MA 3D Computer Animation

This blog mainly shows some pictures of our finished products and Demo videos。

Summary of animation work:

Week 7: Complete the animation section & import Unity to test

This week I tried to change the UV on the model that finished the animation and unfortunately it didn’t work. This gave me a warning that UV must be developed after completing the model and before rigging.

Another thing that alerted me was to open.mb files in Maya using open files rather than drag and drop. Otherwise, prefixes appear in file names. This does not affect the animation presentation in Maya. In Unity, however, this can cause problems with animations that don’t connect.

According to the needs of VR and Game Design students, Qian Tang and I have completed the UI Design of our prop – plant chart.

After completing the rigging of the Oin and Master, Qian Tang and I worked together to complete the animation of the Master and the Oin.

The work is divided as follows:

Master Animation

Qiantang: The Master animation Ending1 and Ending2 common parts and the ship animation

LanjieXiong: Master animation Start and Ending3

Oin Animation 

  Qiang Tang: Oin3, 4, 5

Lanjie Xiong: Oin 1, 2

Here is an animation video in Maya.

Once the animation is complete, the next most important thing is to import the Unity test. Based on previous experience, animations on controllers cannot be displayed in FBX files. Therefore, I looked for some solutions to this problem on the internet. It turns out that I need to animate all the controllers on every frame of the skeleton. The operations are as follows.

Select all the bone joints and click Edit – >Keys -> Bake Simulation

After completing the baking and exporting the file, I tested it in Unity according to the knowledge Herman taught in the second week, and the animation performed well.

In this blog, I will focus on recording the process of painting skin weights. After finishing the bind skin steps, I found that the weight of some positions was not reasonable. For example, as shown in the picture, the foot is deformed.

By selecting Skin- > Paint Skin Weights to enter the screen for Painting Skin Weights. White is the part of the skin that the chosen joint can control, and black is the part that can’t.

This week I solved the Oin rigging problem by learning about rigging. I also put it into Unity for testing. The result was excellent.

First, switch the mode to Rigging. Then choose Skeleton – > Create Joints to create bones. Open the model’s X-ray Joints. We can see exactly where the bones are in the model.

Skin is required when a complete skeleton has been built based on the Oin model. Band Skin’s purpose is to glue bones and models together.

When the Band Skin is completed, the joint can be moved to determine if anything is out of place. In this case, paint skin weight is needed to adjust the range of skin that each joint can control.

This week we discussed our group project with other students. It makes a lot of sense. I can not only hear other students’ ideas about the team project but also get feedback about our project.

We shared our projects with Ziyao Zhu. I was very interested in their project, which was about puzzle-solving, a reference to the Rusty Lake series of games. And the character design is very great. We also got feedback from him. We currently have less animation in the overall project, which requires us to be more involved in the game.

I’m working with Qian Tang this week. She is responsible for character master rigging. And I’m responsible for the Oin rigging. Since I have no rigging experience, I ask Qian Tang for advice on this issue. She introduced me to the rigging method of controller. The Sprite movement looks great.

Unfortunately, WHEN I exported the animation to FBX format and imported it into Unity, there were no animations on the model. I searched the Internet for a solution. It turns out that Maya’s animation is done with controllers, while Unity’s animation is done with bones. So, any animation done on the controller will not show up in Unity. Therefore, we now need to find a new rigging method. I found some videos on skeleton rigging and skin. Hopefully, we can solve this problem next week.

This week we give storyboards based on the script. At the same time, students from VR provided character design and models.

Storyboard explanation: The player wakes up and sees a lab. Then the master came up to him. Told him why he was here and threw the plant book on the table. The master tells the player to follow the book to look for plant samples in the forest. Then the master left.

Storyboard explanation: The master was satisfied with the plant map and kicked the player off the ship. After the player lands, he sees the master’s ship leaving the planet. But soon thousands of them came back.

Storyboard explanation: The master was satisfied with the plant map and kicked the player off the ship. When the player lands, he and the other Oins activate the Alchemy table and defeat the master with the alchemy ray.

Storyboard explanation: Player doesn’t finish all tasks on time. Master catch the guider Oin and player back to the lab. Master killed the player.

Character Design

Character Model