Creative Futures: How am I presenting myself at the Final Year Show?

With everything up and running, I can now talk about what I will be presenting and how I went about it.

• CV

My CV I wanted to keep within my branding, I honestly haven’t changed it a great deal since the rough submission, bar the following feedback:

“Your CV is very well laid out, I would try and have your titles on work experience, volunteer work and Education stand out more. Your profile information could be more focused on technical aspects of the skills you possess too.”

Based upon this I have increased the size of the text, altered the font to match my business cards, rewrote my profile paragraph and updated my logo and colour scheme. Below you can see the previous and latest design.

 

Previous CV

New CV

 

• Business Cards

With these I again altered some things but not greatly, just refined. However this was my feedback on my previous design:

“Your business cards are also well designed although the rigging part of the tree doesn’t come through to me, more design work could help clarify that aspect.”

This was only a last minute thought, which I did decide to develop. I created the design to looks like rig joints connected with leaves sprouting from them to link to the front of the cared. On the note of the front, one of the biggest changes I had was my logo design. Cassie created this tree of life for me, which I loved, and as previously mentioned, I wanted a design to put on the cards encase I was not to wax stamp on them. I kept with the same font and layout as the previous draft, just updated the designs themselves for print.

 

 

When printed, unfortunately they printed with the safety edging on them. They are currently being reprinted, but it did give me a chance to try versions of this with the wax stamp with these faulty cards. As evident it took a lot of trail and error. The bottom row looks the best as the colour is the strongest and I got the quality right. I plan to only have a few of these on my table as limited editon ones as I like the feel of these stamps, plus then each on stamped it unique. For the Final Year Show I will be trying out some better wax rather than candle wax, and maybe a slightly lighter shade of green to match my font colour more. 

 

• Showreel

Below is a link to my showreel. It has work from of course my final year, placement, bfx, and small projects from second year. It is mostly a rigging reel with bits of animation within it, and I feel it shows a good amount of variety within it while showing where my skills are heading. It is 1:18 exactly so I don’t feel it is a very long reel either for the amount of information it shows.

 

• Website/ Portfolio 

I decided I should have a proper website with a proper domain to show my showreel and compilation of work so far as well as a link to my CV. It is quiet simple, one page scroll with all the information you may need on me at first glance which is nice to have I think when showing employers my work in the future.

Link: https://www.lornamcfall.co.uk/

 

• Project Poster

Cassie was in charge of this front, and which we where pretty close to getting there prior. This was the feedback given:

“Your poster designs are well thought through and eye catching. The title text could be transitions to cover a larger part of the horizontal space, matching with the team’s names in the lower part. Moving ‘happy’ to the left and ‘place’ to the right should help with the layout. “

This was implement quite quickly by Cassie, along with making the mug look slightly more solid, altering the glitch design a little. Below you can see the comparison between the old and new poster, as well as the print of it which is now framed.

 

 

• End of Year Show Set Up

Our final year show set up got completed today. Prior to today, we got all we could prepped, including what we wanted on the walls (we confirmed that due to our room placement, we could just put our things on the wall rather than using boards). The images imaged a variation of environmental renders, character models, character rigs, final animation, glitches as well as motion graphics/ design work. We knew we had a lot of information to present, and below was our previous feedback:

“You have clearly thought about the location and requirements your space needs to accommodate and help sell the virtual experience that your project gives. I would consider trying to scale back the amount of information or present it in a simplistic manner to avoid information overload with the four stands together.”

