Author: Hanyue Liu

In the third lesson, we learnt to make a ball with tail movement This animation is an advanced version after the first ball bouncing. We needed to animate a ball with a tail bouncing across an empty space in class George showed us a video of a squirrel bouncing which gave us a reference for our animation, in class we were given more pointers on how we need to do more squashing and stretching when animating so we can create a more dynamic animation.

Afterwards, we had a critique of our work. Firstly, we looked at my sketches and George thought that they were too specific and too big and told me that I could make the movements smaller so that I could understand the movement of the outer contour better, and then we critiqued the last modification of the ball and pointed out a few problems, and then we looked at the movement of the pendulum, and modified my animation to make the swaying of the chain under the pendulum more flexible. The wiggle of the chain under the pendulum was made more flexible, and more slight wiggles were needed during the closing process. After this I made the changes and felt that the animation looked better.

For the third assignment, I watched a tutorial on how squirrels move and animated online, and then created an animation based on that. During the process of creating the animation, I found that I needed to keep the tail flexible and light, and that it was not easy to render the movement with the tail as the ball bounced around, and this took me a lot of time to modify the arc of movement of the tail.

In our second lesson, we learnt about the motion of a pendulum

During the lesson we were asked what the 12 principles of animation are. At the end of the lesson I made enquiries to gain a better understanding.

Each joint under the pendulum is connected to a joint above it. When the joint or axis above it swings, the one below it also moves and drags.

In this lesson, George would like us to do some sketching in the future I think sketching is really helpful for us to understand the movement of the characters and it can provide us with the ability to draw with our hands.

After that George explained to us one by one about the assignments we had done before during the correction process, in every frame George made corrections where there were problems, but I misunderstood the requirements of the assignment and made the number of frames a bit too much, George encouraged many of us during the correction process which helped us a lot to improve our confidence, thank you very much to him.

I watched George make a video of a pendulum in motion and two animation videos of a pendulum in translation for the assignment.

Following the tutorial, I created the translational motion, which took me more time in creating the final swing after stopping. And the second attempt, trying to animate the pendulum moving up and down was more difficult than expected, needing to consider the force of the up and down dive.

Afterwards I modified the ball movement to George’s request in that the downward movement needed to take care of more deformation and a slight up and down flutter before the end.

In the first class George introduced himself, him and the game he is working on, Tail’s Fate, I searched this game on steam and I like the style of drawing and the character’s movement pose, it made me have a new understanding of George, he also showed us the animation he made, the animation character’s movement is very consistent, I like it very much, I hope in the future study I can learn more from him, then we did self introduction, after that George talked to each of us one to one I told him that I am interested in modelling and rendering but not much about animation, because of that I don’t have much knowledge. We introduced ourselves, after that George talked to each of us one to one, I told him that I was very interested in modelling and rendering, but not much in animation because my undergraduate degree is in visual communication, I also talked about my career plan, I want to work in a company in the future in modelling and character design, he encouraged me very much.

In the first course, we started from the most basic animation of the ball bouncing, in the course, he showed us how to make a ball bouncing, after that I made my own production, I found that it is not as simple as I imagined the trajectory of the ball movement and the strength of the downward force, need to study in the class, I also watched the online animation of the ball bouncing and the acceleration trajectory of ball movement in the course, it took more time than I thought to make my own. It took more time than expected to make my own.

Lighting adjustment for the canyon scene, I accidentally gave a blue light material ball to a spherical model when I adjusted the lighting, I found that its reflection of the light on the green leaves appear blue will make the scene more fantastical, in the place where the sun does not shine I use cold colours, and when I walk to the place where the sunlight shines I use warm colours.

I will character movement debugging, found it difficult to debug a large number of continuous action, the protagonist of the dynamic more cut down, and delivery of the letter of this letter is also very inconvenient to pick up, this letter as an interlude of the main line I will turn it into a ball of light, but the origins of this ball of light it has a sacred nature, for the inverse of the first scene of the original intention of the protagonist of the trapped I changed into a cave inside the altar, the whole main story also has a sacred nature. altar, the whole main story also changed to the protagonist in the prayer after the mysterious ball of light, guided by the ball of light to a few scenes, and this ball of light in the journey can continue to strengthen the last to a critical value when the summoning of the beast to achieve the protagonist’s wishes. Now I have a few scenes in mind: cave, canyon, centre of the lake, top of the mountain.

