This week we were experimenting with Virtual Production Cameras within UE5. A few of us had some technical issues setting up the app in class, so I tried it on my home PC where having access to my home wifi seemed to help. We used the ‘Unreal VCam‘ app on our phones and connected this to a virtual production scene in UE5. While I found the process very cool and useful for VFX style production, I am unsure how much I will use the process in my own work. I would like to research the use of it more to see how I might be able to make use of it, but for my current project ideas the cameras are either hand animated or physically held and then tracked for compositing purposes.
Project Progress
I started doing some visual research for ideas, and based on project ideas Serra mentioned last week I also considered window sets seen in store fronts.
My idea for my FMP is based in a futuristic cyberpunk version of London, so incorporating punk themes to this project feels suitable. Above are some cool window sets I found and liked the vibe of, including some punky ones and one of a runway show with punk/alternative themes.
I also did some visual research for cool unique digital media styles that I could potentially experiment with, both for animation and otherwise.
When I showed some of these things to Serra today, she suggested I could potentially have different window sets in different visual styles, which would allow for me to experiment with multiple styles in one project. I do really like this idea, but I later realised this might take a lot of time depending on how long the Marvelous Designer side of things takes me.
I think the next steps for me will be figuring out the scope of the project overall, and designing some clothes to make in Marvelous Designer.
Blocking is like the bones of the body, aka: the blocking is the foundation that everything else is laid on top of. The poses shouldn’t be the same as those from reference, be mindful of line of action and the other fundamentals to push the poses and make them and the movement more visually appealing.
Some tips for blocking:
Time can be saved while blocking be copying similar poses and making adjustments on top
Don’t forget hands and fingers in blocking. While the detailed finger movement can be left until polish, they should still be moving and posed nicely at this stage. Don’t just have open basic poses for the hands in every pose.
Establish your key poses that tell the story
Don’t worry TOO much about timing right now, get the poses down first. You can do retiming later if needed
Don’t forget to use FK/IK where needed
Finished, not perfect! Getting the base of the shot down at this stage is most important
Don’t key parts of body on different frames, everything should be keyed to same frame for blocking
George also showed us a cool video explaining how important the ‘finished, not perfect’ approach is when making progress in learning. I definitely struggle with this myself, and find it difficult to finish tasks due to focusing too much on the smaller details. It was good to hear and understand the idea that in a year what I consider perfect now won’t look great to me because I will have improved, so why should I waste time trying to be perfect now when I can spend more time on learning.
Blocking Plus:
Essentially a way of adding in more keys to get that feeling of polish within your blocking
Moving holds: when pose is holding, adding some movement in (breathing, dragging, settling into pose, etc).
Copied pairs: a technique where a keyframe (or pose) is duplicated and repeated for a specific duration, creating a hold or a static pose within an animation sequence.
Breakdowns and Arcs Breakdown: a pose somewhere between two key poses that better shows the movement
This week’s assignment:
Apply blocking plus stuff to current shot blocking to take it to the next level
Should be in stepped still. Poses are important at this stage so make sure they are really strong.
Week 1 Assignment: Body Mech + Planning
Filmed reference:
I both filmed myself and one of my housemates for my reference. I was struggling a bit to do a natural fall/stumble myself, so I asked one housemate to push the other into view, and gave the one on camera directions on how to act out the rest of the shot.
Thumbnails:
Individual poses:
Week 1.5 Assignment:
As mentioned before we’re a little behind due to losing a day last week to the bank holiday, so this week I did the blocking on Thursday evening for review on Friday alongside my plan.
I didn’t add as many poses as I would have liked due to the time constraints, but I am happy with the poses overall. I do need to hide the skin under the clothing at some point as it clips through the clothes several times and is distracting.
Plan + Blocking Feedback:
The fall and skid along the floor is too simple, I should be pushing myself more. Either have the character fully stumble or completely face plant the floor
Could still do the turn and punch towards the hidden person who pushes them, but George recommends instead just having the character realise where they are after the fall, pause, and then go into the dance/wave
Poses in current blocking are nice, but overall idea needs pushing before I move more into animation progress
Last week’s lesson was cancelled, so this week was our first class with Nigel for this term.
We went over how to develop potential topics, and how our thesis and proposal should be structured. Nigel mentioned that while it is more standard for the Thesis to be connected in someway to our FMP, it doesn’t need to be. This does feel reassuring to me, as I often get very uninspired and demotivated when I am focusing on one topic or project for long periods.
I began considering areas of research I am interested in. While I am still unsure what would make a good research topic, my current interests are:
Unique visual styles/techniques in digital media
Viewer immersion
Empathy towards fictional characters
The link between phycology and the way we interact with fictional stories
Socio-political themes in modern digital media (especially those that have conflicting themes against the production houses/streaming services they are featured by, such as anticapitalism themes in Apple TV show Severance for example)
I have also been considering potential artefacts to write about. I would want to choose those I have either enjoyed or had an interest in analysing, as to keep my focus while writing about. Some I have considered:
Andor (2022)
Arcane (2021)
Severance (2022)
Spider-Verse films (Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023))
This week we covered world building, including the tone of the world and story within it. When constructing a fictional world, it is important to consider things as its history, ecology, and geography to make the world as interesting and immersive for the viewer as possible. George also went over creating moodboards for our ideas to build a tone for the story and world setting.
