Project Progress and Works During Summer Break

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.

Chet Alexander from Monster University (2013)

Henry J. Waternoose from Monster Inc (2001)

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.