Long time no speak! Daruma was completed in mid May! I just wanted to link our final product and share it to you all! Hope you enjoy! You can view the short here! (https://vimeo.com/711014944)
Just to update you all about Daruma, we have entered several film festivals, and got an award in one and was selected at another! We were awarded Best Animation - Honorable Mention at Sea of Art in June of 2022! Daruma also made the Official Selection at Sacramento Underground Film & Arts Festival 2022, in July! It's exciting and means a lot to the team having our work recognized! Below I will attach the fancy awards!
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Throughout these few weeks I have been occupied with lots of animation! I've continued to make small adjustments to the earlier scenes that I have animated and finalizing the details of the characters and camera angles/shots. Between working on those edits, I was able to spend time beginning to rough out the animation for Scene 8! There are about 18 shots that I am working on, where the majority of the shots are exterior of the plane and truly capturing the frightening moments Kumo is going through! My goal from the last blog was to really get Scene 8 animated as far as I could, and I was able to make great progress through our flight sequence! I've got about 17 of the shots to a nice rough pass, while the second to last shot still needs to be worked on more. Luckily I didn't face many technical challenges these past two weeks, but I found that when I am working with Kumo's facial expressions is where I am finding myself to be challenged. Trying to find the right balance of fear, panic, and stress with movements that don't distort Kumo in a manner that is not breaking her rig, while also being close to realistic and appealing. With these challenges has resulted in a lot of reference photos and videos of me trying to emulate some of the movements and emotions one may face in a aircraft failure. During these past two weeks, I was also able to render some of the images of work that I have done that I wanted to include in our production book! Which is great to see how far our group has come to reach our finished product! My next goal will to have Scene 8 animation to be done and as final as I can get it! There will be more goals and tasks that may arise as the Daruma group begins to wrap up with our short and get these final scenes rendered!! It's all so exciting and can't believe there are just a few classes left before graduation! Below is the rough animation that I have done for Scene 8 and some renders of the environments and assets I have modeled and textured! For the past few weeks, I have been animating a new scene and continually making edits to previous scenes I have worked on! I have really enjoyed focusing my time and energy on animating these scenes, while also getting better with camera shots and movement! As for the rest of the group, it has been amazing to see the rest of the other scenes come together and experience the entire short animated (no more storyboards in the shots)! With Scene 7, I made some edits to Kumo in the opening shot and continued to add movement to the plane as it is moving through the sky. There can be more adjustments for the plane's motion, but it is a good spot right now. Before this rough pass, I had Kumo push down a lever that controls the direction the plane should be steered in and not how to push the plane forward. Thankfully John let me know of this information and I adjusted that accordingly! After I made those corrections, I moved onto blocking the animation for Kumo, Daruma, and the camera for Scene 8! There are some adjustments to make regarding camera shots and animation that the group would like to have, so I will get to that for the next pass. There were some hiccups along this blocking pass, as the plane animation continued to be lost as adjustments to the plane occurred. Luckily Shayna was able to work her magic and resolve what was happening! After that, I didn't really run into any issues. Since I was able to get the blocking pass done, I have handed cameras one and two over to Hannah, while I take camera three's chunk of the scene! Over Spring Break, I also went back to Scene 1, where I fixed the issue where the at-home flight simulator was duplicated and then transferred the previous animation onto the textured simulator. I finally animated Daruma's facial spin animation. I also adjusted some of the camera shots movements to be more controlled and fixed some of Kumo's animation as well! I was able to accomplish the goals that I had set out for myself by this progress check! I was also able to do a few extra tasks, which were necessary to do at some point! It is nice having some other animation scenes to do because I have found it as a good way to take breaks between shots and come back with fresh eyes, but still being productive with my time! Below you will find the animated scenes for Scene 7, 8, and 1! Over the past few weeks, I have been busy animating Scene 7, where Kumo begins her first solo flight and where she runs into an issue mid-flight. I got all of the shots to an even rough pass, with the animating and camera work in this scene. My goal was to show more interaction with Daruma and Kumo, while also driving more emotion though facial expressions with Kumo! There were some initial challenges with these shots, especially with the flying portion. Where the plane, Kumo, and Daruma all ended up in different places when translating them, which