This week’s assignment:
1. Moodboards: Create moodboards for our 3 ideas, using what we learnt this week.
2. Shot blocking: Start creating some basic compositions/shot blocking in Maya (using crane rig as our camera). Don’t need to be final/shots we keep in final, but should be enough to combine into a first previs draft that will then be reviewed and improved on over the term.
Week 1 Assignment work: 3 storyboards
What I struggled with: I have always had some difficulty visualising what ideas I have in my head in a way I’m satisfied with (or in a way that I actually feel mirrors what I had in my head), usually due to visual ideas that are difficult/not possible to execute for whatever reason. With Idea 1 in particular, the idea in my head felt more engaging and visually stimulating, but when I got it down on paper it didn’t feel as such, and I struggled to figure out what was missing between the idea I had in my head vs the storyboard I created. With Idea 2 and 3, this felt easier to do.
I did enjoy making the storyboard for the second idea. It was easy to pick out which shots didn’t really work for me to change or cut while I’m also applying the feedback from this week. However it was also easy to see which shots did work/worked more than others, and this was also motivating as I could imagine how I would create these shots in 3D and what experiments I could do to develop these shots.
3 Storyboards Feedback:
Idea 1:
Feedback from George:
Feels like this idea doesn’t have enough of a start to it. This could be helped if between scenes we see flashbacks that show how the mage ended up in his current situation.
Idea 2:
Feedback from George:
Would be good with this idea to think a lot about transitions between shots to add flare to the visuals
Idea 3:
Feedback from George:
Not much to say as this is a very basic and short idea, but it works well. Should be expanded on if it becomes the chosen idea.
This week George showed us a cool gif that explains and shows examples of the 12 Principles of Animation:
Squash and Stretch
Timing and Motion
Anticipation
Staging
Follow-Through and Overlapping Action
Straight Ahead and Pose-to-Pose Action
Slow In and Out
Arcs
Exaggeration
Secondary Action
Solid Drawing
Appeal
George mentioned to think of the solid drawing more as solid posing when it comes to 3D Animation.
We also watched a video about using spheres in more complex shots to break down motion arcs, and how tracking over existing shots with high visual appeal with spheres can show how simple it can be to create such appeal. The breakdown of the shot from ‘Brave’ was my favourite, as when viewing the shot alone it was easy for me to get overwhelmed when thinking about how the animator managed to create such satisfying movement in the characters, and while the overlay of the spheres doesn’t discount the animator’s talent it does make it seem much more achievable with practice and understanding.
George advised we do some post sketching, focusing on anticipation, lines of action, and clear silhouettes. I went to the V&A museum to sketch some of the statues, and also used the Bodies in Motion site to sketch some still frames of interesting poses. I sometimes focused only on the silhouette, sometimes only drew a stick figure representation, and sometimes sketched out the full or nearly the full pose. I also tried to draw over some with lines of action so I can translate this understanding of them into my 3D animations.
For the practical work, we animated a pendulum shot today, with extra focus on learning the ‘Follow-Through and Overlapping Action principle.
We also got feedback on our bouncing ball animation from last week.
My bouncing ball animation:
My feedback:
Have more of an arc on the entrance drop of the ball
Have the stretch come in a little later and make it more extreme
On the later bounces, track how low the ball is and make sure its height at the frame before impact is getting lower each time
Drop off the squash and stretches sooner
Have more rotation on the last few bounces and as it rolls
Add a few more frames to the end to give it time to come to a halt
Our lecture for the first week was cancelled, so we had an introduction to the brief this week before the main lecture.
We were taught how we can approach picking a research topic, such as considering what skills we need to attain for the area of the industry we want to go in and how the research topic could help with that.
We were also taught about the different art elements to consider both with our practical work and when critiquing work as part of our research pieces. Observing, documenting, and learning from our visual environment is always important to developing our artistic skills.
History of Animation
Originally, animation was taking up as an art movement, and was celebrated as a new way for artists to express themselves in ways they had never been able to do so before. Being able to make even the most abstract of ideas come to life and have movement was an exciting new medium to explore.
We were tasked to find films where artists/animators celebrate the artform of animation from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. While it might fall a bit out of the time frame, I thought of ‘Betty Boop: Snow White’ from 1933. The animation medium in this short film was used in a way that harnesses the ability to animate surreal concepts, especially with the scene featuring the song ‘St. James Infirmary Blues’ by Cab Calloway.
