8 – 9 Feb 2021

We started this week with video meeting on Discord. This time, we have everyone in the meeting to discuss the storyboard that Emma and I had produced yesterday.

From the storyboard we were able to anticipated what model, animation, visual effects and sound needed for the project. Everyone agreed with the storyboard and then we discussed for everyone next tasks.

The animation department (Emma and I) will start building and preparing 3d models while the visual effects department (Ghera and Antoni) will research and experiment on some visual effects. For the the sound department (Cally and Ben), Emma volunteered to make an animatic from the storyboard to get a rough pace for the story so that Cally and Ben can start drafting audio and music without having to wait for the animation to finish first.

Right after the meeting Emma created a project folder on the University network for all team members to access and working on the project files. I also continue to gather as many free models from the internet that can be useful for the project.

10 Feb 2021

In today’s class, Luke demo to us of how to use and apply motion capture to any character rig as a method to make previs animation process faster. I don’t understand much during the lecture and will watch the recorded session to understand more regarding this topic.

In the evening, Emma posted a preview of her early works on our Discord channel and it looks good. Later that night I checked her works on the university network to see how she prepared the files. I found that all props and background models were imported into 1 file, which may not an issue now but can be problematic when we have multiple animation files with everything inside each of those files. The files can be very big and updating each file can be very tedious if we decide to change something to the background model or textures for example.

It’s definitely not Emma fault though as she probably new to this. I wouldn’t know about this either, but I was a bit fortunate to have some experiences working on several animation projects before to understand the usefulness of referencing system, file management and asset optimisation. Each character, prop and background model are suppose to be separated into different files and composed by linking them into another file. With this method, any model and texture can be updated and the changes can be pushed back to all animation files automatically. Plus, all working files will become much smaller in size and easy to manage. I think this can be very good for our group learning process as well.

The problem at this moment was that I used 3dsmax and Blender pipeline before and not familiar with how Maya referencing works, but I don’t think it will be much different. I didn’t tell the team yet that I want to implement this as I want to understand and confident on how to do this in Maya first. I will work on this tomorrow morning.

11 Feb 2021

Referencing System

Today I started preparing the project folder with reference system in mind on my local computer first. I downloaded all Emma’s files from the university network as my starting point and restructure from there. In the current files, some models were linked from the university model library, which are good, but they were located outside of our collaborative project folder. It can be a problem if any of the team member want to download the project folder to work on their local computer and will experience missing files. It may also will cause damage to the original model in the university library if we decide to modify the model’s shapes and rigs for our project.

In the original Emma’s project proposal, I can see some of the models that Emma planned to use. So I copied all the expected models and their respective texture files from library into our collaborative folder. I setup all the linked textures using ‘File Path Editor’ as dynamic paths inside the project folder so that anyone who copy the project folder will get the textures automatically loaded when they open the project file regardless of the root and parents folder structure.

Next, I started experimenting to see how referencing system works in Maya by linking all the models into a test file that I called ‘playground’ using the Maya Reference Editor. Then I did some experiments with static model first. I modified its shapes in the original file, and saw it updated automatically in the ‘playground’ file. After that, I tested what will happened if I updated a rigged character that has animation. I made a simple animation to the character in the ‘playground’ file and changed its shapes and textures in its original file. The character was updated successfully with all the animations still intact. It’s awesome! The only thing was that I cannot make too much dramatic changes to the bone location and its group as it will break the animation. But this is expected, and it works about the same as other 3d software. I also tested several other things like changing pivot, layers and group. There are small things that irritated me about how Maya project and referencing system works when compared to other software, but I think it’s manageable. I feel so great that I’m now understood the referencing in Maya, how it’s work and its limitations.

Space Ship Model

Next, I do a quick adjustment to the existing spaceship model. I want to do a very simple parent rig to the spaceship especially for its doors so they can be rotated and animated for one of the scenes. The doors were combined within the same mesh group of the body, so I need to separate them first. When I’m double-clicking on the door mesh to select it, it didn’t select the whole door. Which usually means its faces are separated and multiple vertices were overlapped in the same place. This is a very common problem happened when the model was converted and transferred using other 3d file format. So I did some meshes clean-up using the vertex ‘Merge’ function with very minimum threshold to fix the problem. I then managed to select the whole door meshes easily.

I then separated both doors using the ‘Edit Mesh > Extract’ function. The Maya separate function can be quite tedious because it will create a new group and divide each component in the selection into different objects whereas in other 3d software, it will only separate into 2 objects which are the original object and the separated mesh that we selected with original name still intact. But in Maya case, we have to rename the main object back, combine all the meshes that suppose to be one and clean the history. I’m not sure if there is another way to separate mesh but as far I look into tutorials and forum discussion, this is the way to do it in Maya. I will look into this again in the future as I don’t want to waste more time finding solution as this function is working, only it’s a bit annoying to me.

With the doors separated, I adjusted their pivot location and orientation in the right direction, so that the doors can be rotated properly. I then set both doors as child to the spaceship group and rename everything in the Outliner properly. I didn’t do a complete rig with controller for the spaceship as its only need a basic movement for the body and door. So I think a simple group-parent rig would be sufficient.

12 – 14 Feb 2021

Desert Planet Landscape Model

Now I’m ready to proceed with building the background models for Act 01 which are the desert landscape and space colony. I used one of the ground models from Emma’s file as my starting point. Because the polygon count was quite high, I optimised the meshes first using several tools like ‘Mesh > Reduce’ bit by bit, ‘Edit Mesh > Merge’ and some vertex by manual ‘Target Weld’ when Reduce and Merge not working as I expected. I flatten and adjusted some high of the ground shapes as I think it could be used in some shots of the story. During this process I also made a draft space colony model for scaling and location reference. I will revisit this model for detailing.

After the landscape ready, I then imported the modular rock models that I prepared last week and arranged them manually one by one on the ground model. During the process, I organised the Outliner so it is easier to manage as the modular rocks meshes started populating the area.  For basic lighting, I used the HDRI and lighting setup from Emma’s file with some modifications. This aspect may be changed later by Antoni and Ghera from VFX department. So technically, not everything was lost from her original works. During the whole process, I used a screenshot from ‘The Martian’ film as my reference.

Space Colony Model

I went back to the draft space colony model and adding more details to it. I didn’t built the building from scratch, but by combining some modified components from a free space station model to save time. After spending a whole day at the end of the week, I decided to wrap the work for the background model. I did not finish the interior of the building yet as it should has several more models such as tents inside it. So I just put some boxed as a dummy for this moment. I will update the building again and since we can use referencing system, the model changes can be pushed to all animation files at any time. It can also be a good demonstration for the team members so they can see how useful this feature is.

Rendered Images

After everything was ready, I set all the files using category naming convention with ‘char’ for character, ‘prop’ for props, ‘bg’ for background, and ‘anim’ for animation files.

I prepared a template file for ‘anim’ (animation) file with all assets like characters, props and background were linked into the file. So animators (Emma and I) can just grab this template file without the need to setup the references again and again every time we make new animation file.

I finished everything by the night at end of the week but I didn’t push my works to the collaboration folder in the university network yet. I want to brief everyone first about the system that I’ve prepared by tomorrow, 15 February 2021.