caused a lot of issues. Through trial and error, which ended up with multiple restarts, there was a simple solution. I would keep the camera and assets pretty much still in the shots, and we will move the clouds and background accordingly! This saved a lot of time, instead of me constantly fighting and forcing the rigs to stay in place. Even though I did lose some time working through that, I was happy to see and feel the tension that this scene was intended to have! I was able to meet and accomplish my goal that I had set out previously, which was to animate Scene 7 and get all of the shots to an equal pass! Luckily with any of the other texture issues that needed to be done and resolved will be taken care of by Madi! For the next two weeks, my goal is to have Scene 8 blocked out for animation and cameras. I will get those set up and ready, where I will then pass off some shots to Hannah, as we both will tackle this long sequence! I hope that I will be able to get the animation further than a blocking pass, as I have found a great rhythm to animating more efficiently! Below is the rough animation pass that I did for Scene 7! For the past two weeks, I have been focused on animating, texturing, and developing some work for marketing Daruma! I also laid out the extra Turbo Squid assets gathered to fill up the shelves in Kumo's bedroom! It was enjoyable to work on different aspects and accomplish the majority of my goals that I had set for myself! As I wrapped up the rough pass for Scene 01, it was great to see how everything came together with the animation, texturing, and lighting so far! It is a great place to see what is working and what needs adjustments, which we saw as a group and the feedback we received from our peers and professors. There are some edits that I will need to adjust with the animation of Kumo, the camera work of some shots, and the texture for the giftbox tag. These will be something that I'll do when I get my priority of animating others scenes in a strong spot! During the time that I wanted a break from animating, I went in a textured the headset that I modeled and drew out a postcard design for future marketing material for Daruma! The image I drew of Daruma on a toy plane swinging from the ceiling was inspired by an earlier iteration of our story where we had Daruma playing on a toy plane while Kumo was studying. It was nice to incorporate a sweet moment of a past story edit! The most recent task that I have been working on is the animation for Scene 07! This is the beginning part of Kumo's solo flight with Daruma. I've got this first shot to a rough pass of animation, where Kumo starts to pull the plane out onto the tarmac! I have also been working on the camera work for this shot as well. I was able to meet the majority of the high priority goals that I had set out for myself! Some of the challenges that I have been facing are camera angles and movement. I want to continue to challenge myself in finding the right shot types, angles, and composition engaging, but also making sure the movement isn't too jarring. Being able to work more with camera shots has allowed me to gain more confidence and ease while working with cameras, but there is still room for me to grow with this aspect. So I will continue to make adjustments and apply those to the next series of shots I will need to do! For the next two weeks, my main goal is to animate the rest of Scene 07 to an equal level for all of the shots! If I find time to get to fixing/adding textures in Kumo's room, I will, but for now I will focus mostly on animating! Below are the images and videos of my Daruma postcard design, headset, and animation of the first and seventh scene! I'd love to start this post off with saying how happy and proud I am of the Daruma team! My group has been producing great work and consistently showing up for one another! It has been a wonderful process to be a part of a team that has a strong work ethic and communication between each other, while also having fun along the way! Just wanted to begin with some appreciation, anyways, let's get back to the work! For the last two weeks, I have been focused on animating our first scene, while also helping solve issues with textures of other objects! It's been a fun and productive few weeks, as I really enjoyed animating and expressing emotions through Kumo! I am very happy with the progress and stage that this animation is at, and I hope to keep this momentum as I move forward with animating more! Along with animating this scene, I have been adjusting the camera angles. It has been a good challenge for me to address composition and think about movement through these shots. There are some adjustments that I would like to make in the future for some of the shots and finger and face animation, to refine this scene as a whole. There has also been some adjustments that I have made for the textures in Kumo's bedroom, while also fixing some of the texture connections we were having with Daruma. The major issue was the file path was going to an unknown folder, which luckily was easily addressed. I have also been looking into marketing plans, which has mostly been helping generate some ideas along with Skyler and Hannah. With the goals that I had set from last blog post, I was able to meet the majority of the goals that I needed to focus on! The only thing that I did not get to was getting some recent renders of the animation, but was able to get the animation to an equal rough pass throughout all of the shots. This