Weekly Progress

This week, I completed the princess character's clothing in Marvelous Designer and imported the welded garment into Maya. I also used Mixamo to generate a skeleton and animations for the character so that I can bind the clothing to it and begin testing cloth simulations using the Apex cloth plug-in.

For this upcoming week, I will focus on using the XGen curves to create hair card geometry. I will also be revisiting the environment I created in Unreal in order to fix up the grass and some lighting issues. Once I finish applying Apex cloth to the garment, I will bring the character into Unreal and test the cloth physics using the Mixamo animation and wind physics.

Time spent this week: 11 hours

Weekly Progress

This week, I finished creating the base hair curves in XGen. I also renewed my subscription to Marvelous Designer so that I can resume working on the clothing for this upcoming week. My next goal will be to see if I can create pleats and folds that stay pressed after the simulation. I was successfully able to import the garment mesh created in MD into Maya. Now my next step will be to use the Apex cloth plugin to apply the cloth physics to it. 

Although I have the general shape for the hairstyle laid out, there is still some work I would like to do on the hair. I will be trying to add more density to the ponytail and make the braid at the end more pronounced. I also plan to continue experimenting with the clumping and cutting modifiers to shape the hair and give it more variety. Finally, I will try using region mapping on the area around the bangs so that the strands appear less messy.

After the hair is finished, my next step with it will be to use the XGen hair curves to create hair cards so that I can bring the model into Unreal Engine. I will be trying the workflow in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Fs6rle_IbE

Time spent this week: 14 hours

Weekly Progress

This week was mainly spent watching XGen hair tutorials and trying to start setting up a hair description. I was unsuccessful at using the interactive grooming to create the long hair, since the grooming tools didn't give me as much control over the shape of the hair as I wanted. So I decided to go about it by placing guides and shaping the individual guides. I also found out how to use the clumping and cutting modifiers, as well as region maps to create a more defined part.

By the end of the semester, I plan to complete this character by finishing up the hair and the clothing and implementing the cloth physics using the Apex cloth plugin. I will then bring her into the environment that I created in Unreal.

Hours spent this week: 8

Castle Courtyard Design

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0ByZtt1TJJhiqdURzZGhOcXF3Q1k

Weekly Progress

 

This week, I focused on completing the model for the head of the princess character. Like with the body, my goal was to pay careful attention to the edge flow and keep it as low poly as possible without losing the level of detail I was originally striving for. I still plan to sculpt the general shape of the face a bit further in Mudbox, but for the most part, I have now completed the modeling stage for this character. I imported the completed character into Marvelous Designer to use as the avatar so that I can begin designing the clothing. 

 

For this upcoming week, I plan to continue working on the garment design in Marvelous Designer and begin creating a hairstyle in XGen. I also plan to finish importing the main environment assets into Unreal and hopefully begin working on the game mechanics.

Time spent this week: 9 hours

Week 7 Progress

This past week, I continued bringing assets for the castle environment into Unreal Engine. I also finished modeling the body of the princess character, reusing and re-topologizing the hands and feet from one of my previous models in order to save some time. For the castle, I began learning how to use Substance Painter to create materials for the assets and plug them into UE4. I figured out a workflow for texturing some of the modular assets, such as the pillars and the railings. I am currently continuing to create materials and import them into UE4 along with the models I created in Maya.

By the end of week 8, my goal is to start creating the lower part of the clothing in Marvelous Designer (the part that I will apply Apex cloth to). Even if I don't finish the details of the clothing, I would like to finish at least something simple so that I can better understand the workflow of exporting the cloth from MD to Maya (and then from Maya into Unreal). I would also like to begin sculpting the head in Mudbox, as well as continue creating models and textures for the castle environment.

