23005961's blog

Final Project Video

About My Concept (Background Story):

From the beginning I wanted to make a Transformer to I associated a whole story, the main idea is: aliens have built a base on Earth to secretly steal the Earth’s energy, as the protagonist of the character received the order to drive a Transformer to carry out the exploration of the story

Before starting the project:

Initially, I was going to do it all in Maya. First of all, I designed the most classic Transformers, how to make Transformers unique, I thought of making a Transformer that is not in the film, and then modelled it after my favourite character Bumblebee, and spent a month to make the animation.

I thought about importing the models into UE to create the scenes, but due to the lack of refinement of the models and some of the models are missing faces, UE can not be recognised, so I gave up on UE, and now it seems that this decision can be considered a little more.

However, it turns out that Maya’s lighting system and lenses are not as good as UE’s, and the end result is not as good as UE’s. This was a bad decision, but it made me realise that using a more versatile app for the project was definitely a better decision.

Production Process and Challenges Encountered:

I then began creating my characters.
Firstly, I searched for materials on the internet, and then I finally decided to use the Ferrari car as a prototype to create Transformers. As I wanted to create the effect in the film, I looked up a lot of tutorial videos, and then I finally created the Transformers animation according to the tutorial videos.

In the production process or encountered a lot of difficulties, such as before and after the deformation of how to delete the excess model, I learned that Maya can use keyframes to hide the excess model and show the deformation of the Transformers out of the arms and legs and the head, and is the production of the skeleton bindings, the production of the weights of the weights of the re-ratio or the model will be deformed.

The production of the scene is relatively simple, first from the network to find the art style I want, and then create a simple layout of their own can be produced (due to lack of time, I produced the first scene, the next two scenes are network material)

Rendering and Compositing:

I found a problem, the colours I saw in the maya render window but imported into either AE, PR, or NUke were not the same as what I saw in the render window, so I toned the colours in Nuke and then imported them into pr for editing.

Challenges Encountered:

TIME MANAGEMENT:

Although I had set a schedule for myself and started it as planned, it didn’t go as expected. I ended up setting aside about 10 days for rendering after all the models were done, but I didn’t anticipate that the rendering would run into so many problems, and as I mentioned in final project-part3, I rendered it many times. So much so that the compositing time became very short, which is a sad thing, and the quality of my renders was not the best (due to the large size of the scene) each frame took a long time to do, and the rendering was not as good as it could have been, but I did not expect to have so many problems with the renders, as I mentioned in the final project-part3.

Improvement direction:

Determine the right development path: I think my focus should be mainly on the animation of Transformers, because my Transformers only have one transformation animation and I didn’t make any other animation effects, which is something I feel is lacking.

Detailed Study of Materials: Deepening my understanding of Substance Painter (SP) and Substance Designer (SD) was essential. I believe that creating more detailed maps for my next project would be an excellent way to achieve this goal.

Maintain a balanced mindset and patience: Becoming a CG artist is a constant learning and building process. Not everyone is born with talent. The only way to create better work is to study, practice, and improve your aesthetics.

I used AI to animate the character’s facial expressions, then Nuke for colour grading and finally adobe premiere for compositing the video.

I want to say in the production of a lot of obstacles, the biggest obstacle is the rendering, first: maya due to the lack of adjustment of the lens, so that the rendering out of the effect is not very satisfactory so again to make the lens, second: due to the scene is too large, there are a lot of details of the place mapping is always wrong, as well as due to the mapping of the metal is not adjusted, the first time the rendering out of the effect of everything is reflective, so that the Rendering many times (no frame extraction rendering) Third: I learned to use the plug-in in pr to animation slow motion playback, the use of Twixtor plug-ins to make.

All in all, this bishop due to the scene is very big, in the rendering spent a lot of time, but there are also a lot of gains, maya has more skilled control, rendering a lot of times so that I understand to make sure that every object in the lens mapping and metallic, reflections should make sure that it is normal, in the production of a good lens should be playblast for pre-export, and then pre-composite to make sure that the production out of the After making a shot, you have to pre-export it with playblast and then pre-compose it to make sure the shot is what you want.