would also be a great time to hopefully get some test renders out and see how this scene is coming along! There also were no other major challenges while I was working on this scene! My goals for the next two weeks will be to move on and begin animating Scene 7, where I plan to get the animation to a rough pass! This is where the majority of my focus will be, but there are also some items that I would like to cover as well. The headset that I modeled for Kumo is ready to be textured, so if I need a break from animating I will get those finished and connected. The Daruma gift box tag needs to be textured, so I will hopefully get to that as well! Below is the rough pass animation that I have done for Scene 1! Before I go into what I have done so far in these first two weeks of the Spring semester, I would like to discuss some of the work that I had done over Winter break! I worked on different aspects for the roles that I was intending to continue throughout the Spring semester, which ranged from modeling, texturing, and animating. I was able to take the time to model and UV the at-home flight simulator. Then, I went into Kumo's bedroom and set up all of the textures for our final scene, and addressed any issues that may have came up with rendering. Some of the errors were in regard to missing .tx files that did not exist or issues with UV maps overlapping. Finally, I was able to block out and experiment with some new emotions through animating the first scene. I wanted to add more frustration and the feeling of failure that Kumo expresses immediately when she fails the flight simulator. I will share the first few shots at the end, as I have spent the last few weeks making edits and additions! With the start of the new semester, there was a great energy and excitement when getting the ball rolling for our senior short! For the last few weeks, my goals were to get the majority of the environments textures squared away. I was able to fix the final details for Kumo's bedroom after I had the room texture connections finished earlier. Being able to get this set, allowed me to go in and make any texture adjustments, whether if assets were to shiny or not the exact color we were looking for. I got some great feedback from my group to really capture a strong color scheme to convey a 'depressed' or 'cold' emotion that Kumo experiences! After texturing the room, I also completed at least a rough pass for the textures of the campus buildings, walls, and sidewalks. There were several iterations of the campus building textures, as I realized the UVs were effecting the look and quality of the textures. So I took the time to make those fixes, and there are still some color and details that I would like to add to the entrance of the campus. These changes will probably come into affect once all of the hangar sets are together to see how they all are with each other. On the other hand, I really enjoyed capturing the white tiles on the building to capture the feeling that this campus building belongs in Japan! I found reference online and from when I went to Japan, so it was fun to incorporate some personal experiences to the process! With the last bit of textures that I tackled was the control tower. I was able to successfully finish that asset, and I made adjustments throughout the week for it. Finally, I was able to make some animation progress for the first few shots for the first scene! Although I did not get as far as I would have liked, I think it is heading in the right direction and can't wait to see how it comes along as I go! I was able to successfully meet my goals that I had for these past two weeks! There weren't too many challenges that I had faced, except for some of the camera work that I have done for the first scene. There are some shots that need to be adjusted, and we got some great feedback from Jeremy as to how to make the camera shots/movement more impactful! Especially with the camera shots that start from a still position and then move, I need to consider having the camera continuously (subtly) moving. While also considering incorporating foreground, middle ground, and background elements, in order for the viewers to feel like they are a part of the scene (fly on the wall), that Paul has suggested! I hope to makes those changes as I go along with the animating this scene. My goals for the next two weeks is to focus on animating the first scene to get all of the shots to an equally rough pass, while fixing a few of the camera shots! This will be a great chance to get some test renders to see how the lighting, textures, and animation are all coming together. I will also like to make the beginning movements to be more refined and sharp, so I will continue to make those edits to drive the emotions through Kumo. Below is the progress of the first few shots of the first scene and the textures of the campus buildings and control tower! The Daruma group has been hard at work and it is super exciting to see all of the progress we have made over the semester! There were a lot of edits to the story, some challenges, but an enjoyable time learning and growing as a team! I am so proud of each of my group members and can't wait for the story and animation to full develop! These past two weeks were all kind of a blur, went fast, but fulfilling with the productivity that the group had as finals crept up on all of us! First of all, our goal was to add and adjust our first version of our 3D-Animatic! This reveals the adjustments that we have made towards our story and