This week we had decent progress with our assignments and own project.
Unit 1.2 Design for Animation Narrative
In the first class of the week, Nigel explained to us about Animated Documentaries. This was a very new term to me as I had only heard about a normal real life documentary before this. It was nice to see and hear about different animated documentaries that actually became famous. It is a proper documentary about the real world and not fancy fiction created frame by frame. As compared to real life, I began to understand that there is no documented footage and it is actually very rare to find. Animated film solves that issue as we can re-create that. It can also be exaggerated, which makes it feel more engaging and interesting as compared to boring real-life documentaries.
I found Wall-E to be very engaging, especially on the grounds of environmental issues. Although it is not an animated documentary, it is one of the most popular animated films out there. Wall-E gives the audiences a very compelling yet visually striking story. The movie narrated itself around a storyline that tackles a grave situation directly, and that is why it sets itself apart from other films. The theme of the film is related to the overpopulation on our planet Earth it also makes a link to climate change and increased consumerism. The film does all this including subplots of romance and relationships in the midst of everything, which I found was very cleverly done. Due to the escalating pollution, Earth has become uninhabitable, leading humans to seek refuge in space. Meanwhile, robots are tasked with cleaning up the environmental wreckage left behind. Amidst a quest for love and a mission to preserve a single plant, this poignant story highlights the dire and distressing state of the planet, portraying the grim potential fate it may soon face.
Unit 1.1 Computer Animation Fundamentals
In this week, Serra took 2 classes as she would not be taking class the following week. In the first class she taught us about basic physics of an object in Unreal Engine. We started out with a sphere and tried to change the values of different properties of it, to affect the bounce of the sphere. Next, we moved onto a chain link and we added constraints in-between each link so that the physics would apply properly and Unreal would understand how to play in game mode. We also had to show her our scenes that we had ready in Unreal.
In the second class we finally got to check out how to setup a rig for a character. This was the best Unreal class so far! We downloaded a free character from the marketplace and we slowly started setting up nodes and controls for each of the main body bones, like spine, pelvis and hand joints. Once the basic bone setup was done, we progressed to animating a short three second animation using the controls.
George continued with the Ball with Tail animation as we finished the blocking for it. We didn’t do much in this class, but George did critique our poses and he told me to add more poses into mine before I started my spline animation for next week’s submission. George also gave us a demo of how to carry out the spline animation. I understood the tail positioning better after looking at the demo.
The link to my animation in spline is given below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q0D7_RAh22_TfpFzFH8B0aB9-944W9f3/view?usp=drive_link