Research

When we were given the assignment to create a short animation incorporating real life and animation, we quickly all agreed on a fighting related topic. The reasoning for this was that we could pretty much do anyhting we wanted with it, with this being either using a real life environment or a 3D environment.

For the research we started looking at fighting games like Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Dragonball Z, Soul Calibur and Marvel Vs. Capcom. With these we took all the different elements that appealed to us. We looked at the different range of characters that were in the games and thought how we could implement an idea of our own in to a concept that would work with the task that we had been given.

Location research

The location we are going to be using for the real life section of our animation wants to be a front room type layout with a sofa and a T.V. Other attributes to the rooms layout are not really an issue. There  needs to be enough space between the sofa and the T.V. for the actor to walk through a portal. One possible location we have thought about using is the seating area in Priestly building, though some furniture would need rearranging.

We have had a number of ideas for the 3D environment that we are going incoporate into our short animation. We have considered using a wasteland, park type environment, mountain range, subway, graveyard and highland. Most of these were dropped in the early stages as they wouldn't appear correct with our film, we have pushed forward the wasteland, subway and mountain terrain.

Storyboard

The first storyboard that we came up with was quite rough as we were not totally sure what scenes we would have, althought we had the idea.

We then decided more on what we would want to incorporate into our short animation therefore drew up a new storyboard with new elements.

Here are the coloured storyboards.

Movement research

We are going to using keyframe animation and motion capture for movements in the animation. To ensure we get the most realistic movement we can get we have watched different videos of real fightng and computer game fighting to see how they move.

Alongg with this we also brought an outside source to do some acting for us who knew karate, this meant we could watch how he moved first hand.

Shooting Script

Our animation is about a teenager who is playing on his xbox on a fighting game, he then beats the virtual competitor but then something strange happens and he unlocks a bonus round. After unlocking the bonus round a portal emitts from nowhere and the teenager steps through it. He then finds himself in the game in a strange unknown environment, standing infront of him is the character he just beat and realises that he is there to fight and gets ready. The teenager begins to give him an influx of hits and then delivers him a handblast, which the 3D character just takes like nothing hit him. The 3D character then devlivers him a handblast of of his own which sends the teenager back through the portal and lands back in his chair.

For the filming process we are estimating that it will take around 5/6 hours to get the raw footage.

The first scene will involve one of us acting with an xbox controller pretending to play a game. (There will be no dialouge over the section of the film) There will be music but it will sound as if its coming through the TV.

The second secene will be again one of us acting as if we are going to be walking through a portal, with using a split screen effect. (This scene will have a voice over that will be done in post-production)

The third scene will be again the same actor but this time we will be acting as if we are in the 3D environment. The camera will pan around showing the scene. The music will be the same from the first scene but will be clear therefore adding to the effect that he's stepped into the game world.

The fourth scene will be of the actor fighting against the 3D character, which we will achieve by filming on a bluescreen and adding the 3D charactrer in 3ds Max. The music will still be playing.

Motion capture

When we were given this project from the outset we knew we would have to use the motion capture facility to be able to create the most fluid and realistic motion we could get, with a little help from key frame animation.

We started this by going to the motion capture room setting up the different cameras and getting changed in to the suit.

 We then had to do a slight exercise before we could start capturing the data that we wanted, once we had done the warm up and set the program to the correct setting we were ready to record our movements. Luckily for us we had a plan of what motions we wanted for the character as we also knew the mannerism of him, he was going to be cocky a good role for Matt to play. We hit many problems whilst in the motion capture room, and still to this day we don't understand why this happened, one of the problems we were having was the nodes on the suit kept jittering about on the 3D live work space when we were capturing which meant the data was unusable.

Eventually all the markers were where they should have been and we managed to label them all accordingly:

from the vicon software the motion capture data is exported as a CSM file and here is how they look:

We tried loading the CSM files straight onto the characters biped but it completely messed up the mesh and just made it look stupid, with a little research on the internet I soon found out that the CSM files needed converting into .bip files so I found out how to do it and then converted them, here is a test of how the motion capture data looks on our character after the envelopes were edited:

Character development

After looking at already existed in the game world for fighting characters as well as concepts and characters from different shows to see how designs varied. We began developing our character by looking at the head, from there on we progressed down to develop our final character.

After a few experimentations with heads, we decided that we quite liked this one, as it had the feel of the character being quite large and muscular compared to the real life character showing that he didn't stand too much of a chance.

 We then came up with this for the body, this was going in the right direction, with the correct attitude and muscles, but was slightly too caricatured.

Finally we achieved our final design for the character which implements all the different elements from the previous concepts as we still have the larege muscles and the impending look of his face, all we need now are the colour swatches for him.

The final colour swash we considered to work the best as the skin on the character looks slightly like it has been made out of stone which reinforces the fact that he is going to be an extremely tough opponent to beat.

Creating the character in sculptris:

 We initially started with the head and added slight detail to this, as it stood the was the first early stages to our character and it was looking promising.

 We manipulated the head even further to a stamdard that we were extremely happy with we could now continue and develop the shoulders and body.

 When we began to sculpt the body we started off with a very low amount of detail which allowed us to obtain the correct size we needed.

 Finally we could begin with the muscle definition around the abs and shoulders as well as the top of the arms.

 We then thickened out the rest of the body to get a more human like shape to the character.

 We could now start to model the legs of the character which like the body we started in an extremely low detail manner which like before was to get the proportion right.

 We could now add the karate style pants to the model, he now began to look like the character we had drawn and we were very happy with how it wsa coming in to its own.

 We now created the full character without realising we had done one fundamental mistake, which was the fact we had not modeled the character in to the T-pose which would cause many problems down the line for when we had to rig him.

 When we got to the point of bringing him in to 3Ds Max, we realised that we wqould need to vastly reduce the polygon count to be able to rig him, which unfortunately meant that the detail in the character would be lost, but we still managed to lower him to the point where you could see what we wanted to achieve whilst too being able to rig him.

With the endfess problems that we ran in to with the character not being in the T-pose we decided that we would have to re model the arms so that the envolopes would not be touching the legs.

 We had to seperate the ID's of the model to allow us to out different textures on him.

This is the final render and texture of our 3D character.