Categories
4.1 Project 1 (George - Previs) Uncategorised

Week 06 – Animate Developments

In this week, I continued to create my shots and character animations, and I rigged all the characters except the

main character (existing model), and here are the on going animation to show.

the magic potion (week06)

Idea02 (ghosts)

For the second story, I created a dynamic storyboard (animatic) for the second story to help myself understand and visualize the timing and effects of the animation.

Animatics

Categories
Collaborative Uncategorised

Week 06 – Character Modelling

Collaboration Work

This week, a brand-new character design was developed by Zheng Deng. we redesigned the character to create a standing, adorable rabbit based on the rabbit. With the exception of the eyes, the rabbit character was intended to have a non-motorized face.

character design by Zheng Deng

This week, the character model was also created by me in a lowpoly style with Maya as the main software.

3d model
wireframe

Categories
Collaborative Uncategorised

Week 05 – Work in-Progress Discussions

Collaboration Work

This week, I prepared for our upcoming presentation. Our group assigned responsibilities to every member, and each of us had to present what we had produced and what we planned to do in the future. Also in this week, I received the character design from Zheng Deng, which I analysed briefly before creating an model.

Character Modelling

I used maya to creat the model, and the texture part is not yet finished. My current plan is that if the model part passes, I will use Substance Painter to create texture and materials.

character design by Zheng Deng
3d model
wireframe

Reflections

Friendred suggested after the presentation that the character’s design was too similar to that of the little prince, therefore our group decided after debate to rework the design and model of the young kid. Transform the this young boy character into a rabbit or a squirrel.

Categories
Theory with Nigel Uncategorised

Week 06 – My Thesis for FMP

This week, I continued to look up literature that would be helpful for my dissertation, and took notes on them to extract the highlights.

Common modelling and rendering tools have trouble with complex, repetitive scenes with forests, leaves, grass, hair, or fur. Even in high-end productions, this kind of scene is rarely used because it takes a lot of data, is hard to model and animate, and costs a lot of money to render realistically. The author talks about how volumetric textures work well in these kinds of scenes. These basic shapes can make modelling and animation much easier. More importantly, they can be rendered quickly and with little aliasing by using ray tracing. Kajiya and Kay (1989) came up with the main idea, which is to represent a pattern of 3D geometry in a reference volume that is tiled over a surface like a regular 2D texture. In our contribution, the mapping is independent of the mesh subdivision, the pattern can be any shape, and it is prefiltered at different scales, just like MIP-mapping. Even though the model is encoded in a volumetric way, the way it is drawn is very different from how volume rendering is usually done. A volumetric texture can only be found near a surface, and the repeated parts of the reference volume, which are called texels, are distorted in space. Also, each voxel in the reference volume has a key feature that controls the reflectance function that shows the overall geometry of the voxels. This lets a single ray per pixel be used to trace very complicated scenes with very few aliasing artefacts (for the part of the scene using the volumetric texture representation). The most important technical parts of our method are figuring out the ray path and figuring out the reflectance function. (Neyret, 1998)

Neyret, F., 1998. Modeling, animating, and rendering complex scenes using volumetric textures. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics4(1), pp.55-70.

It allows texture elements to be placed on a surface in a way that is not limited by the mesh subdivision, just like regular 2D textures.

References:

Lake, A., Marshall, C., Harris, M. and Blackstein, M., 2000, June. Stylized rendering techniques for scalable real-time 3d animation. In Proceedings of the 1st international symposium on Non-photorealistic animation and rendering (pp. 13-20).

McDonnell, R., Breidt, M. and Bülthoff, H.H., 2012. Render me real? Investigating the effect of render style on the perception of animated virtual humans. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)31(4), pp.1-11.

Rosenblum, R.E., Carlson, W.E. and Tripp III, E., 1991. Simulating the structure and dynamics of human hair: modelling, rendering and animation. The Journal of Visualization and Computer Animation2(4), pp.141-148.

Strothotte, T. and Schlechtweg, S., 2002. Non-photorealistic computer graphics: modeling, rendering, and animation. Morgan Kaufmann.

Categories
Theory with Nigel Uncategorised

Week 05 – My Thesis for FMP

This week, I looked up more relevant literature on rendering, and distilled the information that was useful to me in different kinds of literature, and recorded and saved it.

Idea01: GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) and CPU (Central Processing Unit) are two types of computer hardware that are commonly used for rendering.

CPU rendering is when the computer’s CPU is used to do calculations for rendering. This method is usually slower than rendering with a GPU, but it can be more flexible because CPUs are made to handle a wide range of tasks. CPUs are usually used for rendering applications that need a high level of accuracy and precision, like scientific simulations and photorealistic rendering. In GPU rendering, on the other hand, calculations for rendering are done by using the computer’s GPU. GPUs are made for rendering and can handle a lot of data at the same time. This makes them perfect for real-time rendering applications like video games and virtual reality. GPUs are also often used for architectural visualisations and product design, which are two other types of rendering.

Both GPU rendering and CPU rendering have their pros and cons, and which one to use will depend on what the application needs. Many modern rendering programmes can do both CPU rendering and GPU rendering, so users can choose the method that works best for them.