As we went about looking at how our framed images could go together, we thought it might be nice to remove the titles we originally wanted as well as any writing to try and take on board the feedback. This also allowed us to play about with where frames went and make it seem like a cohesive project, rather than just four split up people with certain jobs considering many times we crossed over to help one another. Although it took a few trys and a lot of eyes, as well as frustration, we finally got the images aligned. However we found that in our want for symmetry and getting a balance on both sides, we had enough space to put our team name in the centre. As we didn’t plan on putting our team name up, we had yet to have time to print or add anything that would look presentable in this space by the deadline, but we plan to have it filled when the final year show comes around. We technically had two areas of set up due to our VR space. For this we got a slightly smaller table (we decided one table was big enough for both the laptop and the headset unlike our original designs) which is a more comfortable sitting height, covering and dressing the table to look like a diner as planned. As our poster will either be hung in or outside the room, we decided instead of showing it again here, that we would put up Cassies designs for the posters which are actually within our setting which I feel fills a space on the wall. We also have marked off a safe area, going 2 metres. It seems quiet big, so we might reduce this prior to the show, however we also like that it ensures nobody is breathing down the neck of the viewer as they watch it. Also below you can see our previous intentions, and then what the show looks like including my table set up.

 

 

 

• Trailer

Our team felt strongly about this one, that because we had created a piece for VR, when presenting our piece in the Connor Lecture Theatre we would do a trailer for it, showing snippets of the project and encouraging people to go up to the third floor to try. If we showed a screen recording of our piece in there, it would not only defeat the purpose of our piece in being VR, and would then have people not try it having already seen the story, it also would not look great on a big screen compared to projects that are purposefully built for a presentation like that. We want people to try the experience for themselves at the end of the day, to feel curious enough to give it a try. So Cassie worked on the trailer, getting footage of us working on it and giving a hint at the end as to what is to come within the story. I shall also note that Megan and Thomas have been managing social media promotion of our piece.

Crediting

As evident, there are parts of this project which I did not work on or only helped out in small measures, so I want to link their blogs that document more of the following areas and give a shout out to them for the work they did:

Megan Conlon: https://meganconlon.wordpress.com/category/major-project/

• Worked on: Character Concepts/ Modeling/ Texturing and Animating

Thomas Drake: https://foronelasttimeblog.blogspot.com/

• Worked on: Enviromental Concepts/ Modeling/ Texturing and Animating

Cassie Galloway: https://cassiegallowaygetsadegree.wordpress.com/

• Worked on: Lighting, Visual Effects, Sound, Motion Graphic Trailer, Unity Scene Builder

This images I got off Cassie Blog, but they show the transition of our project from a simple scene, trying to get it working within Google Cardboard, to a more complex scene trying to work in the Occulus, then switch to the Vive.

Final VR Piece

This is our final VR film! It has taken a lot to get here from all of us, and it may not look exactly what like it was first envisioned. However, this was always an ambition project considering we where doing it within a completely new program, and media of story telling. This is just one viewers way of looking at it, but we know that certain viewers will see things that others may not.

 

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Cleaning up and Combining Animation

Originally when we split the scenes, we thought there could be some way of cross fading between each other scenes to hook up, provided that the end and start positions would be the same. However as we went through creating our draft builds, it became more evident that it would be better to combine our animation scenes. The process in theory is simple. Copy over the animation onto the one referenced rig, and tidy up the hook ups. However it took longer than expected due to unforeseen issues and knock on effects of those.

Main Issues

I had to select and paste each joint. If I selected all it would not paste over correctly. This I knew would be an issue as I know this has to be done with the AI walk cycle. But on a larger scale, it allowed space for human error aka me to copy and paste the wrong thing, which did happen when pasting the lip fine turn controls. It also was generally time consuming as it meant going through 9 characters of animation and condensing to 3. I did consider just pasting Thomas’s and Megan’s animation into my own scene file, reducing how much I had to go through. However I felt it would be better to do it in a fresh scene file to ensure the scene file size stayed low.