I mainly made model textures for the past two weeks, and since I didn’t make UVs and add materials when I was making the model, it took me two weeks to add textures before I had time to adjust them.

I use substance painter to do the model textures.

In the production of mapping, after rendering, I found that there is a lot of noise in the picture, after checking the mapping found that it is not a problem of the model itself but a problem of the normal attribute in the mapping, reduce the value of the normal can be avoided to avoid the appearance of noise!

IDEA:

Because I have been exposed to robots since I was a child, and then I especially like the Transformers movie, so I want to make a Transformer of my own in the last project, and the Transformer I do like is Bumblebee, so I made a Transformer of my own Ferrari model based on Bumblebee in the holiday.

Background:

A group of aliens are secretly harvesting Earth’s energy in a desert in the middle of nowhere on Earth, and our nearby bunker sends the Transformers to investigate.

Storyline:

In my mind, the door to the bunker opens and a car drives out, there’s a road in the sand, and the car drives on it, I wanted to create the effect of the car driving during the day and at night, then the car drives to the top of the mountain (At first, the model has a new texture, and when it reaches the top of the mountain, I’ll change it to an old texture.), starts to change into a robot, discovers the aliens’ base, and starts to get ready for the next move， I’ll probably build robots to fire cannonballs to destroy the alien base later.

For this project I think I’m going to base it on maya, houdini, nuke, pr and so on.

Art style

Bumblebee

Patrol robots

Car driving in the desert

Bunker

I’ve downloaded an alien base scene, but I’ll be replacing the downloaded building with one I’ve made myself.

Transformer

I made this Transformer, Firstly I downloaded a model of a Ferrari from the internet, Then found a tutorial video on how to make a Transformers Bumblebee, and then went about breaking down the car model as well as animating it according to the video.I learned a few things from this tutorial video, for example, when making Transformers you can use two sets of models and show or not show them with keyframes; when a car transforms you can not show the inside of the car and then show the arms and legs of the robot. I made a portion of the model’s materials as well as textures.

Here’s the Transformers transformation animation

https://youtu.be/daZBMpI8_so

Patrol robots

This is the robot I made and animated（I took apart and put back together some of the models I had previously made, then animated them as well as material mapping them）

In my vision I’d have patrol robots going back and forth across the alien base, or add some more animation of scanning objects

https://youtu.be/I7cOx0syGx0

Problem

But at the moment I don’t have any specific ideas about lens. I only found a few CG videos to go by for reference. I have another question, I think if the final video is mainly about driving the car, but it will be imbalance, how do I go about animating the car after it turns into a robot？

My personal project was inspired by a video I saw on the internet, but it was still different from what I saw, but this time it made me more familiar with houdini, I used maya to make the spaceship and the spaceship animation, the scene was taken from the internet, the background video was a video of a thunderstorm night, and I used houdini to make the lightning effect on the spaceship and nuke to do colour mixing and compositing, I hope to have more time for my graduation project to polish it up and make myself more satisfied. I used houdini to make the lightning effect on the spaceship and the flame effect behind the engine of the spaceship, and nuke to carry out the colour mixing and synthesis, I hope that the graduation design has more time to polish a work that makes me more satisfied.

This is my group work, I created the model mapping of the robot as well as the animation, and the scene camera and other parts of it
I was also involved in the pre-design section, storyboarding, and storyboarding, as well as the art style of the video.

Here is a video of our group

Here’s a video of our group’s breakdown

https://youtu.be/5PG-7VdZ5do

Video description: The main character of the villain walking on the road found a dormant robot, he scanned the surrounding environment, accidentally woke up the dormant robot, the robot scanned the villain, and found that he is righteous, so he kneeled down in the hope that with the villain to punish the evil and promote goodness!

UAL VFX Semester 1 Final Project (youtube.com)