Rhythm
Final Render
Intro
Rhythm is the second half of ETC's year-long animation project. Our team received a prepackage from previous semester's team, which includes a storyboard, character design boards and a sound track, and our goal is to finish the short animated film adapting the Chinese legend “High Mountain, Flowing Water”. |
Trailer
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Story Iteration
The original Chinese story "High Mountain, Flowing Water" is a really authentic short story and it has different versions of ending. In order to make sure the story is understandable by people from other cultures and also fit into the length of 3 to 5 mins of animation, we did a 2D animistic based on the original storyboard, and we started iteration the story based on the feedback we got from our advisors. |
According to the feedback, we did more researches on the Chinese ink art style, and we decided to add a voiceover in the beginning to explain the background of the story, which help a lot in the aspect of storytelling.
In terms of the ending, we carefully thought about what kind of feeling we want to leave to our viewers, and finally we decided to make it a totally sad ending to emphasize more on the friendship between Boya and Ziqi.
In terms of the ending, we carefully thought about what kind of feeling we want to leave to our viewers, and finally we decided to make it a totally sad ending to emphasize more on the friendship between Boya and Ziqi.
Art Iteration
The concept art and character design we received from the prepackage portrayed a beautiful Chinese art style with a lot of Chinese elements, including ink, paper texture, bamboo as well as Chinese traditional clothing. To accomplish the visual design we have, we did several tests with different render engine, and we figured out that we could use Unreal engine and shaders to re-create the ink painting style, and also the rendering time in Unreal engine is suitable for this one semester long production process. |
Our ink drawing outline shader
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Render result with our outline shader
Rigging, Animation and Cloth Simulation
As a rigger and animator in this team, I was in charge of rigging one character(Ziqi, the woodcutter) and animate him according to the story scenes. I set him up with IK legs and FK arms, but later on during our production process, we added one more scene which he need to hold his stick to support his balance, which needs to use IK hands. Thus I added IK handles on his right arm to make sure the animation in this scene works well. The scene which Ziqi is supporting himself with the stick
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For his facial expressions, after we had team meetings with faculty, we decided to use blendshape because our piece and Ziqi's face is stylized which do not need to have some of the facial rig controls, for example the eye aim, thus the blendshape could be used to get what we want to achieve and also helped us saving a lot time on rigging part.
After I and the anther rigger finished rigging, we did quick test on each other's rig to make sure the rig is usable for animating and cloth simulation.
Spline stage of Ziqi drawing a mountain
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In terms of animating, our team had a meeting and made a list of all the motions Boya and Ziqi would have in each shot, and then animators shoot their reference video for the character.
I was in charge of Ziqi's key frame animation, and I did several iterations to make sure the animation looks authentic, at the same time could be usable for cloth simulation later. One of the most important lesson I learned during this process is to think more about the character and preform as the character. For example, I need to think about character’s age, job and feeling while he is listening to Boya’s music, this helped me a lot when recording myself as reference. Then I followed block, spline, polish method to develop the animation. |
Taking reference video for Ziqi's animation
Adding transition for cloth sim
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While animating, it was really essential to keep in mind that the animation will goes to cloth sim and I was animating according to some requirements from cloth sim. For example, I need to reduce penetration between arms and legs as much as possible because it will add difficulty to simulation part, and I also added a smooth transition from T pose to the animation start to make sure the simulation has enough time to calculate.
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For more details, please check our development blog:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/ignition/
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/ignition/