 

The second and main issue was that key frames did not paste over exactly right. The coordinates would be the same, however there was often a slight offset which upon fixing that it offset another control. Such as with the Male, it was his back bend that was off, which meant that he wasn’t leaning on the table but his arms crossed in mid air. When I altered the back bend, the arms wouldn’t be leaning on the table right, any movements went through the tables GEO and the arms no longer interacted with the objects correctly. Another case of this was the Girl in scene one where her world control just was not in the same position as meant to be in the pasted key frames, which would have been an easy enough fix had she not been climbing on the chair, jumping off it, and then later walking a few steps out of her world CTRL. This later on effected the hook up although the girls actual pose was the same in the hook ups, her world control positions where different from scene to scene 2. To get around this I eventually had to glitch her between the posing, getting Cassie to add in more glitched sound to give a reason as to why the Girl might be glitching at this point in the story. It wasn’t an ideal fix, but the only one I had without deleting and redoing a chunk of the animation. I should note the fixes I did had to be done by eye, there key frames no matter what way I pasted them would not look the same in these cases, which meant going through frame by frame and aligning it to the way it was meant to look and be posed.

 

One particular version of this issue that was even more complicated that the others was the Girls clavicle control key frames in scene two. For some reason when pasting her key frames, it wasn’t like slight off on rotation, it is was completely different positioning. Which offset the entire of her arm animation for scene two, which considering she carries a piece of paper, climbs over a bench, and plays with a spoon, it needed fixed badly. After some investigating both within my scene and the original scene file I was copying from, it turned out that the clavicles initial first key frame believe that to be its zeroed out position, which of course it is not. So when pasting over these values, it said its first position was all zero when actually it had been both translated and rotated into that position to bend the girls arm down and rotated forward. Again unfortunately to resolve this, there was not work around, I had to again go by eye and rekey frame the clavicle controls into position to sync up the animation. By fixing this though, yet again it had another knock on effect where in scene one the right clavicle hadn’t been key framed as much, so it when off model as well for the majority of it, meaning more me fixing by eye because I couldn’t think of a quicker way to get it working.

 

Original Animation Pose

Pasted Animation Pose

Hooking up by eye

Offset in Sc1 due to fixing Sc2

Issue 3, lip syncs going off. Each of use animated the lips and the facial expressions in different ways, and I don’t mean style wise, more in controller wise. We did the facial expression testers for me to show the others how to use to the rig and to get use to it, so I honestly don’t know why this happened. I had used both the general facial controls as well as the fine tune controls in scene 3, scene 1 had only used there finer tune nurb controls, scene 2 I originally could not find any of the key frames made on the face. I could see it was moving so it had to be key framed, but it was not on the lip nurb controls (general or finer) nor on the joints themselves. Turns out it was key framed on the group in the hierarchy itself, which I shall note the general lip nurb control in front of the face controlled. I assumed ‘grand, problem solved, at least the key frames are there to paste over, as long as it looks fine as at this stage of the game it doesn’t matter’. However because the groups themselves rather than the lip control controlled them had key frames, all of my/ scene 3 lip sync on that control stoped working on all characters (Effecting the upper, lower and edge lip controls build into the lip control). The facial control and finer tune controls still worked fine, but the mouth simply did not open or close. So, I then had to go through, note every key frame made and their nurbs, and then enter them in on the group itself, basically rekey framing the lip control, making it absolute. This was frustrating, as I thought I was making things as clear as possible with the facial rig, by having everything you would need to effect right there in front of the face, so next time on a project I am going to ensure my team really know how the rigs work. You will see in the image below all the key frames I noted along the way, as well as an animation to do list which I will talk about different aspects of that more later in this post.

 

My last issue wasn’t with the animation itself, but my Maya deciding to start glitching itself no matter what the scene. After setting a normal key frame alteration, this weird spiking started, as I move the mouse, the spiking changes and alters in different ways. I have since learnt that this is an adobe issue in general on my computer after experiencing the same thing in adobe illustrator. Although this didn’t have a major effect, it was just distracting.

 

I did though get all the animation together in the end. Below is the first look at the compilation of the animation. Some of the issues above had yet to be addressed, but I was glad to see it all in one scene, on one set of characters. (For some reason play blasting was not working so I had to screen record, apologises).

As evident, this isn’t perfect. There are issues that are obvious I wanted to fix, and also some animation things I wanted to alter. I will note I did not want to go in changing all of Thomas’s and Megan’s animation. They worked hard on them, and although I wanted to alter the odd thing about their animations, I was not going to reanimate their scenes by any means. But I needed to get a better understanding and review what exactly I needed to fix. Below are the notes the first time watching the whole thing together. Some of these notes again refer to issues I have explained about above, others are smaller ones that where just me being a perfectionist.