Time spent this week: 16 hours

Weekly Progress

This past week, I began modeling the princess character, completed the layout of the castle and began bringing assets from Maya into Unreal. I still need to refine a lot of the meshes and UV them properly, but my goal for this week was to start bringing my scene into Unreal to start testing it with the scale of the character, collision maps and blueprints. I also did more research into creating hair for my characters and found that if my goal is to bring my characters into Unreal (as opposed to my original idea of just creating an animation in Maya), I should not use XGen like I had originally planned. Instead, I plan on looking into creating hair cards using textured planes and alpha channels.

For this upcoming week, I would like to finish the body of the character so that I can start work in Marvelous Designer by Week 7. If time allows, I would also like to start sculpting the face and begin creating the hair cards that I mentioned above. For the castle environment, I will continue to refine the meshes and do UV / texturing work. I would also like to see if I can figure out how to create NPC dialogue options using Blueprints in Unreal. For now, the NPC will just be a static mesh.

Time spent this week: 17 hours

The Story

Summary of the Original

As I mentioned before, my narrative will be based off of The Goose Girl. The story starts off with a princess being sent away to another kingdom to marry a prince. Along the way, the princess loses her amulet and her waiting maid tricks her into switching clothing with her. When they arrive at the kingdom, the prince assumes the waiting maid (dressed in the princess's clothing) to be the princess. The true princess is given a job tending the geese. She tries to hide her identity, but one day, the boy who tends to the geese alongside her notices her beautiful golden hair. He tries to get a better look before she ties it up, but the princess speaks to the wind and has the wind carry the boy's hat away so that he goes chasing after it instead. She does this every day until one day, the boy mentions her hair and her ability to control the wind to the king. Eventually her true identity as the princess is revealed and the waiting maid receives death as her punishment.

My Changes

In my interpretation of the story, I would like to incorporate a backstory and motivation for the waiting maid. Although not explicitly stated, it seems like the waiting maid has the power to make people do her bidding, much like the princess has control over the wind. In my take of the story, the waiting maid was also a princess once upon a time. When she was young, a much larger and more powerful kingdom found out about her powers and was frightened by them. They tried to get the king and queen to hand over their daughter, but they refused, so the larger kingdom invaded and detained everyone they could. The soon-to-be waiting maid's kingdom was small and peaceful, so they couldn't put up any resistance. All they could do was send their princess off through a secret tunnel leading out of the castle and hope she wouldn't be found. Meanwhile, one of the princes of the larger kingdom takes over her castle. This is the same prince that the other princess is supposed to marry years later.

Character Concept Sketches

The first character I will be designing is the princess from the Grimm fairy tale The Goose Girl. In the story, the princess travels to another kingdom, accompanied only by her waiting maid, to be wed to a prince. Along her journey, the princess loses her protective amulet and the waiting maid tricks her into switching clothing with her, so that the maid may pose as the princess. When they arrive at the prince's kingdom, the prince believes the waiting maid to be the princess and the true princess is sent off to tend to the geese. She tries to conceal her identity, but the golden color of her hair eventually gives her away.

The first concept is the princess in her true clothing and the rest are of the princess dressed in the waiting maid's clothing. For the design of this character, I definitely want the colors of her hair and eyes to stand out from the rest of her clothing. To do this, I will limit the color palette of the clothing to shades of brown. Because the princess will be taller than the waiting maid, I also want the dress to appear short on her.

When the player first meets her, she will not reveal her identity right away and she will be wearing a hood to hide her hair. It is up to the player to find her room and look through her belongings to find something that will identify her as the princess. If that happens, she will take off the hood. Because I would like the game to be based around the player's actions, it will be possible to proceed without revealing her as the princess. In that case, she will continue to pose as the waiting maid and the story will be revealed in a different way.

(Time spent: 8 hours)

Thesis Idea Revised Again

After thinking over my previous idea, I've decided to redirect the focus of my senior thesis project. Previously, I had been focused on combining Marvelous Designer cloth, XGen hair, and a fully rigged character to create a series of short animations for that character. However, I had a hard time finding something within that scope that I wanted to focus on that would make my project 'different' from the rest.

