Month: April 2023

The past 10 weeks were extremely helpful in making the foundation of our 3d skills more strong. Over the past few weeks we worked on different things like modelling and rigging of a mechanical arm and creating pre-vis of a short film.

Pre-Vis

In this course, I learnt a lot of mindful things about the pre-production of animation. It helped me understand the camera movement, position and the co-relation of camera and storytelling. Creating pre-vis before animating our final short film helped us save time because we can finalize the character placement and camera movement in the initial stages.

Mechanical Arm

This exercise helped me enhance my aesthetic knowledge in terms of modeling. I got the idea of how little details can add complexity and increase functionality to the model. This course was also helpful to gain an adequate amount of knowledge about mechanical rigging. Now we have a strong foundation of the basic skillset on which we can build a good mechanical modelling portfolio.

After important the image sequence in Maya and adjusting the scale of the arm, this week we started animating the arm. We animated the arm with reference to the filming we did last week.

Following is the screen recording of Maya showing the animated arm.

Roadblocks

After animation, I tried to take the render of the video with the textures on the arm. But unfortunately, the background images disappear in the Arnold render window. Next week I will try to do the RnD and fix this issue.

Introduction

As we have finished the modeling and rigging of the mechanical arm. This week our focus was on recording the video for mechanical arm and later we edited the video to remove the green arm.

Recording

I started off by wearing a green costume on my arm and then we started recording my acting video. I acted a small scene with my arm with the imagination in my mind that I have a mechanical arm. We will then remove the green arm by using chroma key and replace the void with the mechanical arm.

Removing the Green Arm

Our teacher removed the background using the software “DaVinci”. We can also use After Effects to remove the green object by using the color key or chroma key.

After removing the green arm, we exported the image sequence from after effects so that we can import it in maya and incorporate our mechanical arm in the scene.

Setting up the scene in Maya

We then scaled the whole scene and the arm. Next week we are planning to animate this shot.

This week I continued working on the feedback I received last week. The feedback I got last week helped me self analysing my previous pre-vis shots as well.

Improved points

• I changed the camera position in the 3rd shot with the student filling the test sheets.
• I have also made the 3rd and 4th shot seemless as I have deleted an extra camera movement and zoom
• I have changed the timing where the character is going in the star portal
• Additionally, changed the character’s position when he is falling
• Moreover, I have added ease in and ease out in all the camera movements.

New Feedback

I have got two feedback points on this variation of the pre-vis

• One is to remove the camera zooming in when he falls on the floor.
• Second is to swap 3rd last and 4th last shot