Main Alterations

• Girl climbing on chair and jumping off it

I wanted to alter this as a previous note that had been given to us was that it seemed a little floaty, like there wasn’t enough weighting on it. Although it had been altered, I still felt it was too floaty. Checking with Thomas before running ahead, I decided it would be good to change this about. I decided to break down he movement more so there would be more weight in each part. So the Girl instead pushed herself away from the table, puts a foot up on the chair, pushed herself up, then turns around. As she jumps off, I wanted her to bounce off the chair before landing. I think breaking down the motion like this into separate sections helped the timing of this, giving time to show the weighting of her landing on the ground, or the awkwardness of standing up on the chair.

• Girl climbing over bench

This was something Megan had flagged with me in the past the struggle to get the Girl over the bench. I said I would have a go at trying to refine it when combining the animation. I could see why there was an issue as the bench is half the height of the Girl, and having her leg reach up that high was a challenge. To help with this, I decided to get some more reference of me climbing over a table, because height wise it was an equivalence to her.

As you can see it was a lot of shuffling about, but this really did help me break down the pose. It was still difficult as her arm where not long enough to put on the bench really, so I attempted to use the table in front of her instead to lean on to swing her leg forward. Her feet do not go through the bench now, and although it isn’t still the cleanest of movements, it is the best I could do with what I had. It was a movement we added in later in the refinement stage, not considering when rigging or modelling anything, Megan originally had the Girl walk around the bench, but it was me who asked for her to climb over it, as no child would think so logically and would climb anything they can. But I am glad we got this movement in to show the Girls personality a little more.

• Glitching Hook ups

For the first hook up between scene 1 and 2, the Girl was a little bit of a ‘there is no other way I can hook her up just to the difference in the world control positioning’. For the AI she had too far to walk in far too short space of a time to get behind the counter. I didn’t want her to start walking away will talking to the Man. So I decided since she already has been glitching that it would be ok to glitch her between her two positions. The second hook up it was far more justified story wise where I glitched them since that is the biggest one. The AI I though it would be nice for her to glitch the way she did throughout the story, so such as the scene one glitch of her beside the table then behind the counter, then the same glitching as she walked around, while the man switched between his two poses. This was because the music Cassie had put in was like a stuck record player during this segment, so it made sense to have them glitch like they where stuck or jumping about in time, almost replaying the past a little.

• Blinks and Eyeline

This was an element not in any of our scenes. Not of the characters blinked at any point, nor had of of us move the facial control to change the eye direction (good old aim constrain on those eyeballs). This was something I added during this stage. Animation lecture notes I have shared in another post said about adding in blinks on any head turn, as well as a long stare at something. So I followed that a lot and the blinks where relatively easy to do. I had it that the AI blinks quite slowly but consistently at the start, and by the end has stopped blinking as she becomes more robotic. The Girl also blinks a lot at the start, and even during her long ‘please’ I added that she closes her eyes together, pushing them together tight as she smushes her face together having her cheeks raised by pushing this word out for so long. I then have her stop blinking whenever she freezes. The Man does more double take blinks, such as when he first glitches, or when he starts panicking after saying ‘what have you done?!’, but likewise when he freezes he stops blinking. I found that not just the eye lids, but my outer eye controls to push or widen the eyes really helped sell a lot of this and get more character across. However the eyeline really helped I feel. Suddenly by getting to put these in there was a greater sense of believability behind this characters as they where directly looking at you, or where doing glances around the room with bending their head, or glancing away from other characters, it just helped make the whole thing less static. I have found that a lot with the finer details that it has helped make the animation better for viewing.

But here is the last iteration of the character animation! Parts of it of course are not perfect, and I learnt a great deal by getting here, and it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be combining this, but here we are.

Visual Effects and Glitches

Although Cassie took the lead on the visual effects and glitches doing the majority of them, we decided since there where so many smaller effects we wanted in the scene that I would take the odd one off her and do in between animating.

Coffee Boiling

The viewer has a mug in front of them filled with coffee. One of the glitches wanted is that this suddenly starts boiling and moving unnaturally. To create this I followed this tutorial, looking at combining mash and particles to push the mesh out.

This worked quite successfully, however I found that the rounder boiling shape formed was a little low in height and could be more dramatic. When I heighten this though it became more spiky. Although it looked a little less like boiling, it still looking threatening and more glitchy to me so we ran with this.

Here in this gif below you can see that Cassie has impliement it within the scene, placing it beside the viewer to be clear to see (you can also see her sauce bottle melting effect done in houdini in the background).

Coffee Pour

Here are the links to the tutorials I followed for this:

Blog step by step one: https://area.autodesk.com/blogs/the-maya-blog/pouring_water_with_nparticles/

Video one I have previously looked at:

I have done stuff like this before in second year. This should have been easier than it was. Filling the coffee pot with particles was easy enough. However the coffee pot itself had issues in the GEO having a surface that blocked them in. After altering the model, I then tried to guess where the particles would go, which as you can see, failed a lot and missed the mug. I also had an issue of random stray particles that, even though I set their life to 0, and I have upped the object output settings a lot, the particles would not convert to a polygon to be exported. Between these issues and focusing on combining all the animation, I passed it on to Megan to finish. This is how far I got with my different tests though.

Megan then went on to recreate this, ditching the coffee pot as for a cup to make the pour more seamless. I only tweaked it slightly and added a plan for it to collide with so we could have it pouring on the table. We still struggled with exporting it though to get it into unity. There where no stray particles, and again I upped all the output options and still the while thing would disappear once converted. To work around this, we decided to render it from the angle you would view it at and add it as a video. Not ideal, however then Cassie can glitch out the footage so it still works within our piece story wise.

Prop Glitching

The props around the environment I wanted to shift and switch their viability, syncing up with the rest of the animation when errors happen. Although this was simple to do, it was time consuming as it was alter one every frame during the glitch. Seeing this in unity I do feel it adds something, especially making the ceiling fans or clock hands move, small details that I feel add up.

 

Fuck Up Compilations

This is a beautiful folder actually named ‘Fuck Ups’ that I have collected during these past few months. They are either being errors of hitting the wrong button, having all controls selected rather than just one, trying to copy and paste key frames, or just rigging errors. But I thought it would brighten someones day to seeing that everyone messes up quite a along the way, but all of these mistakes I have learnt from.

 

Offset in Sc1 due to fixing Sc2

Hooking up by eye

Final Year Show Update

I have contributed a lot to my final year show in the sense of time and effort. I have taken notes in every meeting, helped with fundraising events, created the invite list for the show, as well as helped cleaning up the first year room. Below are links to the different documents, as well as photos from the different events.

Minutes:

12.03: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2Ha6o87DRdp1KkZTb65Y4hsboYaq9ntoEloHeTNUlA/edit?usp=sharing

19.03: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LrDHOk98AFxduWGNWOlsVZtispUngt-PMN5vwWWjHzQ/edit?usp=sharing

25.03: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NaxMDG0C1PZVhb5H_dAR1mknhZFL6VJEEqQHUTyH0jE/edit?usp=sharing

08.04: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aQIEOlR9kuOMi4BTi_HukJYLU7Mljl7_XujppKfkkUc/edit?usp=sharing

15.04: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HK_S1D7S69ljW67VRh-ifxaKfKbWoMltL75ymiTHxvo/edit?usp=sharing

24.04: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q1Vyg46U5Pc2Yit1vPHz7JV9RojsCP_mML4zoseHc2I/edit?usp=sharing

Email Listing: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gxXi6VKPNhODGJbLs28FCP6ePG_sCxVdq57YJxBMPs8/edit?usp=sharing

Room Planning: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rwomtUx8JeYh6n4O5GVReBRPYA3vefKoISrPzXQtlJY/edit?usp=sharing

Bake Sale (which I organised and sorted out who was baking what – I made baileys chocolate muffins and blueberry muffins – as well as sitting at the stand for over half the day and selling tickets for the pub quiz at):

 

Pub Quiz (which I marked at and help set up)

 

Cleaning on Saturday (sorry for the blurred image):

Animation to Unity

Although Cassie was in charge of things to do with Unity and getting things working in there, I took over getting our animations into Unity. Thomas was the first one though to explore this, linking the following tutorial and sitting down with us to show step by step how to do it.

