Friday, August 26, 2016

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.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

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.