My Research Topic
I’m not yet exactly sure which topic I want to base my research on, but I have had an interest in both how experimental visuals advance animated media, and the phycology of media and fictional characters for a while, so I would like to involve one of both of those topics. I also became very interested in the representation of rebellions through media such as ‘The Hunger Games’ and ‘Andor’, which could potentially tie in well with phycology. I could also explore something mentioned in our lecture this week, this being how in the absence of TV and cinema, art was the main movement of culture. I would be curious to explore how animation has been used to both represent and create movement in rebellions.
While my undergraduate dissertation analysed the closing scene of ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2’, I focused more on how the visuals summed up the tragic events of the film and the bittersweet ending for the protagonist than the theme of rebellion. I did however touch on the tragic nature of the protagonist being a tool of war, and still find this topic to be very interesting and would love to have the chance to explore it more.
For this week, Serra showed us how to set up our UE5 project and the importance of project structure.
From the start we should be keeping our outliner and project files neat and organised so we and any collaborators never have trouble finding specific assets.
For the Content Browser tabs:
Favourites: assets used a lot I want quick access to
Project name (SerraClass_02102024 in this case): current project assets
Collections: I can make collections of assets here. Good for collaborative projects where each person can have their own collections that can be viewed and accessed by everyone else.
Serra recommended we have multiple content browser tabs open at the same time, so we can have different types of assets on each tab and speed up our workflow. She also recommended we have a folder for in class work so we can have it stored separately from out of class work we do in the same project.
For lighting, we made an emissive material to use on one of the cubes we loaded into our scenes. We shouldn’t use emissive materials as a main light source, especially when we have many better lighting options to use, but they can have a nice visual effect elsewhere (neon lights for example wouldn’t be used to light an entire street, but should still give off light to look accurate).
We also added in the starter content pack to our project, which can also be added when setting up the project, from ‘Add Feature or Content Pack…’. The same menu can be used to change the format of the project. For example if we are working on a film but want to turn it into a first person game, this can be done from here.
Using a few assets from the starter content pack, we learnt how to merge them if we like the arrangement and want to repeat that several times in a level. Merging is different to grouping, because when merging objects they essentially all become one mesh and material and cannot be separately edited after merging.
Going back to materials, we were shown how to make a metallic/shiny material. Serra explained the reason we turned roughness to zero and metallic to one for this example is because a fully shiny material has no roughness and is fully metallic. For more realistic metals, we would want some roughness in there, how much depends on how worn/imperfect the material might be.
Next, we looked at levels. Sublevels can be used to make changes to master levels for different circumstances. For example, when making a film I might have a forest that has some day shots, but I also want some night shots later in the film. Rather than having two different levels where only the lighting and a few other assets change, I can make the forest on a master level, and have two sublevels for night and day. If we forget to make a new level and are currently working on a master level, we can change levels by selecting the assets, right clicking, and clicking Move Selected Actors to Level.
To finish up, Serra recommended we open sample projects and explore them, especially with how the project is structured so we can see more examples of that in relation to this week’s lecture.
Project Development
I’m currently torn between two similar ideas. I was still set on my previous idea with someone on an underground train thinking about their day and those thoughts being visualised and animated out the window of the train, integrating with the blurred shapes of the passing tunnel.
But when I was doing some visual research (particularly for aesthetics/colours for the project) I found an artist I’ve been a fan of for a while again, James Fenner.
The heavy use of bold eyes on silhouetted faces and heads brought to mind the anxiety I sometimes feel on busy trains, where I sometimes start to feel like everyone is looking at me. I had the idea of someone being on a train, and there being other passengers that slowly start staring at them. The colours and shapes get more bold and distorted to represent the main character’s growing anxiety. The film ends with them stumbling off the train onto the platform breathing deep gasping breaths, and the people in the background either not looking at all or just looking concerned.
I think I like this idea more as, while very similar to my first idea, I can focus more on the animation and interesting visuals (something I wanted to experiment with a lot during my studies). The previous idea could potentially take up a lot of my time with figuring out how to integrate the thoughts of the person’s day visually into the blurred tunnel, whereas this idea already has some ground work for the visuals.
I continued to build a Pinterest board for this idea to help me when it comes to experimenting and developing materials in UE5. I think before I start doing that though, I want to mock up a rough previs/storyboard as I don’t want to get too attached to an idea that isn’t feasible to complete in the time we have. For myself, nailing down the length of this project is going to help a lot in the long run, and once I have that I can also make myself a project schedule.
Next tasks:
Make a previs/storyboard/mix of the two to give an idea of how long the project will be and what elements will be involved.
Plan out a schedule, including allocated time for different stages. Give some overlap for things that end up not taking as long/take longer.
Start doing look development, particularly with materials in UE5, exploring potentially animated elements so I can have the materials distort more and more throughout.
Ask Serra if she has the subway pack in her Unreal Engine vault (during our talk about my idea she mentioned she might already have one of the subway packs I showed her, and asked me to remind her to check during the next lecture).
