This post is going to be going over our very last dedicated Fantastical Creatures session. I got two main things accomplished this session: brought Skollcrabb's textures back into Maya from Substance Painter, and made Skollcrabb's turntable.
First, I'll start with the texture reapplication. This was a kind of fiddly process, involving a lot of different nodes in the material pop-up menu. I applied each relevant texture file to where they needed to be, following the tutorial Jon had written. It all seemed like it wasn't working as I went further in, but when I pressed render, Skollcrabb's textures were applied! I'm so glad this worked, as I was worried it would all go wrong.
Once I had a fully textured and renderable Skollcrabb, it was time to make him a turntable. We were given a turntable template file, which had a spinning disk that spun 1 full rotation for exactly 5 seconds. I had to reference the Skollcrabb into the file, and then parent it to the spinning disk. By doing this, whenever the disk moves, the Skollcrabb would move too.
I rendered the turnaround and put the .EXR file sequence into After Effects, and ended up with a nice looking turnaround!
All in all, I'm glad to have finished my model entirely! All I really have left is to composite Skollcrabb onto some still photos, which I'm really looking forward to! It'll be fun to make Skollcrabb seem that little bit realer! This session was an all around success the entire way through; nothing went wrong, and the two things I did within 3 hours were tasks I imagined would take me all week! So I'm very happy with today's work!
WEEK STARTING - 29th of April, 2019
WEEK ENDING - 5th of May, 2019
MONDAY - Fantastical Creatures Modelling workshop
Original post: https://ncarolannua1b.blogspot.com/2019/04/fantastical-creatures-skollcrabb_29.html
TUESDAY - Media Roles Presentation
Original post: https://ncarolannua1b.blogspot.com/2019/04/media-roles-final-presentation-and.html
THURSDAY - Lip-Sync
Original post: https://ncarolannua1b.blogspot.com/2019/05/lip-sync-finalised-animation.html
"So now my animation is all done! I really enjoyed this unit all in all, mostly due to my own bias towards 2D animation. Getting back into it after units which were more experimental & foreign to me was like a nice homecoming, and was definitely a more comfortable way for me to work. I don't really have any major gripes with the sessions, they let us get on, and Katherine was very enthusiastic and helpful! The only thing I'd really change is keeping an eye on consistency. I feel like my lip-sync animation was very successful, and it's probably my favourite piece of animation I've done this year!"
SUMMARY
This week is the final week before hand in, and it's all about getting things fully finished.
The lip-sync feedback has been fully implemented, and now it's finished! I'm really happy with how it came out, it hits the sweet spot of feeling like something I'd make on my own, but with the skills I've learnt since coming to university, mostly how to properly apply the principles and animating on twos. Overall, my thoughts on this project are entirely positive! I got to animate in a way I adore, and work in a medium I'm more comfortable in.
My Fantastical Creature is so close to being finished at this point! The model is all there and textured in Substance Painter, I just need to figure out how to get it back into Maya with the textures all intact and applied correctly. I've got a feeling it's either going to be ridiculously easy or ridiculously difficult. But I want to make it look as good in Maya as it does in Substance Painter, and hopefully the correct application will make that possible. Then it's just a turntable and compositing to do and it'll be a wrap for Fantastical Creatures!
In this post, I'm going to go over how I textured my Skollcrabb creature.
After getting feedback yesterday on how to bring my model into Substance Painter properly, I started to work on getting my Skollcrabb model finished.
The main feedback I got was on how the seams worked on my model's UVs. Before when I brought it into Substance Painter, all the seams were auto-generated. That meant there were a LOT of faces created from the seams, and drawing on one of them copied it to every face.
So I took each object and worked on each UV again from scratch. I made sure to create enough seams so that when I added a texture onto the shapes, the images wouldn't be stretched out. It was a quick enough process, and finding out about the Layout function made rearranging the UV shells a lot quicker and easier than I thought.
I then applied different lamberts to each object that would have a certain texture on it; the skull & jaw would have one, the head, arms, claws & legs have one, and the eyes have one. That way, when I bring it into Substance Painter, each group of objects under one lambert would be grouped together.
And that's exactly what happened! I had three layers set up at the start, which I nicknamed "BO0O0O0O0ONE!!!", "eyes" and "shell". I tested dragging textures onto different areas of the Skollcrabb, and sure enough, only certain areas got affected; the ones grouped together!
From there, it was a process of finding the right look. I messed about with two main textures for the skull & jaw; a preset for bone that looked like bone but didn't give off the exact effect I wanted, and a matte porcelain preset with a cracked texture. I ended up going with the porcelain one, since the cracks looked a lot closer to what I wanted. I was also able to change the base colours, so it'd look more like off-white, signifying the age of the shell.
The actual shell body underneath the skull was textured using a rust preset. It gave off a battered, layered look, which looked really nice when I changed the base colour to a dark purple.
Finally, the eyes. These were by far the easiest to texture; white gloss with drawn on pupils. While I was drawing on the model, I also added 2D looking eye holes, nose hole and teeth.
And in the end, the Skollcrabb model looks like this:
I'm REALLY happy with how it turned out! This is exactly what I envisioned Skollcrabb looking like in 3D with textures, and it's the first time I've taken one of my characters and made it 3D, so it's a big deal for me! I'm glad that after so much trial and error, I have a textured Skollcrabb that looks as good as it does! Next step from here is bringing the textures back into Maya and creating a turnaround, as well as some composited images.
This post is looking at my final lip-sync animation, which I've been working on in TVPaint.
Last lip-sync session, I got feedback from Helen on how to improve the animation, which is to retain consistency better. The hair and hairline was the main issue, with the hair changing in shape & volume little by little, and the hairline having a jittery effect to it.
I fixed this up by just doing the head all over again, starting with a new rough animation layer and then doing lineart again. And within the session, I was pretty much done.
So now my animation is all done! I really enjoyed this unit all in all, mostly due to my own bias towards 2D animation. Getting back into it after units which were more experimental & foreign to me was like a nice homecoming, and was definitely a more comfortable way for me to work. I don't really have any major gripes with the sessions, they let us get on, and Katherine was very enthusiastic and helpful! The only thing I'd really change is keeping an eye on consistency. I feel like my lip-sync animation was very successful, and it's probably my favourite piece of animation I've done this year!