the overall flow of the message we want to convey. We were able to successfully get that completed and show progress of work for the rest of our pipeline work to the class. We got some helpful feedback and ideas from our Professors, which we have already accounted for! Our group also took this time to plan out our goals, tasks, and expectations that we need to get done by the end of Winter Break. It was very important for us to lay this out, that way we can be as prepared and well-off for our final Spring semester. It gives us an expectation for us to obtain and reach, that way we have more time to calculate for any issues that may occur come rendering/post-production. We know that this is our break time, but we also want to make the most of this given time to keep making steady progress! With that being said, our group has completed 86% of the assets we aimed to have done by the end of this semester! Hannah created a table full of the assets, textures, and rigging that has been done so far (all of which will be found below)! This will allow us to focus on animating and rendering/post-production in the Spring! We want to prepare, plan, and execute work thoroughly in a timely manner! It is also great to note how organized and dependable we all are as teammates, as we can expect quality work to be done when we plan! The work that I have done have been primarily been with the rough animation of our first and third scene, while also working on modeling and texturing! These past two weeks came up with some unexpected issues that I had to resolve, but it allowed me to focus on the details the several times afterwards. When I was animating, many of the key poses I did for the first scene were not keyframing correctly and I would lose several days of works, even with several iterations of saves. To be honest, it was maybe the fifth time animating the scene, it was finally saving the work, but not sure what the issue was. I was really happy with how it came out in the end, spending about two to three days on it! I wanted to challenge myself with the camera angles and shot composition, as I found that is an area that I can always expand on! The Professors found that camerawork was strong and effective! The third scene was a great way to try to convey emotion through the head movements of Kumo and expressing the affection between her and Daruma! I have finally wrapped up the modeling and the UVing of Kumo's pilot headphones, which I will include below! Then, I spent most of the time to plug-in all of Madi's and I's textures done for Kumo's room. This is where I went through each of the assets and nodes to make sure we weren't missing any textures, and we have got those pretty much done. Expect there was an unexpected and unfortunate issue that I ran into when plugging in all the textures. There was a ghost node of a texture that does not exist, which ultimately means I will need to go through this process again in a new file. But to find a silver lining in this, I would have done that eventually, as Hannah will begin restructuring our file layout. At least I have become faster at connecting textures! Over Winter Break, I will plan of finishing up some modeling assets, which is the at home flight simulator. I will also focus in on refining the animation for the first scene. There will also be time allocated for texturing the campus and the new assets I make! It would be great to find time to make some personal work for demo reels, but we will see how everything goes! The rest of the group's goals, is to achieve as much work as they can, in each of their respective departments! Overall, I feel that our group is in a great spot and will continue to make great progress! I am eager to see how Daruma comes to life even more! Below will be links to the 3D-Animatic of our short, the work I did, and screenshots of modeling that has been completed thus far! ---More updates are added at the bottom of this post!--- These last few weeks, the group has focused on our completed rendered scene and going through testing of what was working and planning on any adjustments. This was a great element to see how everything in this sequence and ultimately envision what our short will look like! It was also the time to run into issues earlier rather than later in the process, which are all beneficial as the team has been already adjusting to fix them! We all came together and really knocked this first run out of the park, and it was super exciting to see our story come to life! I'm eager to see where this goes and the progress we make in the future! For the goals that I set out, I met the majority of what I wanted to get done, but working on this sequence was the priority over the assets that I wanted to get done. Which luckily hasn't caused me to be behind in any way, those were personal goals before I met with the team. However I was able to do more texture tests and modeling than I had anticipated during this time, which was great! I began fleshing out the headset model and texturing the control tower and campus building roughly (which is based on the Kokusai Aviation College)! I will continue to refine as I go! Throughout these two weeks, Madi and I rounded up the textures in Kumo's bedroom! Cleaning up any issues and fixing anything the group wanted to note! We got that accomplished early enough for us to test some renders and we enjoyed how it all came out! The rest of the group has been working really hard, which is shown in the video attached below! Hannah did the animation of Kumo