References from : https://academyofanimatedart.com/cpu-vs-gpu-renderer-which-is-better/

Categories
Theory with Nigel Uncategorised

Week 04 – Defining and Testing a Research Topic

This week, I decided on the title of my thesis, ‘ what is the significance of rendering in the animation, video game and film industries? (The significance of various rendering techniques and rendering styles in the film of animation, film, and game). After deciding on a title for my dissertation, my primary responsibility was to locate relevant articles, books, and academic papers.

Rendering is the process of utilising computer software to generate an image or animation from a 2D or 3D model. In computer graphics, various types of rendering techniques are routinely employed, including:Rasterization is a quick and effective rendering process that includes projecting 3D objects onto a 2D plane to transform them into 2D images. Rasterization is a technique that is frequently employed in real-time applications such as video games and interactive simulations.

Ray tracing is a rendering approach that replicates how light interacts with items in a scene by tracing the course of individual light rays as they bounce off surfaces and interact with other things in the image. Ray tracing may produce incredibly realistic visuals, but it is computationally expensive.

Global illumination: This approach simulates the way that light bounces around a scene to provide indirect lighting effects like as reflections and ambient occlusion. To create highly realistic visuals, global illumination can be used with other rendering techniques such as rasterization and ray tracing.

Radiosity is a technique used to create diffuse lighting effects by simulating how light bounces off surfaces in a scene. Radiosity can be utilised to provide soft and nuanced lighting effects that would be difficult to achieve with other rendering approaches.

Volume rendering: This approach is used to render volumetric data, such as medical pictures or fluid dynamics simulations. It entails projecting light beams through a volume of data and calculating how the light rays interact with the data to form an image.

Photorealistic rendering is a rendering approach that seeks to create visuals that are indistinguishable from actual photographs. Photorealistic rendering often entails the use of several rendering techniques, including ray tracing and global illumination, as well as advanced texturing and shading techniques.

references from: https://www.marxentlabs.com/author/soniamarxentlabs-com/

Also, I have concerns about two categories: 3D Real-Time and 3D Post-Process Rendering.. These are the two ways of renderers, which are used very frequently in games, and movies. Real-time rendering is the main rendering method of almost every large AA game, in order to enhance the effect of the graphics, more efficient and fast to improve the player’s experience.

The process of creating graphics or animations in real-time, generally at interactive frame rates of 30 frames per second or more, is referred to as real-time rendering. Applications like video games, augmented and virtual reality, simulations, and architectural representations frequently use real-time rendering.

Rreferences

Song, M. and Grogono, P., 2009, May. Application of advanced rendering and animation techniques for 3D games to softbody modeling and animation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Canadian Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (pp. 89-100).

Goswami, P., 2021. A survey of modeling, rendering and animation of clouds in computer graphics. The Visual Computer37(7), pp.1931-1948.

Categories
Collaborative Uncategorised

Week 04 – Avatars

Collaboration Work

This week, we decided on a theme and a story for the animation we’ll create. The story is around a rabbit who discovers a peculiar small tree in front of his house. he doesn’t know what it is at first, but as time passes, the tree grows and becomes a large tree filled of stars.

We also set up the team members to perform the work. My main responsibility are character modelling, texturing, character rigging, and animate all character actions.

We also looked for some references to scenes and characters, here are some references below:

character reference
scene reference

Sessions

During this week, we managed to learn some simple ways to use unity in class. Before the class, I had never used unity as a piece of software, and the only thing I knew about it was that it was a game engine that required an extensive amount of code to work.

Herman taught us the way of asset import and export, and some basic unity manipulation.

Categories
4.1 Project 1 (George - Previs) Uncategorised

Week03 – Storyboards Animating

MOODBOARD:

IDEA 01 (Week03)

3D Layout

story 01

IDEA 02 (week03)

Script:

script page 01
script page 02
script page 03

IDEA 03 (week03)

Ghost Modelling:

still render 01
still render 02
Categories
Collaborative Uncategorised

Week 03 – Project Discussion

This week we decided on the direction of our project and as each week we will have a collaborative meeting to discuss

and update everyone on their ideas and progress.

Title: Tree and Star

Main Theme:

Your efforts will eventually pay off. Everything in the world has a certain cause and effect, for example if you plant a

seed, it will grow into a big tree.

Group members:

Jixuan Chen:
j.chen03202212@arts.ac.uk
3D Computer Animation

Jiawei Chen:
j.chen0320216@arts.ac.uk
3D Computer Animation

Jiahao Yang:
j.yang0320221@arts.ac.uk
3D Computer Animation

Zheng Deng:
z.deng0320221@arts.ac.uk
3D Computer Animation

Kaiyue Wang:
k.wang0320222@arts.ac.uk
Visual Effects

Categories
Collaborative Uncategorised

Week 02 – Design and Digital Processes and DAOs

In this week, we explored various collaboration subjects and content. In addition, we had a productive meeting in the

cafeteria to identify group members and discuss the precise topics and themes we would be working on.

Gamified Collaboration

For the first game, we created animal body parts and then sewed them together to create something entirely new. So,

we can gain additional inspiration.

Collaboration Meeting

In addition, we continued to discuss whether to create an animated short or a first-person game for our collaborative

project in the canteen. One of the ideas is to create an experimental animation about two people in the same room

doing different things, but they cannot see each other because they are from separate subgenres.