WIP- Collab animation porject

Although rigging in Maya is manageable, weight painting can be frustrating and challenging to understand. Fortunately, I reached out to an animation tutor who provided me with some helpful tips. 

The tutor also introduced me to the advanced skeleton, which made rigging fingers and faces much easier. Following a tutorial they recommend, I redid the rigging, and it went even more smoothly for the most part. I was able to make my characters walk and blink, which opened up many opportunities for future rigging projects. This is a significant improvement from using Maximo, which only allows for body movements, but with the advanced skeleton, I can now create facial rigs for my characters. 

Tutorial: https://youtu.be/https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIV47uRi3f2VyGDn4P8fzZqhi5Q7TYILt

However, I did encounter some issues with the hand and arm structure, which I now realize could have been improved by adding more loops to the armpit areas where they bend. Going forward, I will need to gain more knowledge in these areas to avoid similar mistakes and create even better rigs.

While I texture the character, I got pointed out the face has quite a lot of problems by my partner's tutor, at that point, I have already finished everything up to texturing I have been updating my partners and asking for feedback, and I have already made changes due to their comment. But I also quite agree the face can be improved and only the face needs major changes, so I decided to fix the face. 

I was using references of a dolls head, which is definitely not the same age and facial structure as the concept that I was given after more discussion on the setting, it is confirmed that the character should have features of a kid who is around 10 with more of younger faces with a more chubby and rounded face, even though there isn't an actual age for this character. 

This time I found better references that are closer to my friend's direction, hero from big hero face has quite similar features and rework the character base on that. This makes me realise we need better communication when discussing the progress and more clear feedback. Also, it makes me understand more about the facial elements of stylized characters from the mistake in my old model.

I was recruited by an animation friend to assist her with her final project animation. Even though there are differences between creating animation and games, I can still learn to create models that are suitable for rigging as well as the animation work pipeline. Also, this will allow me to experiment with different industries I believe it would be a great time in university to experiment with different industries. This will also be a great opportunity for me to work in a team in which I will be working closely and communicating with my partners on occasion, working flexibly, and adapting skills from game production to animation.

The animation will be a 10-minute short film in 2D and 3D, with the goal of telling a story on multiple levels with a lot of symbolism from various angles to create a compelling, thought-provoking animation. The main goal of this project for me is to create a stylized, animation-ready character.

Concept of Ying by Alicia Tse

The animation is in black and white, exploring the symbolization of Ying Yang. The character I will be working on is Ying, who is quite confident in himself.

I decided to use the same technique for the hair of the fall guy princesses but after sculpting a bit more and making everything in shape I feel like there are too many hair strands and a bit too detailed. The process is a bit unnecessary because after looking at how people do stylized hair buns they mostly start off with extracting the head and sculpting off the base, like this one doing tie up the hair of Hanso.

it gave me a more clear direction on how to do the sculpting. ​​ In the princess models the Hair strands are a lot bigger and thick it works, that technique works well on the fall guys model because the hair is not tied up I don't need to wrap around it to cover the whole base of the head with the hair strands. Like the hair from this tutorial:

this technique works well with hair that has more flow and shapes. This is a good reminder of thinking through which techniques work better for different styles and shapes, it also made me learn the different ways of doing stylized hair.