’m not doing the final compositing from scratch.

During the final week of the works, Giulia, Diana (from VFX course), Luke and I pushing to complete the rendering as quickly as possible after Luke mentioned that all the computers that we currently working on at the university will be wiped out as a preparation for the upcoming term and student intakes.

FMP & Thesis

I don’t have much progress for my FMP and thesis during the break since I was very busy with the Indie Film and the game project.

But from time to time, I still continue collecting materials for my thesis paper and has found quite a handful of previous researches that can be related to my topic. One thing that I found interesting was that there is a very limited number of research for six-legged animation that come from the animation industry itself, but I found many references from multiple robotic researches that studied the anatomy and movement patterns of six-legged creatures such as insects to be applied to the robots.

Regarding the FMP, I managed to finish the initial model for one of the characters for my short animation which is a crab-like character. I made a simple sketch of the character as a guide before I begin the modelling in Blender. The crab character were based on the design of Chet and Waternoose from Monster University and Monster Inc.

The modelling process was almost similar to ‘The BatteriX’ characters I did during the Term 3. Most of the body parts were built from a modified sphere objects. Several modifiers like Mirror and Solidify were used to assist the modelling process, and Subdivision Surface were added to smoothen the low-poly version of the character which set to only visible in render. I didn’t texture and rig the character yet as I want to have all the character models finished first. Below are some of the modeling progress that I captured.

The model is not finished yet especially for the antennae and mouth area.