Term 1 Showreel:
Here’s my Term 1 showreel, featuring the projects I’ve worked on so far. It’s been an exciting journey of learning and development, and I’m looking forward to building on these skills in the next term.
Design Proposal
In my design proposal, I’ve outlined the concepts behind my previous project and the direction for my upcoming work.
This is my final version of the spline for the Body Mechanics Assignment. After completing the blockout, I focused on refining the animation in the spline stage. I adjusted the foot placement and smoothed out the transition into the sitting pose, ensuring the timing, weight distribution, and sitting in the chair felt natural. I also tried to exaggerate some poses to make it look more dramatic as George suggested.
Here is my final video –
While blocking out the animation, I focused on how the character’s centre of gravity shifts during the movement. I made sure the weight felt balanced and natural, especially when lowering into the chair.
I did face some trouble with foot placement and the distance between the walk and the chair. It took several tries to adjust the positioning and make sure the sitting pose towards the chair looked smooth and believable and doesn’t make it look like the body is falling. I also struggled with timing during the descent into the chair, as the movement either felt too fast or too slow and the knees kept changing as the torso moved.
One of the most crucial areas I’ll be refining during the spline stage are the arcs. Both the arm and body arcs have been challenging to get right, and they’re essential for making the whole movement feel organic and smooth. I’ll also adjust the head movement to match the body more naturally.
The blockout gave me a good foundation, and I’m excited to see how these changes will improve the final result.
For the body mechanics assignment, we were told to understand how a body works mechanically focusing on posture, centre of gravity, weight shifts etc. It is a foundation to understand how to animate as they make movements feel believable and grounded.
We were given many options but I chose ‘Standing to Sitting on a Chair’. For that, I first started to find references on the internet to find a version that I liked. After going through a lot of videos, I decided to shoot one myself.
I tried to make it a stylised version where a woman comes from the side of the chair and sits on it gracefully. I shot the reference and sketched out a 2D trial animation to see how it would look. Then I planned out the key and contact poses to analyse the reference and help me in the blockout.
This helped me prepare for the blockout I will be doing next week by breaking down the actions and analyse the references.
After feedback on the walk cycle blockout in the last session, I started making the changes and converted it into spline. Certain details like the positioning of the legs as well as the rotation during the weight shift made the spline a little better.
After making these changes, I finalised my walk cycle in spline. Here is what it looks like:
Final Showreel
Concept: For my temple cave project, I aimed to create a unique and mystical environment inspired by ancient cave temples to honour God Shiva’s form ‘Natraja’. I tried to connect the God of Dance Natraja to the environment with elements that symbolise the balance of nature: Earth through the lush greenery and rocky surfaces, Fire with glowing torches and ambient lighting, Air through dynamic lighting and shadows, and Water with subtle streams or droplets. I added an animated man dancing, representing the cosmic balance found in the Nataraj Murti but also creates an immersive experience that reflects themes of creation, destruction, and spiritual transformation.
Design Proposal
In my design proposal, I have explained my previous project and the concepts behind it. For my upcoming project, I’m shifting focus to high-speed car chases and car culture. This video offers a preview of what’s to come, where I’ll be working on a car rig, character animation, and creating a dynamic car meet scene with NPCs. I’m excited to explore this new direction and push my skills further as I develop this project.
After the base environment was done and everything was set up, I moved on to the foliage part. I also decided my final character for the animation.
For the character I chose an Indian looking guy from SketchFab to fit the theme and added all the textures and defined the rig in Human IK in Maya to be able to add the motion capture animation to the rig.
I then exported the character to Unreal Engine along with the rigs and the textures to start with the animation process.
After adding the character and testing out the animations, I added foliage in the inside as well as the outside to add the element of ‘Earth’ in my scene.
I proceeded to add lighting to the scene to add those finishing touches. I added a variety of spot lights and point lights (like above the fire and in between the trees) to lit up the darker areas where the sun casted a lot of shadows on.
I proceeded to add my cameras to the level sequencer and keyframe the locations and rotations. Then I created a Master Shot and added all the shots together to create a cohesive video.
With this, I had a proper sequence ready for render to finalise my video and I proceeded to render it in 4K resolution by changing the settings according to my video.
Next, I proceeded to add the element of fire that fit my narrative and played a little with the glow and smoke settings to get the desired effect in my scene. I changed the emissive colour and fade settings according to my liking and played around with a few other parameters as well.
Once I had the fire set up, I started to fix the dynamic sky and atmosphere in the environment and played around with the location of the sun to get the God Rays effect from the cracks of the rock.
After that, I added my second desired element – Water. By adding an ocean from the Place Actors panel in my scene, it made the bridge connect the entrance to the Murti and have water on both sides.
The water however, did not look right as it looked a little greenish. So i changed a few settings including absorption and fixed the water body.
I then moved on to the outside area of the cave to build the entrance part.
This week, we had to show Serra our progress with the term project and get a review on what we had done so far.
My Concept:
A temple inside the caves holding the Natraja Murti, the God of Dance, with dance animations that symbolise cosmic movement and energy. The four elements of nature – Earth, Fire, Water and Air are symbolised through foliage, dynamic lighting and other such actors.
I started by designing the temple structure but making sure it looks traditional and old. I added multiple stone blocks and pavements to see what fits the scene perfectly.
I started adding boulders and rocks to form the cave structure around the statue and added the side wall assets that were taken from Fab and CG Trader.
I then added railings to the side of the main path turning it into a bridge.
In my review, Serra told me to finalise shots in cine camera actor first to see how long the video will be and will help me decide the animation for my male character and set a correct timeline. She also told me watch a few references of dance videos and films to help me in the shots.
This week we looked at Control Rigs in Unreal Engine 5 where we started by adding a Control Rig in the content browser via the Animation section. By creating a Modular Rig, we added the Unreal default mannequin’s skeletal mesh into the blueprint.
We dragged and dropped the rig module into the sockets available in the skeletal mesh and added everything to the character.
We also looked at the module settings to change the size or colours of the controllers according to our preferences.
Then we moved on to the second type of rigging method which we learnt using a octopus model. We started by editing the skeleton, and set the root bone transform to 0. We deleted the existing bones of the arms and left the shoulder as is. Then we added joints from the shoulder by clicking on the arms and add as many bones as we wanted and proceeded to bind the skin.
We then added the control rig samples pack from Fab into our projects. Then we created a regular control rig for the octopus and imported the octopus in the rig hierarchy to look at chain hierarchy.
We then selected the Bone > Right Click > New Control to create a controller for the shoulder and the last joint of the arm. To ensure its not a child, we pressed Shit + P on the controller. We then created a parent constraint and assigned the root bone in the name section. Then we parented the root bone control and attached that to the bone. This ensured that the controller can transform the bone it is assigned to. We did that to all the shoulders then.
Then we added SpringInterp and turned it into a vector. We dragged and dropped the last bone of the arm into the graph and clicked on get bone. We connected the translation to the target. We then dragged the control of the same bone and clicked on set control and joined translation to the result.
Then we created an Aim Constraint and defined the name and the target of the arm in the node from where the aim starts and where the aim ends. We set the Aim Control’s parent type to Control and attached the execute node from the Parent Constraint to the Set Transform’s execute. We then connected that to the Aim Constraint.
Then we tried rigging a human character from what we learnt so far in the class using all the nodes and it allowed us to better understand how characters are prepared for animation, emphasising the importance of proper joint placement and control creation.