Full Project - Daughters Dimitrescu

 Full Project - Daughters Dimitrescu

July 2021

 

 

As part of a fan art initiative, I recreated the Dimitrescu daughters from the game Resident Evil: Village with my own style. I built these characters up from scratch, applying my skills in modeling, rigging, and animation. Many references were used from the official characters, but I largely wanted to take up the challenge of doing it all on my own.

This project as a whole took about two months, covering all three main components plus posing and rendering out individual photos for social media; taking around 2-3 hours of work per day. Modeling comprised about 3-4 weeks of the time, rigging took 1-2 weeks, and animation/rendering took 1-2 weeks.

This project was meant to test my skills as a 3D artist across many areas of expertise, helping me to realize what I am most confident in down to what I feel could use work or I would rather not do in a potential professional environment. 

For the full write-up where I go in-depth about every step of the journey, please check out the project's landing page.

https://thenicholasng.blogspot.com/p/the-daughters-dimitrescu-full-project.html

Animation Project: Body Mechanics - Part 4

 

 Animation Project - Body Mechanics

Part 4 - Overlap, Hands, and Refinement

June 2021

This project reaches its end as I have finished adding in the hand movements and final tweaks for the animation. With this last stretch of practice, I have gone back to further push the fluidity and timing of the animation. This segment took about twelve hours across six days of work to complete. I am happy to say this will be the final post on this project, at least for the time being.

 

I have observed what movements work best, and even taken out some steps that I felt served their purpose for blocking, but ultimately did not fit as well for an animated application. Small frame changes here and there that passed very fast were cut in order to maintain a better flow. I have found that it is better to have consistent and readable movement is better than complete accuracy to the reference material. One example is the quick motions in the torso and feet that really only last for a couple of frames. When played back in real time, while it does still sync up with the reference, the animation itself appears jittery, and too spastic for the common viewer to really pick up on. It would end up looking more wrong rather than right. Another example is keeping versus moving away from accurate timing in favor of fluid and snappy animations. While I preferred to sync the key frames, in-betweens, and holds as accurately as possible in the initial move to spline, in the end it was better to either shrink or extend the range of movements to really sell a movement as quick and energetic or paused and eccentric. I am glad to have taken and accepted such liberties.

Additionally, I implemented the finger/hand movements which I had neglected up until this point. I set up a library of poses for the most basic hand stances like neutral, clamped fist, pointing, and so on. I called upon these as was necessary as I played through the full animation, inserting them where it fit best. This process was very efficient, and in the end, worked seamlessly with the more intricate movements across the body. In this case, having a less-is-more mentality worked out, because viewers would be more focused on the overall sequence rather than something as fleeting as hand motions.

The challenges faced in this final stretch really came from the repetition and struggle to find balance between reference accuracy and personalized movement. Once I finished the finger and hand integration, it was a matter of going back through and seeing what works and what doesn't. Some parts had a really good transition from start to finish, while others seemed to have problems that I perhaps could have foreseen earlier and fixed, but now were too far gone to start over. In consequence, I tweaked what I could and ultimately settled for that. In another attempt, I might look closer at what movements to take more liberty with before diving into the intricate changes.

In conclusion, this project has taught me so much about what it takes to do a dynamic animation of a character. I was a bit overwhelmed by the scope of the project and how much of a challenge is posed, despite considering it a decent and necessary length of animation to tackle. It had many repeating movements, challenging twists and turns, and a varied pace that required extensive thinking in order to bring it all together. For the future, I would like to keep my scope tempered, maybe even more than this time.

My main takeaway from this project is to have an even better foresight and motivation for the desired outcome of a project. I feel I have gotten a much better idea of finding what I want to make versus what I expect to make. This project came out almost exactly as I had envisioned, and I am very happy to have reached a satisfactory endpoint.

 

 

 

Animation Project: Body Mechanics - Part 3

 

 Animation Project - Body Mechanics

Part 3 - Spline and Timing

June 2021

I have taken the next step in developing this animation by moving into spline. Going through the same segments outlined before, I checked to see how well the animated sequence held up with streamlined in-betweens. Overall, it was fairly in tune with the source reference, but in need of some significant improvements for fluidity and time syncing. This process took about 24 hours of on-and-off work to move from the last progress point to here.

This part of the animation process was particularly difficult because not everything translated as expected going from key poses to full spline animation. Some poses needed to be redone in order to maintain the proper motions that preceded or followed. Additionally, certain poses needed holds so they could last longer, like the source material. I made the mistake of separating out keys among different joints before this, and had to double back and re-sync. I made sure not to worry too much about getting the exact frame-for-frame replica. That leaves room for improvement and exaggeration on my part for a better and more unique animation.

Next up will be further refinement, and implementation of hand/finger joint motions finally.

 

 

 

 

 

Animation Project: Body Mechanics - Part 2

 

 Animation Project - Body Mechanics

Part 2 - Blocking In-Betweens

May 2021

This latest progress report has taken me through the next and likely final blocking phase for this animation. Additionally, in response to my previous render, I have synced the key poses up with the reference video.

This time around was much easier, as it was mainly based around tweaking and foresight going from blocked to spline animation. In preparation for the next step, it is essential to actually take a few segments and analyze the start and ending keyframes in spline, since joints can have extra movements that occur in passing, not important enough to carve out an entire pose for the entire character. Certain arm flourishes, leg twists, and overall timing of the body flexing were implemented. Some parts needed to be sped up or slowed down when approaching the next key pose.

The challenges this time centered around the accentuated poses. As a creative choice, I want some movements to be exaggerated in order to convey a better flow of body mechanics. Since the reference only goes so far to help drive the animation, I had to imagine what areas could be pushed further, and what needed to stay dialed back for the sake of realistic movement.

