The main task for this term is to produce a short animation of over 30 seconds.
As I am particularly interested in character modeling and environment design, I plan to focus this term on preparing the necessary assets for my Final Major Project (FMP).
Below is the animatic for my FMP.
I plan to create the character featured in the short film entirely from scratch, following a complete game production pipeline.
(This is because I intend to join a game development project after graduation.)
The character production process will include the following stages:
Character design
Modeling, which involves:
Mid-poly modeling in Maya
Clothing creation in Marvelous Designer
Prop modeling in Maya
High-poly sculpting in ZBrush
Retopology for game-ready low-poly meshes in Maya
UV unwrapping using RizomUV
Texturing in Substance Painter
Skinning and rigging the character and garments in Maya
Environments:
The short film will feature three main environments: a monastery, a desert, and a cathedral.
During the first term, the cathedral environment was completed; however, it may still be subject to revisions in the future.
In this term, I plan to focus on the production of the monastery environment.
I will begin by testing the white-box layout and experimenting with lighting and shadow effects.
At this stage, most of the assets are from the Unreal Marketplace and serve as placeholders. These assets will gradually be replaced with custom-made models later in the production process.
Animation:
I plan to work on the animation for the first scene, which takes place in the monastery.
However, considering the limited timeframe of only ten weeks, I am not entirely sure if I will be able to complete it as planned.
If time does not permit, I will focus instead on producing an animation test at the end of the term.
This test will be used to check the performance of the character’s cloth simulation and material appearance in Unreal Engine.
The animation itself can then be gradually refined in the later stages of production.
From this video, I gained a general understanding of the character modeling workflow used in the game industry, including the importance of optimization and polygon count requirements.