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Final Post

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     This semester, I originally set three goals for myself: animating a quadruped walk, creating a dialogue piece with three characters, and capturing a close-up interaction between a female character and an animal.  I found that I really struggled with planned projects keeping my interests. Once I saw a peer doing a face expression test, I knew that I wanted to do that too. I then started playing around with metahumans, so I planned to scan a friend’s face and record motion capture of him doing basketball themed actions. My goals towards the end turned into animating a polished cat’s quadruped walk cycle with a runway model’s bipedal walk cycle, blocked flirty themed face expression test, few shots of the custom metahuman doing various basketball moves in a park environment, and blocked small interaction between characters without dialogue.      The quadruped and biped walk cycle took a lot longer than I thought.  I wasn’t paying attention to how the muscles interacted with one anoth
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Week 13

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     This week, I continued working on two of my projects that I started. One was the metahuman project where I scanned an actor’s face, captured their motions using Motive Optitrack, and retargeted the mocap onto the custom metahuman. I’m at the point of constraining the ball. I was able to import the reference video into Unreal much like you would import an image sequence into Maya. I then keyed the ball to fly in and had to play around with activating the constraint, deactivating the constraint to animate the bounce, and then activating the constraint again. This was more of a test run, because this is the first time using Unreal Engine’s constraint system. I realized I wasn’t rotating the ball with the flow of the throws and bounces, so I’ll go back in and do that. I’m now noticing how messed up the hands are. I’m not sure how this happened, but the fingers are super spread apart and some of the mid fingers are flipped up. Of course, I would have to bake the metahuman’s animation o
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Week 12

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     This week, I completed the blocking phase of my facial expression test. She’s a flirty girl, so I had lots of fun shaping her mouth into different kinds of smiles, all implying different emotions. My favorite facial expression was the ending pose where I rotated the bottom lip in, tightened the lip corners, and played around with the skin clusters to make a really cute and shy biting-the-bottom-lip smile. I also had fun making her eyes flutter. In a way, it felt similar to sculpting when I would manipulate the skin clusters. I had to think about how the cheeks push up and appear rounder as we smile and elongate and appear more angular as we widen our mouth. I think I’ll move on because I feel more comfortable animating face expressions now, which was my goal.      For the metahuman motion capture scene, I was able to retarget and export the rest of the motion capture actions that I’ll be using. I also found a basketball park scene that fit everything that I needed for my shots. I
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Week 11

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     I wasn’t expecting to come across as many issues as I did while trying to figure out how to scan someone’s face, create a custom metahuman using the scanned face, and retarget the motion capture onto the metahuman. I was constantly met with errors like these that prohibited me from simply following along in a tutorial. I frequently went to help forums in hopes for a solution that isn’t outdated or downright confusing. I somehow managed to get the retargeted animations out of Maya and into Unreal. They aren’t counter animated just yet. I do see the issues with the fingers the most, but I want to get my sequencer situated with camera angles and choreography of the different animations.      I am planning to do three camera shots. I wanted to do a shot where it’s through his POV. His hand would be covering the glaring sun. Then, the camera flips to him in the same position, squinting his eyes, casting a shadow over his own face with his hand. The next shot is him noticing what’s goin
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Week 10

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    This week brought a lot of issues. In the beginning of animating the next expression, Maya crashed and kept crashing. I couldn’t open Maya at all at some point, so I thought it was a storage issue. I got rid of a lot of files, but it still didn’t work. After looking for answers online, I came to the conclusion that my many preferences could be corrupted causing Maya to not open. I decided it’d be best to copy my preferences into a separate folder, uninstall all versions of Maya completely, and reinstall. It was then opening fine, until I added my preferences back. I’ll be adding my preferences back the slow way then. I just managed to throw in a ball and give it a new texture for the Metahuman scene.      I also had issues with downloading the Metahuman I’ve been working on and exporting it into Maya. I had to download a separate  program called Quixel Bridge. It was already connected to my Metahuman Creator library once I signed in. An error kept popping up that it was not comp
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Post 9

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     For this week, I got a bit side tracked with what I want to call the “side quests” of my animation demo reel. Instead of my third idea of a quick animation with a medium camera shot from the waist up of a female character looking determined as her familiar (cat) hops on her shoulder from above, I decided to do a facial expression test instead. I’m using the “Moisha” rig because of her many face clusters that allow me to manipulate her skin to move in a more organic way. I wanted a theme for my facial expression test to establish a personality for Moisha, so I referenced the flirty poses as well as the eyerolls and hair flips of a classic “mean girl”. For now, I turned off the visibility for the hair and extra accessories to not get overwhelmed by the details. I think I’ll be working until near completion in segments, one segment per expression. This is what I have so far for the first expression.      The second “side quest” that I began but wanted in my demo reel anyway is creati
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Post 8

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     I decided to go back and finalize the woman’s cat walk. I made her shoulders and hip movements have more of a pop by grabbing the in middle keys and translating them in the graph editor to happen closer to the highest sway with a longer drag of in between motion. I noticed the fingers were quite unnatural, so I redid them. I made the fingers straight at the highest part of the arc and curled at the lowest part of the arc. I offset the wrist and fingers, so it looked like they were following along with the flow of the rest of the arm.      Mark said that I needed contrast as feedback to my animation. I envisioned this cat’s walk and model’s catwalk to look almost identical to show kind of how owners resemble their pets. However, I decided to make the cat’s walk loop two times quicker than the model’s catwalk, so they only match once in the loop. I also made the cat have a very quick blink with a more exaggerated tail bounce, while the model has a slow blink with a less emphasized h
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