for this sequence. Skyler tackled the lighting, animation of Daruma, and rendering of this scene. Shayna provided the rigs for the characters and John has worked on the sparkle magic of Daruma. Madi modeled, textured, and animated the bedsheet. While I was able to provide the rest of the modeled room and textures! I was super happy with how cohesive each of the elements were in this scene and apply it to the rest of the story! Our group chose a scene in our short where Kumo arrives back into her apartment where she is ultimately feeling frustrated from what she had faced on campus, but then comes to realize why she is working so hard for her dream of becoming a pilot. We felt that this scene captured different emotions and part of Kumo evolving and becoming more confident over the course of the story. This is just the beginning of her journey! For the next two weeks and over Fall break, I plan to work more on modeling assets and plan on texturing more (specifically within the campus environment)! I will provide any assistance to the group for wherever my help is needed, so I may take on more tasks, but I'll expand on that when discussing more of where/what the team needs. Just need to keep plugging away for the team and reach our next goal of getting 80% of our assets completed by December 3rd! I also do not foresee any issues as of right now. The goals for the group will be further explained when we meet, but we are looking ahead towards tasks that we are aiming to get done during winter break. The rough plan that we have discussed is anything else that needs polishing with modeling and texturing, while animating and fixing the rigging issues! Below is the video of our rendered scene completed, it is a jumping off point and will continue to modify as we go! I have also included some images of the works in progress that I have been working on, beside what I have done for the other room textures! ----Update - 12/03/2021---- I just wanted to add some more work that I have been working on throughout Fall Break and this past week!
Below is a rough iteration of the animation in scene 1, it is a work in progress as I have not completed all of the frames that are within our storyboard, but it is getting there! I will also have a screenshot of the headset and the further modeling of that asset so far! With the last few weeks, our group has been focusing on advancing our story, the fluidity of it all, and began working towards our completed rendered scenes due on November 19th! We have several members working on animation, rigging, VFX magic, and texturing! It is steady progress throughout the group, and it is really bringing the story, characters, and environments to life! We are working on a sequence that displays Kumo's frustration, but then realizes why and what she is working so hard towards! We thought this captured a great tone and moment the Kumo experiences along her journey of growth and confidence! It will be wonderful to see how all of the elements we have been working on comes together! My main focus for these past two weeks have been to complete the majority to the rest of Kumo's room textures alongside Madi! We have been focusing on the angles and shots that are going to be seen in our rendered sequence as our priority. Madi and I have been communicating to maintain balance and cohesiveness to all of the objects each of us has been working on. The color palette and tone align very well together, keeping it all well-rounded! Below I will attach some of the textures I have been working, while there will be images of what Madi has done as well below! I have also taken on the task of modeling a headset for Kumo when it comes time for her flight sequence, so I have continued to find time to model assets while texturing! I will further develop the at home flight simulator and work out the empty space as well! For the next two weeks, I have some personal goals that I would like to set before meeting with the group! I would like to get the headset and flight simulator to at least 80% or more completed modeling wise. Finish up any remaining textures that need to be finished in Kumo's room! This remains a shorter list for now, as this will adjust after the group's meeting tomorrow! I will continue to be flexible and eager to grow with the needs/success of the team! With the goals that I set out from the last two weeks, I can say that I have reached my goal with the amount of assets I was able to texture in this period. While also making adjustments and working with Madi through ideas of the final outcomes! For now, I can say that our team goals for the next few weeks are to really nail and finish our rendered scene! We will continue to breakdown all of the elements that we need to consider, especially with animating, lighting, and rendering! We have set a strict timeline for ourselves to reach, and it will all be about timing and executing the details we need and want! The only challenge I can foresee within the next two-week period is getting our rendered scene to a finished point that meets our expectations (but elements can always change and not set in stone). It is a great place for us to see what is working for us and what elements that may not be hitting the mark for us, which will be beneficial for the group either way! It has been fun to experiment with patterns, textures, and the colors of the assets in Kumo's room! |
Author's Note:This blog will contain the many updates that I will share about my progress and experience through my senior short. |