Unit 7 was a two-part project. In part one we learned new skills that we would then apply to the second part which was the collaboration project. We worked in groups with people from other courses and disciplines whilst responding to the brief and working with a company external to UAL.
Part 1:
I started this unit the same way I start most of my projects, with a mind map. I make it a habit to create a quick mind map because this helps me generate more ideas. This is because after receiving a new brief I have lots of ideas floating in my head, it helps to write everything down
In this project I noticed that I am not the best at drawing and communicating my initial ideas, my thought doesn’t translate well into drawings. To get around this issue quickly I often make collages and/or trace around images. I did this with my monster’s turnaround sheets. Once I know the main features and silhouette of my monster, I used Blender to block out its main shapes then traced over them in Sketchbook pro. I did this because I struggle with drawing and my tutor’s advice is to think in volumes. Drafting my monster in blender helped because I could easily figure out its proportions and see what looked like a 3-dimensional model. I find it so much easier to “think in 3D”. To improve on my drawing skills, I am trying to draw more often and practice turning 3D objects volumes into 2-dimensional images. One main way I am trying to improve is by attending weekly life drawing classes. These classes allow me to talk to practice drawing in a supportive environment whilst also getting valuable feedback from my tutors and coursemates.
In terms of modelling, this was my most difficult unit to date. I have always relied on my topography issues being hidden under textures or by thinking “if the camera doesn’t see it, it doesn’t matter”. Although this thinking still applied in parts of this unit, it would have made the whole character-building process much more difficult. For example, I could not neglect the position of some vertices and how many edge loops I had because this would affect how my character moves. When creating characters that are meant to look alive and organic it is important to make the skin look real like there is actually a functioning body complete with bones and organs facilitating the movement of the character, you don’t want your characters to look like puppets being pulled this way and that. The way we move our characters is by making a personalised rig to fit its body shape. We learned to make an inverse kinematics rig. This is a rig that works like most alive creatures’ skeletal structure. This means instead of selecting a bone and it moving the whole limb or body, it allows other bones to bend as if they were interacting with the ground. This is how we animated our characters. I had a difficult time getting my rig to work properly and after some help from my Blender Tutor Molly, we figured out that this was because I had built my mesh using the wrong axis. I had used Blender’s side view as my front view. An example of an issue I had was when I would tell Blender to mirror the rig on the x-axis and it would mirror on the y-axis instead. It would confuse the local and global axis.
Stills and Screenshots:
I took multiple videos of myself acting like a monster to better understand the movements I was going to animate. I also asked my housemate to act out the movements I wanted to animate because I wanted to see how others interpret would perform the actions. For other movements, I recorded my arms swinging and I also held them out at an angle to replicate the shape of the monster
Part 2:
I chose the Shakespeare Resurrections project that allowed us to work with PlayLabz. Playaz is a Research Institute as well as Multi-dimensional Arts & Social Mixed Reality Experience Zone. They developed a technology that allows users to put themselves into an environment using photogrammetry technology and software like Blender and Unity.
My teammates were from very different courses to mine. Christina and Connor are acting and Performance students with Conner specialising in theatre performance. Cerys is a Theatre Design Student. We found it difficult to find out how our different backgrounds can come together in this project because it looked so overwhelmingly technology-based. In the end, we all had our own tasks and specialisms but still helped each other out with making reactive decisions I oversaw designing and creating the environment as well as animation. Cerys oversaw character design and decided on the main aesthetic inspiration. Christina oversaw storyboarding, character research and also charge the role of character modelling for Puck and Lysander.
Link to our group Padlet ( joint digital sketchbook):
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