Now, I want to focus on bringing a character or two to life in an interactive environment. By that, I mean that I want to create a 1st person game in which the NPC characters will interact with the player. Some things I have in mind are that they will react differently depending on the actions the player takes. Or if the player is looking at a certain quest item or location for a while, the NPC character will take notice and say something about that item or location. It would also be neat if the character could tag along with the player without trailing along directly behind like NPCs do in most games. Maybe they could wander about on their own within a certain radius around the player until said player entered a key location. I will still be designing the characters using MD cloth and XGen hair, but instead of going for rendered short animations, I want to bring the characters into Unreal and focus on finding different ways to make them interact with the player and the player's decisions.

Since I am currently also taking Real Time Design, I would like to bring my projects for both classes together to create the final product. Therefore, rather than going with my first plan of creating the characters from my favorite childhood books (A Single Shard and Kira-kira), I will be creating characters based off of characters in one of Grimm's Fairy Tales, The Goose Girl. There will be some deviations from the original story, but I will detail those in a later post.

As for the aesthetic, I want the characters to be designed in a simple, yet elegant manner. I have begun collecting images of styles that I like on a Pinterest board (https://www.pinterest.com/sydney8073/3d-design-thesis/). For the environment, I would like the player to start in a forest, then make their way to a castle. The color palette for the forest will consist of cool, dark colors like blue and green. The castle will also have a darker, run-down look to it, based off of some of the changes I plan to make to the original narrative.

Revised Thesis Idea

My goal is to model and rig two characters and then render out a few short animations to show off the rig. I will create facial expressions using blend shapes and use set driven keys to control them through curves. I would like to use XGen to create hair and Marvelous Designer to create the clothing, though my focus will be on rigging. Ideally, I would like to set everything up so that I can export the characters for use in Unreal.

Week 1 Thesis Ideas

Idea #1: Detailed Environments

            My first idea is to create a series of 3-5 very different environments, each with its own unique feel. This is somewhat inspired by my love for traveling and getting to see the communities created by different cultures. I would like for each scene to have a different style of architecture and its own color palette. My focus would be on creating detailed assets to populate each scene, making sure that the styles of the assets are consistent with each other. In order to accomplish this, I would definitely be doing a lot of research to gather the right reference images. I will then texture and light the scenes. If possible, I would like to learn a new renderer besides mentalray. I would also like to use XGen to populate some of my scenes with grass and trees. My final product would be a repeating animation for each scene, with just a little bit of movement to make it interesting, such as curtains blowing, leaves rustling, or a light flickering. Although I think I would be comfortable with modeling the assets, one of my concerns regarding this idea is that I have not taken the Environment Design elective.

Idea #2: Character Animations

            My second idea is one that I’ve had in mind while taking Project Planning and Production. This is to create a character (or more, if I have enough time) and render a series of short animations, such as running, walking, jumping, standing to sitting, etc. I would also like to incorporate blend shapes for facial animations. For my Project Planning study, I used Maya’s nCloth feature to animate my character’s clothing and hair. This time, I would like to try and use XGen to create the hair and Marvelous Design to create the clothing. My final product would be a series of rendered animations of my character(s). One concern I have about this idea is that the scope of things I would need to do is a bit broad. As much as I would love to do all of this from scratch, I’m not sure if it would be reasonable to design / model a character, rig it and weight paint it, animate it, and on top of that set up the XGen hair and create the clothing in Marvelous Design.

Idea #3: Design and Rig a Character (From the Senior Thesis Ideas document)

            I really like idea of taking a character from a story and designing the character in a way that portrays his/her personality. If I pursue this idea, two story characters I would be interesting in modeling are Katie from Kira-Kira and Tree-ear from A Single Shard. For this idea, I would like to pursue a stylized look, rather than a hyper-realistic one. I would also like to model props and maybe a simple environment based on a specific scene from each book. I could then rig the character and paint weights in order to pose the character within the scene. My final deliverable would consist of a still-camera shot of the lit and textured scene, maybe with some simple moving elements in the scene to make it more interesting.