With this next part of the project finished, I now move on to spline animation, which will test whether or not my blocking was effective enough. I hope to also add in the finger joint movement in effort to match the reference even better. I may slow down and split the overall scene to focus on specific segments for the following progress reports. Eventually, all should come together for a presentable final product.

 

 

 

 

 

Animation Project: Body Mechanics - Part 1

 Animation Project - Body Mechanics

Part 1 - Blocking Phase

May 2021

 My latest animation project will demonstrate and help my practice of body mechanics. I have chosen a dance sequence to base my animation on for key poses and flow. Throughout this process, I hope to hone my skills and gain a better understanding of dynamic movements for full-body animations. This first progress report has taken me through about a week's worth of work, 2-3 hours per day.

 

This initial phase is strictly blocking, and what I have to present today is about a third of the intended length of animation. I tried to keep to as few but crucial key poses as possible in matching the source material. I started with just the center of gravity, spine, head, and feet movements, in order to get the most important shapes of the body down. I then moved on to the arms and hands, plus shoulders. Next I will move to the fingers, and after that the in-between poses wherever they may be needed. I have yet to adjust the timing of animation to the corresponding audio, but will do so once I begin the next phase. The source material has repeating motions, so I plan to copy the key poses, but alter them to make each phase unique in the future. Otherwise, the process has gone very well, and I am excited to move forward.

 

 Source video:

 MYLEE Dance Workout - Levitating

timecode  0:27 - 0:57

So far, no hardships getting the motions and poses I'm looking for. I am, however, sticking very close to the key poses. I intend to stretch the rig to more extreme poses in order to convey more dynamic motion later on. For now, matching the poses gets the job done. It will depend on how it looks once I begin to ease into spline.

Animation Project: Dialogue #01 - Part 3

 

 Animation Project - Dialogue #01

Part 3 - First Full Pass

April 2021

 This is the last progress report for this initial segment of animating a dialogue piece. After refining the mouth animations, I went ahead to animate the body movements and set up the camera. Since I purposefully split the dialogue into separate parts, I moved the camera as if they are connected scenes without being one single shot. Once synced up, I did my best to convey proper flow and rhythm to the overall animation. The rig I have used for this project is the Polly rig from NoisyChain on Turbosquid.

https://youtu.be/wThv1hLdfTk 

It was much easier to block out the body movements based on the reference video I shot, with multiple passes. I picked the most impactful poses and tried to replicate as close as possible. However, I did take liberties and also tried to accentuate the character 's movements in order to make the animation more dynamic. Sticking too close to the real-world proportions would dampen the readability of the scene. Once blocking was done, switching to spline and editing the in-betweens was not too tough. 

There were parts where it was difficult to pace the facial animation alongside the body motions so that the character was still relevant to the camera. I only wanted a stationary camera for this first dialogue piece, so no fancy movements from the viewpoint. This was meant to convey the audience as actual onlookers in the scene. 

Additionally, one of the hardest parts was not going too far with the body animation. Sometimes during the process, I found myself exaggerating the movements too much, and at the expense of the perspective I had already established. The character would turn too far or flow way too bouncy or stiff at times. Upon re-evaluation, I went back to fix as much as I could, but evidently some parts are still a bit much for the tone of the dialogue.

Overall, this has been a teaching moment for my journey with animating. I do not think this project turned out as I would have hoped, but at least I was able to reach an endpoint. I will leave this project alone for a little bit in order to focus on other things. I would like to return to this in time, but for now I think I need to put my mind elsewhere, so perhaps I can come back with new and fresh ideas. I feel that in order to improve, I would be better off restarting the whole process with a different strategy.

Rigging Project: Pigsy

 Rigging Project: Pigsy

April 2021

This is my latest project, the first of many hopefully leading to a fun final product. Pigsy is their name, and they are a sentient piggy-bank set to be the main star in my developing animated short. This is my first original character built from the ground up from conceptualization to fully rigged model.

This rig has full rotation capabilities in the body, head, and limbs. Movement in 3D space can be achieved with either the main body control, or the root control. The face has some more specific controls, such as a head tilt (in place of a neck), nose tilt, and one of my favorites: eyebrow movement and manipulation. Finally, the eyes are 2D grafted onto the model, made by an image sequence which can be toggled to display one of the many eye textures I have drawn up. There are also a few more specialized features intended to enhance the animated scenes to come.

As this is my first original character made from the ground up, I was hesitant to dive into the vast pipeline from modeling to rigging to animation, but by keeping my ambitions in check, I was fairly confident I could do it all on without having to compromise too much. I am happy to say I was able to accomplish what I set out to create almost exactly.

Making the armature for Pigsy didn't take too long, as I actually started building it as I modeled the character parts. Once I got to the actual rigging process, I ran through the process as I had envisioned and just observed what worked as intended and what didn't. The legs, body, and main head controls went together flawlessly. Meanwhile, with the help of a few tutorials, the eye texturing and eyebrow controls turned out alright as well. 

 

 

The only real point trouble was the eyebrow manipulators, as I wanted the easiest way to get clean deformation without too complex a rigging system. The solution was lattice deformation, which turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. With one control on each end of each eyebrow, I can squash and stretch to just about any extreme, which should prove very useful for expressions in animation. I am very proud and excited to see what I can do with such a feature.

This rig was a nice challenge to have as my first original character. On one hand, I had a clear vision of what I wanted the character to be capable of. On the other hand, there were obvious tasks I would have to face and problem solve for. The finished product has just about all I had hoped for. 

I began development of my first original character and soon-to-be short animation a little over a month ago, and this is one of the largest steps so far. This is the first result of my labors. I hope to push forward and begin animation and scene building next, but before that, I must begin production of additional assets and other necessary materials. Luckily, the main model here is out of the way, so the process will be a bit less stressful in the days to come.