Part1 Animation Reference
This week, Kay and I thought about 15 animations that can trigger and interact based on the story of Sweeney Todd. The character runs in the scene. According to the props in the scene, such as razor or stove, the animation can be triggered. The content of the animation is similar to the daily action and life of the character.
Character personality
Todd, the barber, is a kind-hearted man who only wants to enjoy the happiness of his family. Due to the conspiracy of others, he was exiled far away. The hardships on the road made his heart so strong that he was cold. He saw the darkness and stench of London and was shining with the light of death. After returning to London, he still cherishes the hope of finding his wife and daughter. When the hope is broken, there is only hatred in his heart. Revenge becomes the reason for his survival for the rest of his life. The life and death of others is not important in his heart, as long as he has important people.
Mrs. Lowe is a lonely one. She has an admiration for Todd. This admiration makes her come up with the idea of Todd killing people and using corpses to make pie materials. She seems to care for the barber apprentice. Generally speaking, she is just a person who only cares about what she likes but ignores other things. She is smart and calm, and greedy for small things ）When Todd killed for the first time, he handled it carefully and came up with a plan to make a pie with a corpse, but Todd ignored her and even despised her. Compared with Todd’s original wife, Mrs. Lowe is a survivor.
According to their characteristics and representative actions, we finally decided nine animations of Todd, five animations of Mrs. Lovett, and the last animations to interact with the two characters.
Based on the binding in progress, we chose to shoot the reference first.
- Pick up the razor (left to right)
- Place scissors
- Step on the chair
- Wipe the chair
- Turn on the stove (flame in pupil)
- Peeking at the guests
- Spray perfume
- Exercise muscles and bones
- Drinking (looking at the bottle)
- Chop meat
- Carry a tray
- Look at your wallet
- Roll dough
- Flower arrangement
- Pushing to the stove
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Vs411X7iu?p=2&spm_id_from=333.788.b_6d756c74695f70616765.2
Part2 Rigs, Skin and Weights
In fact, Kay involves more software than me, but because I still like the whole process of modeling, I finally decided to be responsible for the carving material and binding of the characters. She told me that advanced skeleton is very easy to use and easy to use, so I spent a lot of time this week learning about the plug-in. She showed me the binding she had done before. Although it didn’t succeed in the end, she gave me some advice and points to pay attention to in case I repeat her wrong steps. She also gave me some tutorials that she thought were very good, which were relatively short and easy to understand.
This part is the most time-consuming part, the binding part. I learned how to use humanik to make and apply the motion capture actions into the model rigs which is shown in my previous blogs.
At first, I used the most primitive way to create bones, but I soon found that there were two problems with this method. One is that I don’t know the name of each skeleton. The other is that I don’t know that I can’t build an automatic controller in this way. That is to say, I have to use advanced to build the basic skeleton.
Then I used VMware to use advancedskeleton.
- Rigs — BUILD and FIT and EDIT
- Skin — DEFORM ( option1)
First, create a skeleton. I use the skeleton biped.ma then import
Half of the skeleton appears at this time, because it will automatically mirror. Then go to match the skeleton to the position I need, that is, to match my model. Click the select deformjoints and the rigs will be selected. And click the se smooth bind options and the controllers will appear.
One of the advantages of this plug-in is that you can select the joints name to display the name of each body part, and it will automatically calibrate the orientation of the bones.
I made mistakes in this step several times, because I hid the controller, just moved the root skeleton, and didn’t find that the controller was at the origin position, so the position couldn’t match all the time. Later, I moved my character to the origin and finally succeeded.
Then I tried to bind my first model with the advanced skeleton. At the beginning, I read the Chinese tutorial. Because of some translation problems, I didn’t do it right all the time. Later, I finally learned the location of the bone points, and then successfully mirrored them. I also made the skin.
In fact, I’m not so satisfied with the weights and bones, because the binding is still a little stiff, but this is just an attempt. I also want to ask Luke about how to solve this problem before we go to further study how to modify the weights.
Binding is really a very complicated process, and it needs to be tried many times, because there will always be many problems, but I don’t want to avoid this problem, because once I do it, I will have a sense of achievement, and I believe that this process is relatively slow at the beginning, and I will improve efficiency after I get familiar with this plug-in.
Part3 Updating
In fact, our progress this week is a little slow, because after discussing with Kamil, he told me that our model needs to run in both Maya and unity, so the riging requirements are a little high. So we use this gap for animation reference. What we hope is to trigger a prop in unity to start playing an animation. This animation doesn’t need to be very long, just a small action.
Kamil is not very familiar with advanced So skeleton spent a lot of time, and he also tried to use it in the unity. But finally he finished it.
Although Kamil has rigged the models to us, it doesn’t seem to display correctly when it is imported into unity. Unfortunately, when we imported the model to the unity, his legs disappeared after we led in. We, including the students of the game, don’t know how to solve this problem. However, in order not to affect the progress, we don’t spend too much time on this problem. And when he gave us time was already very tight, in order to catch up with the progress, we found a friend to help modify the previous binding and help us bind facial expressions and the rigs are quite good. At this time, we had a new bound model, so we didn’t ask Kamil to change it. We also thank him for promising to bind the role for us when we need help.
And I think his binding is very good, but we are very short of time, and we can’t complete the animation until the binding is completed. If we wait for Kamil to give us, we will not have time to finish all the animation, so we asked our friends for help. Even if we didn’t use Kamil’s binding in the end, we still thank him for helping us test these bones, and he said he learned a lot from this project.
After we got the model binding modified by our friends, I made some skin adjustments. On the whole, we are quite satisfied and can do animation.
Part4 Rig testing
character1
character2
In fact, this character didn’t do very well in facial expression because she didn’t have too many movements and because of the time. Another reason is that we want to spend more time on Todd.
Part5 Conclusion
It’s hard to keep trying and challenging, but our project has the goal of understanding and contacting areas we haven’t been involved in. It’s not to say how perfect I want to be. I want to enjoy every process of meeting and solving problems. This process may take a lot of time, but what I learn is not only the skills, but also the process of my own research. These experiences are very valuable. At the same time, learning to solve problems and materials is also a process of training myself.
Actually, after I tried binding for the first time, I think it is really difficult. I still have a lot to learn and a long way to go.