Showreel

This is my animation showreel for the assets I created for this machinima project. It is comprised of all of my assets made this semester except for the gramps "model" I used in the animatic. It plays through a little faster than I planned but shows off what I've done quickly and to the point.

Final Animatic

This is my final animatic. I had some major issues when it came to putting it together in Unity. I was able to get all of my assets and animations imported and working, but I had major problems with setting up the cameras. I attempted using the camera script provided on blackboard but could not get it to work, even after hours of editing it and trying to find other scripts that could do the job from the Internet. The problem involved Unity switching to the wrong cameras, even though when revising the script, I was sure I was giving it the correct cameras to switch to. Scripting is my achilles heel and so having a major scripting issue put a halt to the production of the animatic through Unity. After hitting this wall in production I decided to set up cameras for the scene in Maya and playblast it in order to demonstrate how I had intended for things to go in Unity.

Below is my final animatic:

Below are screenshots of my failed unity scene and camera script:

Gramps: Character Development

Development went a bit dodgey when I realised I was yet to create Gramps. After focusing on the Jokid, Garden Gnome and Batgnome characters as the main characters, I completley forgot about this character. It took me until I was about to start the animatic to realise he ahdn't been made. As is has gone so far for a large chunk of this semester, I realised I was, once again, well behind schedule. It was too late to model, texture and rig another character from scratch and so I was forced to cut a massive corner for this poor character. I ended up creating a rectangular prism and texturing front and rear view sketches of Gramps to it to create his character. I died a little inside when I realised it was all i could do at this point in the semester, but its not a huge problem for the animatic as he reprises only a small role.

below are some screenshots of Gramps:

Scene Development

I went with a pretty simple environment for my animatic. The original concept I had for it involves a nice, big house with a beautiful front lawn adorned with an enormous rose garden. I wanted it to be picturesque so that when it is all destroyed at the end of the story, it added a little more bang for its buck and, in a parody, destroying things is always funny. For the animatic, I kept the scene very simple, due to time constraints, but still gave it enough to give good example of how I would like it to look next semester when I continue developing for this project.
As my narrative is a parody of the Batman universe, I attempted to merge my bright, cartoony style with that of Gotham City (the dark city in which Batman dwells), giving the house a very wonky shape and dark texture, while still making it look like the inviting dwelling of a friendly old man.

Below are some screenshots of the scene:

Garden Gnome: Character development

Things were starting to get a little desperate when I began developing the character models for the garden gnome and Batgnome characters. Under a lot of pressure to get going on the final animatic, I managed to model, texture and rig the garden gnome character in 2 days and then proceeded to alter his outfit to create Batgnome as well. This worked out well as I got two characters completely modeled, textured and rigged for the price of one, allowing me more time to get going with the animatic. I'm very happy with how these two characters turned out as they look very similar to the concept art I did earlier in the semester and I got quite a bit of positive feedback from my peers on their appearance. The only thing I'm a little disappointed about is the rigs attached to them. They do the job well enough for an animatic, but my rigging skills still have a lot to be desired if I want to animate these guys properly next semester.

below are some screenshots of the Garden Gnome and Batgnome characters:

Project 5: Character Animations Within a Realtime Engine

Surprisingly, I didn't have a huge amount of trouble with this activity. My rig for the Jokid character isn't perfect but I managed to make decent idle, walk, run and jump animations for him and got them into Unity with no troubles. Luckily for me I had talked to my tutor about importing skeletal meshes into Unity prior to attempting the activity, otherwise I would definitely have missed the 'bake animations' checkbox within the export options for FBX within Maya. The only thing that worried me when I first imported the animations into Unity was the fact that the character model was completely grey. Luckily, I snapped out of my stupor and remembered I need to import the textures as well. I guess these things happen when you don't get much sleep.

below are some playblasts of the animations I later successfully imported into Unity:

Storyboarding

When creating this storyboard I was forced to revise the script for my project. I didn't want to make any changes as I like my original script (outlined in one of my previous posts), but, unfortunately, they had to happen. The due date for this project is creeping up quite fast and there was a lot happening in my original script so I heavily simplified it and made it shorter. The fight scene between Batgnome and the Jokid (previously known as the Punk Kid) is much shorter and sweeter, but a bit lacking, but I'll have to deal with it for now. The ending now involves the firecracker being hurled into the air at the climax of the fight scene, with it flying towards the Gramps as he comes out onto his veranda for some fresh air, ending with an explosion.
I'm also hoping the theme of biodiversity within the conflicting forces witin this front lawn and its garden will still be obvious. It may just be a little overlooked this semester as I don't think I'm going to have much time for modeling a detailed rose garden. With these changes, the narrative is incredibly different to my first draft, but i'm happy with it as far as making a deadline goes.

Below is my current storyboard:

Project 4: Punk Kid Character Rig

For this week's activity, I applied a rig to the character I modelled and textured for the previous activity. As I have very little experience in the field of rigging, this proved to be a very difficult activity. It took me a couple of attempts to get the joint structure correct so that it would bind to the mesh properly and move in a desirable way and still be simple enough to allow it to be imported into Unity without any troubles. After getting the bones right, I created the controllers for each of the limbs, etc, using NURB circles and locators (with pole vectors attached to the elbow and knee points). At first, I applied parent constraints from the controllers to their respective joints and, after binding the mesh to the joints, this caused some major issues, mainly on the hands. The hands and a couple of other body parts would stretch and fold strangely as I moved the mesh around. After deleting the parent constrints and cleaning up the heirarchy, I applied orient constraints to the hands and this solved the problem. The other problems lied within the default weights Maya applied to the mesh. After sifting through each of the joints and their weights, the rig was pretty much complete. There are still a few issues with it but it should be fine for use in the animatic for the end of semester.
After creating the rig, I attempted importing it into Unity. It imported without any trouble and there didn't seem to be any problems. Hopefully I can use what I learned from the problems I had with this rig, as well as what I did correctly, to create the other characters for the final animatic with a bit more ease.

below is a screenshot of the character rig: