Unit 6 was our first project within our chosen pathways. I chose the Special Visual Effects pathway. This project was focusing on Motion tracking.
We learned about what motion tracking is and to demonstrate our understanding, we had a brief to respond to. The brief required us to build a robot and rig a robot from scratch. The robot also had to look realistic in the environment we chose to put it in.
After reading the brief I made a mind map on the words that came to mind when I thought of robots.
It was definitely a helpful starting point because I had no idea where to start. Talking to my peers also helped me to understand robots better. For example, based on my prior understanding of robots, I knew I wanted to build a "cute" and small robot and after talking to a coursemate, they recommended a TV series called Love+Death+Robots.
We also watched videos made by Boston Dynamics to see how they made their motion capture robot videos.
Early on in this project, I learned the importance of having honest discussions on your work, your progress an understanding of the brief and being open to constructive criticism. There were points in this project where I felt very frustrated with how my robot looked but during meetings, people would give their thoughts on my work and that would definitely help me know how to improve. For example, I wanted the material on the body of my robot to be a combination of different types of scrap metal. However, it was very difficult to get it to look realistic. At times it would look less like metal and more like plastic, stone or a wet surface. Part of me still wishes I had learned how to get the material looking realistic or at least looking passing as rusted metal. Although I have these feelings about the older versions of my robot, I am quite happy with its final appearance.
The most difficult part of this unit for me was modelling and animating. Although these are skills I learned last year during Unit 4, I found designing and rigging my own character to be difficult.
I often know what I want my work to look like but I have a hard time communicating and showing those ideas. In the past, I have been quite wary of having my model too closely resemble references. I think this is why I found it so difficult to make the head. I wanted to have it resemble the orange robot from Love+Death+Robots but I also wanted to ensure I wasn't just copying it. In the end, I took a step back and looked around me and at older projects for inspiration. I remembered how one robot from the TV episode I watched was a modified game console.
I thought about what old technology relates to libraries and I remembered my parent's old computer monitor, and I thought that it would fit the setting of the library
There are many different things that you must focus on and are important to making a successful motion tracked scene. The main thing is to choose footage that contains many areas of high contrast because we use to zoom into pixels and attach markers to them to set up a tracking scene.
I thought that my footage was going to be easy to track but I didn't pay attention to how much the footage changed between frames 1 and 195. I also realized too late in the project that the books in the footage would have to overlap the animated book and that effect would be rather difficult to achieve. I raised my concerns to my tutors and we both concluded that cutting my animation down to frames 192-648 would make it look better, would be easier to do (given my current skills) and would still be an acceptable length to fulfil the requirements of the brief.
Overall I really enjoyed this Unit. I learned a lot about the basics of motion tracking and how to make a realistic-looking model.
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