I also looked at the following tutorial which shows how to get the visible changing, showing the animation tab and how it works more as well which came in handy a few times.

Based on this, we all exported the animations while I worked on getting them into Unity. These are some of the issues I encountered along the way:

• Three Sets of EVERYTHING

Because spiting the scene into three, we had three of each character to import, 3 sets of animation for each character to import. I had to change the scale from 1 to 100 on all of them due to the scale difference between maya and unity. All animation clips needed named to make it clear for making controls for them, which meant making 9 controls. I then had to hook these up to the geo within the scene, which when first place within the scene wasn’t at the right point in there setting, they always loaded slightly to the right and back of the environment, which meant placing moving and checking that where they are placed was correct for their prop interaction. As you can guess, this was time consuming and often I have to do the process all over again if the animation didn’t load in right, meaning reexporting the fbx files. So it sounded like an easy job but often there where random curve balls thrown in which made the whole process a little more awkward. Hence why I was keen to combine all the animation together which I discuss in another post.

• Timeline

I also needed to add all the animation to the timeline and ensured it played on time and properly within the headset. Daryl having shown us this in the past how to use, it was simple enough getting the animation in using the animation and activation track to make it visible. It was then a case of ensuring it was time correctly to the music. I shall note I only add in the characters in the final version, Cassie put in the rest of the props into the timeline.

• Animation Transfer Error

One area that needed problem solved was when the animation was put into Unity, the eyes, teeth, tongue, glasses, anything around the face, moved in and out of the face. This you can see in a screen recording of an older build, and something commented on within both user tests (some said it was creepy and they liked it, but most said it looked wrong and to fit).

After inspecting all the animation fills, I could see this was not a maya issue, there where no key frames on these areas and it looked normal within play blasts. I even inspected the rigs and did do some rig tweaking on them in the sense of constraints to refine the rig, but this was unrelated to the issue at hand. I did look on Unity forums to try and help figure this out too, trying to see if this was a Unity issue. This it turned out to be as it was attempting to compress the animation, which within the Unity inspector Animation tab you can switch this off. By doing so this resolved the problem. Gotta love that one button fix that is hidden away. Below is an image of me accidentally instead of switching it off setting it to optimal (three options: no compression, key frame reduction which is was on prior, or optimal). The result itself was not optimal. But it did get sorted and the characters look exactly the same as they do in the Maya file.

• AI Hair

The AI when transferred into Unity, her hair weirdly became see through, where you could see the shape of her head under it. I looked at a number of forums and talks rooms to try and find a solution to this problem as we checked the texture and it was at full opacity:

• https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/27117/part-of-my-model-are-see-through
• http://forum.brackeys.com/thread/unity-problem-transparent-mesh/
• https://answers.unity.com/questions/990061/why-does-my-opaque-texture-seem-to-be-transparent.html
• https://answers.unity.com/questions/47091/when-appling-and-alpha-texture-model-become-see-th.html

From reading through these, it told it was a back faced culling issues, where because the hair did not have inside mesh/ one whole shape that was not just a moulded plane, it did this odd optimising effect. To resolve this I then had to create the inside mesh. This was quite difficult to do while keeping the geometry clean. Filling the hole didn’t resolve it, so I had to extrude inwards and then try and shift about vertexes so they would sit better/ not stick out of the top surface of the hair. Here below is the finished product, which as you can see it still isn’t the neatest, however it worked in Unity and you do not see this messy mesh.