Shaikh Muhammad Allayear, Associate Professor and Head of MCT Department for his kind help in completing our project and other faculty members and staff of MCT Department of Daffodil International University. We would like to thank our entire colleague at Daffodil International University who participated in this discussion while completing the course. The end result of this project is a video that brings together all the work done and hopefully expresses the idea for the build.
Introduction
Motivation
In this project, the realities of the lives of privileged and disadvantaged children are shown side by side for comparison. In our society it is not uncommon to see children working instead of going to school just to feed themselves.
Objectives
This neat yet pathetic look was the motivation behind developing such a story and turning it into a 3D animation. Although the result of this project is a 3D animation, it is not necessarily aimed at children. The target audience of this project is people aged thirteen and above, but people of any age can watch the film and enjoy it.
Literature review
This chapter will detail some of the primary parts of the 3D animation pipeline.
Storyboarding
The picture above shows that the shot book is drawn shot by shot according to the shot split. It contains little notes about how the shoot will proceed, what the characters would do and a little description of the setting. So the characters are simple, but in each part the drawings are done in such a way that the actions are vividly understandable.
Modeling
- Swing Set
- Slide
- See-Saw
- Lamp Post
- Dustbin
- Fence
- Signal post
- Clock
- Pencil box
- Buildings
- Window
- Table
It was then duplicated 5 times to make all the steps fit the height of the ladder. After erasing the forward faces of the two halves, the corners are then interlaced to make the entire stand. In addition, some pCubes are added to the bottom of the model to form the base of the record.
Since the trash can has a pointed top, which required a simple trick, the edge ring in the middle was added to the top of the frame. For the bin lid, a pCylinder was created and reduced to an almost flat shape. The small top of the cylinder is then pulled out a long way to make that long part of the cap that is attached to the frame.
Then the straight post was placed in the middle of the first two bent posts and similarly doubled to sit in its designated place. Some of the edges of this model have been removed to make it more low poly. For a perfect shape, the vertices at both ends of the lid were translated into sections using the soft selection tool.
Next, the top face was extruded to create a long section that would be the final part of the arm. A small cylinder was added to mark the mechanism that holds the hands together in the center of the watch. Edge loops were added and then the box cavity was modeled using the Extrude command.
Character Modeling
- Character Costume
At first, the Pintu reference images were imported into the front and side view backgrounds in Maya. When modeling the character, keep in mind that the model should match only one side of the reference image. Because after one side is perfectly matched, the faces of the other side are hidden from the middle.
Then select the faces of the other side, move the pivot point and snap to the center of the grid by pressing d and x on the keyboard. After the selection of vertices is at all points facing each other from both sides in the middle part of the model, they are selected by dragging and then joined by selecting joints. Since they have arms and legs on 8 sides, the 8 faces are erased from the torso where the arms and legs are placed.
Like the main body of the character, the costume should also be symmetrical. Thus, at the base of his hair, pieces of modified sphere hair were placed, starting from the side of the head. Although his hair was styled in the same process as the other two, it was held in all directions.
About the other older character Rana, he was not given much attention due to the insignificance of his character.
UV Unwrapping
- Clock
- Signal Post
- Character UV
The main body of the lamp post being a cylinder, the unwanted bottom was wiped off and only one cut on one side of the post to unfold perfectly. The rest of the pattern is made in cubes, so they are cut along the edges where the least amount of seaming should be needed or visible. All shells were then unfolded and layered in such a way that the resolution of each shell remains the same because this model had to be textured in the Substance Painter software [10].
Then the edges on the side of each cylinder were cut, each end of the cylinder was then cut. One edge on the inside of the frame was chosen to be cut and one edge of each corner. The legs and little sticky parts were less rectangular that only needed a cut on one end to unfold.
The long top was given the most surface area and the legs were stacked in the layout. The default layout didn't save any patterns which would have been a problem during texturing. In the manual laying process, body parts that have similar textures are placed close to each other.
In this case, all clothes were kept in the same 0-10 space in the UV editor to save some space.
Texturing
- Clock
- Water bottle
- Pencil box
- Character
A few PNG images of the character and title were downloaded and placed, then the background was painted in brown. In the photoshop, they first placed a cartoon image on top of the box, and added a dotted texture for some of the accessories. Then on the second layer they drew some marks where the elbows and knees should be.
On the face, the Tzone area and cheeks were painted a lighter color for some emphasis. Since the older character Rana also works in the same factory as Pintu, it was only logical to add dirt to him as well. All the texturing of the rest of his body was done the same way with a different skin tone.
Shanto and Millie were supposed to be clean, so they had a clean texture with a lighter skin tone. Also some highlight areas painted a lighter shade of their skin under the eyes and tip of the nose. When texturing, keep in mind that maintaining layers in Photoshop is essential.
During painting, it is necessary to keep in mind that even strokes should not come close to the edges of the UV, otherwise the texture will not be flawless.
Animation
- Animation with one prop in hand
- Both hands on the same prop
Referencing keeps the original character data separate from the animation scene data. Animation is done using character model controllers which are created in the manipulation process. These controllers allow us to move or deform any part of the body as required.
Different controllers are assigned to different parts of the body and they all have different functions. In this phase, some of the characters' movements and actions were shifted from the graph editor. This creates the realistic movement of characters that when a part of the body moves first, the part attached to it follows.
This can be done by simply turning off the visibility on the connected prop and turning on the visibility of the free prop using keyframes such as the car in Millie's hand in the following image. Some controllers automatically created by the rigging plug in “Advanced Skeleton” [13] provide default parameters in the channel box. When animating, it was taken into account that the characters' faces had to be attractive.
It is also important to give each animation enough time to allow the audience to capture the changes and the mood of the scene.
Limitations and Challenges
Limitations
Challenges
To fix this issue, it was sometimes necessary to set the default unfold method to inherited in the options box next to unfold in the UV toolkit. In doing so, sometimes the leaves were not attached to the surface of the grid on which they were introduced. Then it was found that if the master sheet was freeze-transformed at the 0, 0, 0 point of the grid line, it would work correctly.
Leaf texturing: The leaves were made with a PNG file on a plane to make the trees low poly. Arnold Stand Ins: some heavy objects were made proxy by Arnold Stand In options so that the scenes would be less heavy. We couldn't solve this problem completely, but it was decided that the scene with Stand Ins will only be rendered with the computer they were made in.
Texture loading failed: since there were a lot of heavy models in most scenes and they all had high resolution textures, the GPUs on our PC failed to load them eventually. Viewport loading failed: Some of the scenes were so heavy that computers with less RAM were unable to load them into the viewport. Some of the scenes were also shown in the alpha channel where the background could be a still image.
Manual subdivision causes PC freeze: To give the character hairs a high poly look, more subdivision had to be added.
Conclusion
From https://www.vyond.com/resources/what-is-a-storyboard-and-why-do-you-need-one/.
