This week’s work was centred on animation and we started to pace the animation through Jixuan’s storyboard.
As we have a wechat group chat, we had a lot of questions on wechat. Fortunately, the mapping channels painted with the Substance painter were successfully displayed in the UE. The animations also made it into the UE.
The rest was left to Jiayue to make adjustments to the footage and graphics.
This week, I have added colour to the main character’s house.
I had a discussion with Jiawei about the adjustment of the character’s model.
Also this week I had a discussion about the material channels in MAYA and SUBSTANCE PAINTER. As many of us had not used UE5 before, we were worried that there would be a lot of problems in the rendering stage.
This week I finished the basic design of the main house, which I wanted to make look like a carrot. But after some discussion I couldn’t just stick it in the ground because it would be like a pineapple instead of a carrot. So I wanted to place it horizontally and add some angles.
I sent this part of the sketch to YANG first, as he needed to start modelling the house.
I want to examine the question of whether a satisfactory ending is an absolute requirement for a good work across various forms of media, including film, television, video games, and literature. To do so, I plan to explore different perspectives, including artistic merit, commercial value, narrative necessity, and the extent to which a satisfying ending can elevate the underlying themes of the work.
Before starting to explore this topic, I had a question in mind: Is a satisfactory ending a necessary condition for a good work? However, after researching and thinking for a period of time, I began to overturn my initial idea.
First of all, people’s perception of a good work is often subjective, as it may conform to the mainstream aesthetics, the comments of a niche expert, or the author’s original intention. Take the popular anime/manga “Attack on Titan” a year ago as an example. Many people thought it was a work worth being recorded in history before it ended. But when the manga version came to an end, the comments changed dramatically. Many negative reviews conveyed the idea that the author only needed to draw a happy ending, and this work would become a great one. However, the author chose an ending that nobody could accept. Despite this, many people still believe that it is a good work. This event made me think about whether a happy ending is what the audience expects and whether evaluating a work’s ending should be discussed from multiple angles.
Therefore, we need to recognize that evaluating whether an ending is appropriate for a work requires discussion and analysis from multiple perspectives, rather than simply measuring it by a happy ending.
This week was our first presentation of our project.
There were no major problems overall, but Frienderd felt that our characters were too much like the little prince. Although we don’t think so, given the atmosphere and the more relaxed pace of the story.
We decided to tweak our main characters.
At the beginning we had two directions: anthropomorphic creatures and a dwarf.
After a vote, we went for the anthropomorphic creature.
Then there were still two options: a rabbit and a squirrel. In my opinion they were both very cute and perfect for our story.
But the team member in charge of the animation part suggested that we use the rabbit as the main character because the squirrel’s tail animation was difficult to control. And this year is the year of the rabbit 🙂
Then I looked up some references to rabbits.
Then I did some experimentation with the rabbit’s hat.
Finally I did some colour style comparisons (for one colour)
Finally, I tweaked the rabbit’s ears a bit and did some colour contrast (A-D for one colour)
The second half is devoted to some costume designs (1-5).
This week I have been working on some basic character designs based on our story.
Because the character needs to water the trees, I thought he might need to look like a gardener or a horticulturist.
So I referenced a lot of workers’ looks.
I think the workwear and the strappy trousers are the key to the character.
I also added a few different outfits for my group to choose from.
And of course the different colour schemes were important.
After much discussion in our group, we came to the unanimous answer that it was impossible to do the story we had come up with in a month’s time.
So we changed direction and decided to go for a simple story, but with good graphics and effects.
Our new story is about a little girl/boy (not sure yet) who plants a tree and eventually the tree grows and its fruit is stars. It sounds like a fairy tale but has a very simple moral – you reap what you sow.
The challenge now is to establish the style and how to present the final star effect.
We had a lot of interesting stories after our first discussion.
Because our topic is cause and effect, there will be a lot of storytelling.
This week I’ve tried to do some basic setups for my story.
At the same time I experimented with some styles.
Of course it is likely that I will not use these styles.
Considering that the final completion of the whole project will most likely depend on me.
I’m going to go for a simpler style.
We formed a team with a fellow VFX student. This time we worked on the topic of causality/butterfly effect.
We discussed a lot of plots and some interesting settings, but had to abandon them due to time constraints and production difficulties. In the first meeting we didn’t get a clear conclusion.