Project TFD

      Since I textured the Coffee Table, I textured the rest of the props that I have modeled.  First was the coat rack with hats. For those who don't know, these were differnce props altogether with different materials/textures, so in order to keep things separate, I assigned each of these objects to different materials. I even assigned them different colors so like a checklist, I know what materials I've assigned. When you do this and export it as an fbx, the materials imported into Substance are separated as material layers with their own UV maps. Sometime after that, I got director's notes in changing the textures a certain way. This led me to making further adjustments on the texture of the middle hat. I also changed to the color of the coat a few times until I got the director's approval. The other prop that I textured that week was the record player and the cabinet below it. At this point it was a challlenge to adjust the metallic part of the texture, deciding...

 At the turn of the new year, we received a response to a casting call we made on castingcall.club . Alisa sent out audition lines of the Mother character on this website in search of a voice actor. This person who responded is named Shay Reeves from Australia, and the both of us enjoyed her performance. As a result, we cast her and directed what we wanted out of her recordings. Of course, we had to give it time before we heard anything from her, having a time difference from Australia, but she gave it to us sooner than expected and we were so thankful for that. Now that we had a new voice though, we now had to make new adjustments to our lip sync animations. It turned out to be quicker than I thought to adjust the animation, but with the new emotion she delivered, I made a slight expression change, adding a little more sadness in the middle. Hopefully we'll all vocal shots done accordingly to this new voice. Thank you, Shay.

      Throughout the Winter Break, one of our crew members EJ (Yihang Jiang) has taken some time to tutor me and our director (Alisa Ren) to use Adobe Substance Painter to texture our characters and props (mostly props). In fact, we've mostly set Substance Painter as our means priority means of setting textures in our production. Out of this, I have been asked by the director to apply this texturing to the props that I have modeled out. and so it became quite the list of models to go down, and quite the process of setting the props up for that.  It's because it took longer to set up the props' UV mapping for the textures. I found that a little more stressing especially since it's so delicate and one needs to make sure the UVs are aligned right. As shown here, when I applied this texture via the UV that I first made, the texture came out different from what I intended. With further help on this, I made corrections to the UV mapping and the texturing was more smooth sa...

           This week, I have been able to animate more on the scenes and so I have moved to shot LVR250-251. This has become a challenge because of the necessary pieces to put together. Such as multiple characters that are to walk in the shot and constraining a comic book that falls out of a bag. Suffice to say I have a lot of challenging shots in this production but I do believe working on these helps me expand my horizons and expertise in animation.     To make this work I made as much reference as possible, starting with the daughter. I even filmed my feet to get the walk just right. I also filmed the bag and the comic book individually so I can animate it properly. We're looking to do that more since we're not big experts in simulation. We've learned plenty skills but feel we can't risk setbacks in using it and not knowing everything. That being said, so far we've only applied simulation to the clothing when the animation is ready, and the fir...

This week has had a little more time consumption due to reviews and long meetings and an important event I had to attend. Nevertheless I got some things done, even things I haven't ventured before. Rigging     We've started with a small group so some of us shared duties. I have a little experience with rigging so as soon as my director asked, I rigged a small prop for her; the Band-Aid. The joints on the left side were mirrored but I didn't think to orient them so rotating them in this video wasn't so convenient ata first.     Eventually I came around to fixing this up, along with the director's request of removing some joint controls to simplify. Animation     For this department I had a big discussion with my director on how I was to animate my shots. These were pretty big changes to make as well so I made my first swing at it.     I'm still making adjustments but I feel like we're getting closer to finishing this. I've mentioned I started other...

      At last the Superhero model is officially finished and moved to the texture chapter. After some advice from our look development mentor, Michele Ahn, we might polish up the the fabric texture of the coat, specifically the gold lining to actually look golden.     As for other models, I used a placeholder texture on the bandage model. Our rigger to set up the band-aid to bend and place on the daughrer character's finger is a little MIA but in the meantime, I can use this in one of my new animation shots.     One new model I was assigned to was the broom and dustpan for the same animation shot and a few after. My director has proposed I use strands on the bottom of the broom instead of a smooth surface. Fortunately we learned a new trick from our Look Dev mentor using a plugin called MASH available on Maya. Supposedly it's old that not many people talk about it but there are still plenty of tutorials about it. With Mash, I should be able to provide ...

       Thanks with the help of my colleague EJ, and classmate's mentor, Michele, I was able to find resolutions to UV'ing the superhero model. It's been a while since I've used the UV tools and I newly approached unfolding these pieces using the planar, cylindrical, and spherical tools to unfold the UV shells of the stubborn pieces. On that note, I also found the error in the boots and it fixed everything. It was an extra vertex that created a rogue triangle pointing inward and inside the right boot. With this, I was able to unfold and optimize the pieces as much as I wanted. Funnily enough though, optimizing the top pieces was more problematic as these pieces kept wanting to wind up. I can understand why because of the middle/smaller part of the piece, as many other UV shells of that constuction do the same thing. For this one, I resolved it using the clylindrical tool. As for the other stubborn piece, the vest I followed Michele's advice in attempting to smoothen ...