I started looking for material for a few more scenes.

In this lesson we have learnt how to use live link face to capture faces in UE5, to give our expressions to the Metahuman, and to use them in future productions where we will need to use the face of a character.

The facial form of the character was less important in my projected animation, I didn’t want to define the protagonist as a human being, but rather as a humanoid fantasy creature walking through a natural landscape. I continued to tweak the canyon scenes, but the starting scene inside the house was difficult for me at first. I couldn’t balance the interior of a primitive house, the furniture I found was too modern and industrial, and a fantasy creature’s house scene needed more thought. I conceived several images in my head, such as the perspective of the bird delivering the letter dropping it from the roof overlooking the whole scene, the encountering of kindred spirits bowing to each other and greeting each other on the way, and finally snuggling up with the behemoths after the successful delivery of the letter.

In this lesson we learned about UV expansion and how to use PS to modify the colour of the texture and add postprocess to the scene for post-processing. Then we learned how to render and export files.

I reorganised the story, I wanted to express the story as the main character delivering a letter to a beast in the forest, I started to build the canyon scene, I used the plant drawing function to make my canyon scene look lively and full of plants, I used the assets in the Bridge and all kinds of rocks and trees and mountains that I collected to make up the canyon’s terrain, I downloaded a lot of texture balls, and when I attached the texture balls to the objects, the scene became more and more interesting. I downloaded a lot of material spheres and when I attached them to objects the scene came alive. I tried to adjust the lighting and the lighting became a difficult part for me to adjust as well as thinking about how many scenes I needed to build and how to differentiate between the scenes.

In week 7 we learnt how to use the modelling mode to create a house that can change shape, then set the material of the house and press ctrl plus L to change the position of the sun in the sky to change the lighting.

Then in lighting we learnt about five types of light, direction light, point light, spot light, rect light, sky light, Serra showed us the difference between these lights and I tried them out myself, we can also download material balls for different lights from the mall and use them to change the lighting. We can also download material balls for different lights from the mall and use them to change the lighting.

Next, we were taught how to use the colourCalibrator, which allows us to capture the colour of an object and then adjust the light source against the colour properties.

After this lesson the teacher looked at the scenes we had built ourselves, as well as the video recorded by the camera. I built a naturalistic scene but wasn’t sure if I wanted to continue building it yet and shared some ideas with Serra.

In the big assignment I started to look for how to create the characters, but I had a hard time with the movement of the characters, it was hard for me to express my ideas well through the movement, I re-conceptualised the world view and decided to focus on the scenery, and the big contrast between the world and the main character would make it hard to manipulate the movement, I didn’t want to turn this animation into an action film, I decided to turn it into a serene and nature scene story. scene story.

In the fifth lesson we learnt how to control the movement of a character.

First we downloaded our favourite character from the mall, then we went into the bone to create a spire, we need to put all the spires at the bottom of the bone, click on the bone and drag it over and select set bone and then drag the spire and select set control and then connect the two orange dots and then connect the red control to the blue one so that we can move the joint. Next you can record a video in Sequencer where you can move the character’s joints by adjusting the set joints.

In Lesson 4 we learnt how to use the gravity and collision properties of an object to create a falling collision action.

You can make the ball fall in a different state by modifying the gravity property so that it looks like you are changing the weight of the ball.

After that we learnt how to use chains to link objects together so that the parts that are strung together don’t break when we run.

Next we started to communicate with Serra about the direction of the big project we wanted to do at the end of the period and the finished product. I looked for some reference pictures and built a scene in maya using the model first, my idea was to make a picture of man and nature living in harmony, in this picture the characters are very small and the surrounding scenery and animals are very big, Serra asked me to think about the inconvenience and other factors of the life when the people become small. Serra made me think about how inconvenient life becomes when people get smaller, and how I can find more ideas about the changes in the environment.