Our first challenge this semester was: 

Started off by testing and researching the right rigs I could use from the provided websites.
I found very limited high-quality models. Most of them didn't have an adequate articulation of their expressions, so I narrowed it down to 4 rigs that looks decent enough quality to express itself and are also not too complicated so I wouldn't have to manually pose every fiber of their clothes the rigs that I found usable were Hulk, Psylocke, Akali, and this female elf-looking rig called Rayla.

Akali:
Agora.studio (n.d.). Agora.community | Akali | Maya. [online] agora.community. Available at: https://agora.community/content/akali-maya.

‌Rayla:
Agora.studio (2021). Rayla. [online] Agora.community. Available at: https://agora.community/content/rayla-maya.

‌Rayla impressed  me and attracted me from the pure amount of controls allowing to fine tune the nuanced creases on clothing and a plethora of muscles controls on the cheek. this was a good first choice as  it would definitely not limit me on function. but may be quite timely to pose.

After testing the dexterity of the rigs I landed on the middle ground of Akali which had decent facial expressions, albeit no nose controls, and also  supported good movement.  This rig also allowed me to disable a few clothing layers to help clearly see the body pose underneath,  Ididnt want to remove every clothing layer though, so I left the top brown shirt on.  I may experiment with changing the outfit based on the pose, if allowed.

I then started collecting some visually clear expressions and poses of women online as it seems most of the good rigs i found were female.
I wanted to find a good range of expressions from happy sad angry confused scared, etc.

I found this to be a fairly decent reference and starting point for my animation as it gives great body poses and positioning and also is of a great action style which will allow for a range of camera shots to be included, from impactful slow motion shots to dynamic close-up shots. 

Although there is still much work to do in figuring out where to place the feet of characters and the rest of the body when the characters have gone out of frame in the reference, as I will likely change the camera angles in areas and will want the body movements to align properly. I have tried my best to position them appropriately throughout.

The reference also includes a female, which matches my main rig type better. I will use the female rig to express facial animations in key moments, such as slow-motion shots where she is taking impact. 

Map inspiration taken from Charge - Blender Open Movie: www.youtube.com. (n.d.). CHARGE - Blender Open Movie. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXqq0ZvbOnk.

This week I'm doing the final touches on my previs project / "blockout and inbetweens with filmic language" and got a few tips from my tutor Sanjay.

I was told by my tutor on Padlet and in person that my work was amazing and to keep it up.

The main improvement given was to do with story, although it's a very short piece, I found benefit from adding more context to how my character entered and leaves the scene. I found this to give the audience a much better understanding of what is actually happening.
It is now visually obvious and shows that she was sneakily looking for something important, and she got caught by a sort of guard of the facility, and managed to fight him off and escape.
Whereas before it seemed like a pointless and meaningless battle. Now we can more easily relate to the character by understanding her change of emotions throughout and the full struggle shes goes through, rather than just seeing her midway in the struggle for some unknown reason. It also helps build up the tension of the hectic camera movement and fight as it starts slow and ramps up into the action. helping the audience feel and rise with the tension.

Today, we were given an exciting extra challenge—helping to create an animation video for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The video aims to showcase what the foundation is doing this year, and they asked animation students to design the cartoon segments, giving us a lot of creative freedom to develop our own style. They see us as the "professionals" in animation, which is a nice acknowledgment. The project itself revolves around footballers meeting critically ill children, taking them out for snacks and small activities over a couple of days, which sounds like a meaningful experience for those involved.

I really like initiatives like this. Having previously worked as a SEN teaching assistant, I’ve always found campaigns like this to be heartwarming, fulfilling, and enjoyable for many people. I’d love to contribute to this project, Although I fear it may take away time I need to focus on my coursework. If I were to take part, I fear I may end up producing a lackluster promotional piece for them simply due to the workload.

If this had been scheduled at a different, like the summer holidays, I would have more likely taken part and enjoy spending my time on it. Nonetheless, I still greatly appreciate the opportunity. If I manage to complete my assignments early and am certain I'll achieve top marks, I won't mind coming back and spending extra time on this charity project.

In class, I struggled a bit with coming up with story ideas since it seemed difficult to fit a complete narrative into just one minute. However, after looking at submissions from the actual challenge, I realized that the judging wasn’t solely based on the story but on the overall quality of the piece. Some submissions didn’t have much of a story at all - one was about a character following X’s on a map, finding what they were looking for, which then triggered a monster reveal before abruptly ending. Another was basically a comedy sketch of friends joking around in front of a TV. First place was won by a contestant who replaced their characters with cars.

Since our submission was limited to just one minute - shorter than some of the others - I decided not to force a full story. Instead, I focused on practical execution, structuring it around small challenges my character might face. And adding some sort of a rise and fall in tension.

Aside from the dark storyline within, this game was a very well made 2D platformer game which has aspects of decoding puzzles, using precise timings, and planning out routes. This involved going through the right doors, sneaking past sleeping enemies, or even confusing the enemies to infiltrate them.

