Ang Li Lin
/Animation
Sem 8 Overview
In semester 8, we need to finish our short film and prepare for the final evaluation day.
In this semester, after our 3D previs is finally approved by lecturers, I finalize our environment model and UV unwrapped everything, later my groupmate texture it in Substance Painter, and export all of the model into Unreal Engine. While other groupmates are focusing on character and prop rigging and troubleshooting, I also take part in rigging simple prop. After our rigger done exporting the rig, the animators start animating the shots using our own characters.
Rigging & Animating Challenges
When animating the characters, the animators found out several issues of the character rig, such as paint weight problem, mesh distortion, controllers with incorrect transform values and many more. The riggers fixed the problems after the animators reported but eventually new problems in the rig continue coming out after fixing the old ones. It also causes many shots needed to be reanimated because of the big amount of rig adjustment even after we import the rig as reference. At last, the animators decided to continue animating after the rig had been mostly fixed.
Moving On
We move on to simulations such as rain, fog and generating plants in our environment scene. While our animator continue animating in polish stage, the lighting artists had finalized their environment lights in Unreal Engine and reviewed by lecturer. Later, they start color correct and color grading a few pieces of shots following our color script. After approved by lecturer, we exported our animations to Unreal Engine.
Our groupmates render out the sequences and composite it in After Effects. After my animation part is done, I started editing the video in Premiere Pro, while my groupmates continue sending me the other completed shots. When we all finish everything, we edited the video with the opening, ending title and school's watermark.
Final Evaluation Day
The day has come, we present our short film to the industries guests in the hall. After that, we all went to the library for a talk. The industry gave us comments for our short film, things that can be improve such as character modeling and texture, pacing of the story, camera timing and animation. We also received compliment in our lighting and mood, cinematic shots and good storytelling.
And with that this will be our final day of our journey throughout all semester, after countless assignments, presentations, panic and days without sleep, we finally graduated successfully! Thank you to all my groupmates, lecturers and everyone that helped!
~ The End ~
Short Film