FMP

Through this graduation project, I learned a lot of new knowledge, enriched my knowledge reserves, and also made me think clearly about my future career direction. I will continue to work hard in the future to create more works.

This week I searched for music and footsteps, created fonts for titles, and made final adjustments to the overall image.

Week 13 Rendering and Editing

This week I completed some key props that will be used in rendering

Since my facial expressions are driven by blendshape, not skeleton, I need to export the facial expressions to two formats: abc. and fbx.

After that, I imported these animation data and models into folders separately

I set up some console commands for rendering to ensure the quality of the picture.

During the production process, I encountered many problems, most of which I solved, but there were still some problems, such as white light on the edge of the hair when backlit, which I thought about for a long time but couldn’t solve.

This week I made an animation of a little boy on the top of a mountain

I downloaded the mother’s animation from Mixamo and then modified it.

Finally I finished all the animations

This week I did the little boy running action

This week I mainly made the animation of the little boy climbing the mountain

For animation, I mainly work based on the actions on the previous storyboard.

Since I’m not very good at animation, I try to minimize the amount of animation work I do. I deleted the father character and reduced the mother’s animation to two.

And I didn’t have enough time to make the mother’s model, I found a free character model to use as the mother.

This week I did the shot of the little boy at the bottom of the mountain.

This is the last week of my scene . I have further refined my scene.

I did the final post process volume color grading.

This is my finished scene.

My scene is almost done here, but in order to make it more complete, I used the IK redirection that Serra taught us in the previous class, so that my character can run in the scene like a game character.

Then I recorded a video to show my scene

Because I felt that the shadow at the bottom of the grass was too dark, I changed the type of grass and applied RVT to it to make a better transition.

At the same time I added the effects of flocks of birds, smoke and falling leaves

Added details to the tombstone and also added details to the top of the mountain

Finally, to make the whole scene richer, I added a shadow light function to my direct light.

Then I added a falling leaf effect to my scene.

This week I continued to enrich my scene, adding a lot of props, distant trees, fog, and I kept adjusting the material properties of each object to make the whole scene more unified.

In terms of lighting, I kept adjusting the lighting parameters and post process volume, and added some point light in places where the lighting was insufficient, making the whole atmosphere more like early morning.

Top view of the whole world

This week I made special props, wreaths, tombstones, funeral parlors.

I used Maya, SP, and actor blueprint in UE to make these.

After that I imported them all into Maya and arranged them.

I placed some vegetation and props to enrich the scene, changed the skybox, and adjusted the lighting.

In order to make the road up the mountain more interesting, I added a detour.

I built a rough prototype based on the scenes in my storyboard.

In this process, I used the foliage system and landscape system to create the terrain and position relationship I envisioned.

I put a lot of human models in the scene to make sure my scene wasn’t too big or too small.

I hope the final effect is the whole process of the little boy running from the beginning to the top of the mountain.

This is the first time I made a large scene in UE from scratch.

I uesed Substance Painter to make the texture for the boy. The boy’s hair i plan to make it by x-gen.

I used x-gen to make the hair. I created the curve first, combed the curve distribution, and finally converted them to hair. Added a lot of filters to make the hair more natural and realistic.

Then I converted the hair into abc. format and made a new binding with the character skeleton in UE so that I could preview it in UE. At the same time, I turned on the boy’s hair dynamics system and set a series of parameters to make the hair dynamics stable.

This week I made the model, and divided the UV

Then I used Advanced skeleton to bind and use the component editor and brushes to paint weights.

Face rigging, slightly adjusted the face weight, and finally used blend shape to bind the facial expression.

Finally my model binding is complete. It can be used for animation.

My short film is about a little boy who goes to the mountains with his mother to worship his grandfather. The storyboard has been made in term2 under the guidance of George.

Here is my storyboard preview:

I want to make an animated short film more stylized. Because the story theme is serious, I will avoid some exaggerated actions and use more real animations instead, telling stories through shots. The focus is on showing the changes in the scenery on the mountain and below the mountain, and the scene and atmosphere need to be portrayed.

I searched for some references and set a general tone for my FMP.

This is the character design I drew before, which has been slightly modified.

This is the story scene I made using a white box. But there are still a few points that need to be corrected next time.

1. Continue terrain editing to clarify the trend of the mountains. The relationship between the slope and the plane, the scenery under the mountain, and add several other mountains. (Find references)
2. The volume and position relationship between objects needs to be further considered

I also made a description checklist for my character animations.