Here is some screenshots of my map so far. I think I did a pretty good job on the layout. As you can see below on the right side, I'm also incorporating little platforms and paths for my character to move along, similar to Abe's Oddworld or scenes from Indiana Jones.

To make there be a rise and fall of tension and a 3-arc structure in my story, building on narrative principles as solidified last year in our narrative module. I will incorporate 3 arc structure by having her enter the ancient buried city and start encountering the challenges, which will be shown and focused on with adequate camera shots to build tension and suspense, and the tension will fall when she exits the city safely with her acquired objects.

Gathering motion capture data was a lot easier than I expected, and I was pleasantly surprised about the amount of different actions websites such as Mixamo and Rokoko provides. If I can find the right actions I need to portray my story, I can much more efficiently get the vision across in a shorter amount of time. I started off by relocating the motion capture that was already given by my tutor alan previously. As there was still a few useful moves given there, such as the "running and swinging" motion, I have managed to make good use of it as my character swings across posts to reach far platforms. 

My developed pipeline for gathering motion capture assets and bringing them into Unreal Engine was using Maya for a step in between. As we have already been given knowledge in previous semesters about how to attach and set up motion capture for our rigs taught by our tutor Alan, where he showed us how to take an FBX motion data asset and connect it to our own character rig. This has shown very useful for me as I have now managed to leverage this knowledge by using this middle step of Maya to combine my FBX motion data with my chosen rigs, which saves me from immediately needing to relearn how to link fbx files in Unreal, it also allows me to utilise my animation skills within Maya - which are much greater as we have had much more practice in Maya during this course, this allow for much further tweaking of the animated actions before bringing it into unreal. It required steps such as resetting my skeletons to "T" poses to accurately align the joints before they are linked with the mocap. I find Unreal's tools are still behind Maya in terms of animation- but in terms of everything else, Unreal is far ahead. Using multiple applications shows not only the ability to adapt but also allows me for much more customizability before the final import into Unreal Engine. I still plan to learn more about Unreal's animation features in the future as I am aware they are constantly improving. Below are some of the shown Maya steps.

This following video, linked below, has shown incredibly useful for layout purposes. Understanding how to organise mountains from the cameras perspective, to save huge amounts of time. 

Today was our review day. We were split into smaller groups this time. I was in a group with Darwin and Leah.
I went first to present my work and was pleasantly given praise for the amount of work I had done by my tutor.

Sanjay managed to give tips such as paying attention to cinematography in films such as areas of rising tension- how is the camera framed? coming from a history of more game and not film background, I find benefit from watching and analyzing more filmic-based media and feel it will help direct my shots in cinematic-based sequences.

I decided to take up the extra opportunity to help out fellow members at a different institution animate their game for use in a short film.

 We were initially given assets and instructed to recreate their draft using the assets, but to do the animation properly.

I started putting together the assets.

In the end I was told my piece was chosen to be used in the final film. I am grateful for being selected, but feel bad for the others working on the challenge as they put in just as much work, if not more.

So its a bunch of Star Wars-like troopers on a space station, and they're taking ages waiting in this line on a "Monday" morning; one of them starts thinking or daydreaming about their boring, claustrophobic bunkers, and then a toxic waste carrier spills in the background and brings him back to the present. Obviously days would probably work differently on this space station due to the sun, but assuming they still go by the Gregorian calendar system.

Understanding the setting, environment and personality for characters in game animations is important in making them believable and appealing to the audience.

I was put in a group with Emmanuel, Jeremiah, and Nur-Karn and given some tasks.

1) Choosing a character / 3D rigs 

2) Character as game inspiration 

3) Generating a mini-games idea 

4) Planning in-game animation 

5) Simulating the play(er) (posing) 

Today I felt well established in the module and was cleaning up my work. I decided to help my classmate Darwin by giving feedback on one of his previs animations. I thought I could also lend a hand with my rigging skills. He wanted some sort of chain to be rigged so he could use it for his previs to hold a dog back from chasing something. I thought I was pretty confident that I could quickly whip up a chain rig for him to use. He was capable of creating a simplistic chain to put in its place. I rigged a chain for him using an IK spline on a chain of joints connected it on a NURBS curve and used clusters to help him angle the bends when he rotates the ends of the chain, and I made sure the metal chain pieces don't stretch. Then he gave him the file to use to attach to the collar of the dog and the other end to the wall. I made sure the scaling worked if he needed it changed size so that when he scales the collar control, it increases the size of everything in the rig and still lets you attach the end of the chain to a separate object, -like a wall - and bends without distortion. Collaboration and sharing of assets has been fundamental support in this brief and my current ongoing mentor brief, such as when I also lent my Rat rig to my mentor group for help if they couldn't find access to one themselves. I talk about this Rat project more in my WBL Development page. This shows my determination to help and continue to work alongside other peers in the industry.