Digital Reflective Journal #7

This week I managed to complete Adam’s character model and begin creating the scene layout for the trailer. At the start of the week, we had a peer crit in which there were some connection issues that meant it was just me and one other person again. Fortunately, however, this time I was able to get the feedback on my project from both students before one of them lost connection. For this I showed of the latest test render of Adam, in which I started experimenting with volumetrics to give him a cloud to obscure his crouch. I had previously shown this render on the slack group and had received feedback from my tutor that the cloud was too transparent. In response to this I decided to ask about it during the peer feedback session, to which it was further confirmed that the cloud was too transparent. Because of this, after I had given feedback to the one student remaining, I developed the cloud further by doubling the density of the volumetric.

For the rest of the week, I was working on developing the rigging for Adam’s character model. I had originally hoped that this would be a fairly quick process, thanks to the rigify addon that allowed me to instantly create a humanoid rig with generated controls. Unfortunately, however, the automatic weight painting didn’t function as well as it should have. This meant that I had to more or less paint the weights of each individual bone on the model so that each bone would know how much of the mesh they need to deform to create natural movements. For this I found a particularly helpful weight painting guide on YouTube that showed a proper workflow within blender to make the process go much more smoothly. Because of this I managed to get the rig mostly working by Wednesday, this being much later in the schedule then I had hoped for. Unfortunately, however, on Wednesday I encountered particularly challenging problem with simulating hair physics for animation. The problem that I encountered was that because the model had been accidently scaled in the negative at some point, the collider thought that the hair particles needed to be pushed inside the model rather than rest on the outside. However, the only way to fix this ended up resulting in the multitrees modifier (which with the normal map gave the model high poly detail) to break, with the only workaround causing a loss in sculpted details. Furthermore, when I had finally reached this point, I found that the hair simulations were still very finicky and didn’t function when animating the rig. Because of this I decided to reload an older version from before I started to fix the hair simulations and made them static. Whilst it is a shame that the hair sims wont work, it is far better to maintain the sculpted detail of the model then to mess around trying to fix it.

After this I continued to develop the rig on Thursday so that I could create a simple test animation to demonstrate my progress in the games group feedback session. Unfortunately, whenever I went to animate it new issues with the weight paints would rise that I would have to trouble shoot. Whilst this did help to fix lingering problems with the rig, it did mean that I ran out of time to create a test animation. This led to me creating a very basic key pose render instead which, when I showed it off, had criticism for being very stiff. Outside of this however, I did receive a lot of positive feedback for the detail on the model and the improvements to the cloud. This help to reconfirm my decision to sacrifice dynamic hair physics for the models details as it is currently the main selling point of it.

Coming off from this feedback session I had considered trying to continue to create the test animation as a way of further trouble shooting the rig. However, I ended up deciding that I wanted to start to compile my scene as I was concerned for time. For this I managed to create a basic scene for Adam’s library using royalty free third-party assets. One of the most important aspects of this was the pet T-rex and tiger who were meant to appear with Adam. For this I was able to find a free T-rex and tiger model, however the tiger model didn’t seem to function correctly. This led to me replacing it with the giant house cat which I had hoped would help to further sell the dream like aspect of the trailer. The only issue with these two models however is that fact that they were designed and rigged for other programs. This meant that to animate them I would have to re-rig them. This raised some concern as it ended up taking me multiple days to fully rig Adam and, as I discovered when posing him in a sitting position, his rig still has issues with the weight paints that need sorting out. This most likely means that if I want to keep these elements then they will have to be far less active within the scene. This would allow me to either rig them very basically or possibly not rig them at all. The other option is that I cut them out of the scene, but to do this I would have to rewrite it so that Adam’s character is much more active to make up for the loss.

All in all, the next week is going to be very crucial in what can and can’t make it into the final product. Whilst I am behind where I would like to be in my production schedule, since I cut out the second scene in my animatic, I am still just about on schedule. However, I am at a risk of falling behind depending on how much time I have to spend overcoming technical problems with rigging. This means that I may have to make harsh decision on what is necessary and what isn’t for the trailer to convey the desired themes.