Yanbin Wang

Several thoughts on the first day of elective02 game arts.

I heard about what we will be asked to do during the holiday and I did nothing but some brainstorm to figure out what I want to do.

This one up here is a brief conclusion of my brain storm. Everything will go around one topic: Mechanics. Why? you may ask. It`s because comparing to flexible flesh, mechanic bodies are all about simple geomatry shapes if you break them down to pieces. It should be easier than modeling a curvy bended smooth body.

And I like mechanics.

From my moodboard you can see all those robots are huge. And that is the key element I wish I could contain in my works. Big things shock more. And bigger means more dangerous. Fitting the topic ‘dark and dangerous’. most of them are painted black for steel and brown for bronze. Depending on what they are made of. I am not sure what my robot will look like at this point. But I will find it out before Friday.

I really hope we can get one of these in real life. It will be a great show just looking at them walk through the field.

This is the one with things that actually exist. I got famous war machines from the history, abandoned train station, steam-powered trains, textures and robot legs. I hope they can be useful. I really hope they will.

The first game asset I want to talk about is this one. A robot that comes up with almost all my imaginations. It has extremely long legs, complex but beautiful mechanic systems and it`s steam-powered. That means there will be a lot of smoke while it`s working.

Second one looks way more advanced. It is a highly weaponized exoskeleton with self-sustainable abilities. It `s more human-shape than the first one as it needs a pilot inside of its chest to reach its best performance.

One of the clearest similarities will be both of them are mechanics. That means they have more straight outlines than curve ones. Both of them are bascially made of basic geometry shapes like cubes and cylinders. They are made of steels by settings, so there are less changes on their texture. Most of them are just chunks of color. There are parts that are made of different material. This feature gives them different appearence after the rendering.

The difference may be the amount of details and their designs. Their appearence also heavily depends on their designs. Automatons have more curvy lines than the titan, giving them more flexibility and they look more light and agile. On the other hand, BT-7274 got heavy legs and arms, a big body and a small head. Makes it look more chunky and stable. Giving a sense of protection and solidity. From the character design course I learned to use shape language to express the character`s identity and this rule also seems towork in 3D game assets designs.

The surface of BT-7274 has great details of scratches. burn marks and rust. The Automatons do not have those details. They got smooth texture with almost no changes. Makes them looks almost like lego products. Becasue of the game type. BT-7274 clearly has more changes on its shape. There are numerous bulges on its armor and even more details on its joints and hands. The design is heavily depends on robotics that all parts are placed in a certain logic.

Automatons look more like compositions of bunches of cylinders and cubes. They obey less physic rules making them more unrealistic and therefore more elegant and beautiful.

And I wrote this boring doodle below to add a bit more story to my future work:

An extremely advanced mechanical empire has created giant mechanical walkers with infinite energy. They roamed the world scouting for information, or as weapons of war destroying town after town. But hundreds of years later the empire fell and the knowledge they held was buried, leaving only the giant robots behind. The humans who survived returned to a life of farming and herding. Occasionally, they would see the giant machines from the old empire strolling across the horizon. No one in the world can understand their construction and energy anymore. They never seem to stop until they collapse from age and disrepair.

These four-legged robots have such tall mechanical legs that few birds can fly to the height of their main part. When they lose their balance and fall to the ground, the sound of their violent landing can be heard hundreds of miles away. People sometimes visit their remains in search of usable scrap metal, and many have tried to figure out how they move, but no one is clever enough to understand these mysterious giants.

The point is: it`s old, it`s mysterious therefore it`s dangerous.

Not sure if I`m going to model this. There are too much details. I seem to have trouble on balancing the workload. And if you look carefully you`ll find each sketches has some minor differences from the others. They are not actually describing the same robot. Seems that even myself cannot get clear where to put those armor plates. The Japanese texts on the first sketch meaning it`s not a spider. I keep writing Japanese as long as I am drawing mechanic stuff. I am not a Japanese but it seems to match up; Japan and weird high-tec.

Maybe I should find myself a psychologist.

After 5 weeks, I finally produced this clip. I have uploaded the living voice posts 1-6 which shows my workflow step by step. This post will be talking about essential elements from all 6 posts before. That means no chit chat, no complaining and no useless information.

I chosed the clip 04, it is about a little girl talking about being a millionaire. Normally I`d design a little girl that seems to be able to create that soft sweet sound like the one down below:

However, at some point my brain suddenly broke and started to think if my character is full-grown lady with alcohol in her hands. Will this monologue be more interesting than hearing it from a normal girl?

That was what I did eventually. I designed a bar lady with a short dress and a pair of high heels. I kept her cloth to be simple and erased tiny details like necklaces you can see from the sketch below. I did this to make sure I can have a easier life when doing my inbetweens.

I normally don`t draw people`s hair like this. The idea came from the disney gif the calss lecture used in its ppt. There was a little mermaid one about an excellent head turn and movement of her hair. I was lookinhg at it and thinking that design could be both efficient and beautiful if I want to do hair movements. Hence the design below

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Why did I cover her eyes? It`s a lip-sync project and the second most important thing in this project shall be her eyes!! Why did I do that?

The idea was disguise. I was hoping that in my animation my character will keep making body languages and try to distract a considerable amout of eye sight from her lip and face to her body. Because that is exactly what people like her would do in real life! They keep moving so you can`t tell if they are telling the truth or not. It does work.

Under the idea of that I made this.

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Instead of full attention on her face, I add a lot of close-up shots of her body parts and only three of them shows a complete facial expression. Is this appropiate? I mean it is afterall a lip-sync project. We need to practise our skills on doing facial expressions, right? That is the point I started to smell something wrong that would turn to be a great deal later. But I ignored it anyway because I AM A FOOL.

But I did thought about the problem it may cause when I have too many cuts. They video need to be 15 seconds long. Too much changes would make my viewer feel dizzy and hard to tell what`s going on out there. So I deleted some of the close-up shots and made the third one with 7 cuts.

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The background didn`t cost much time so the quality is not that great. there is a comfy chair, a bottle of wine on a table, a desk full of strange devices and a weird oven on the left.

I actually did some design ont those gadgets on the desk. I was hoping that I would have time to animate them all.

Like the biggest one with a jar of wine, that is actually a machine that goes up and down to stimulate the movement bartenders do to mix up drinks with their speical cups.

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I did a terrible job on X-sheet. That is because I kept thinking about the language itself instead of the pronounciation.. I made the sheet out of how the word is made based on ancient english rules instead of how they are sounded. That is one big flaw. My character design is a failure, either. All my lip movement looks exactly the same. Giving me less chance to create differences between frames. Both of those two flaws were kept instead of fixed becasue I AM A FOOL and I don`t have time. And both of them became the reason why my outcome looks so miserable.

I aslo did two moodboard. One about character design and one about background.

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You can see some similiar color choices up there.

And then it`s drawing key frames and inbetweens. Massive amount of time were invested and littie returned. Massive Confidence is lost and finally some clip showed up. They look just like sadness. I combined pose to pose and straight ahead together as sometimes straight ahead works better with my simple tiny brain.

https://youtu.be/4kcTNREaliY

You can see my lines keeps warping and moving in a disgusting way. It appears that I can`t even draw straight lines. Lack of understanding of human anatomy and lack of clean-ups casues this problem and I feel deeply shameful for what I did up there. That is just unacceptable.

But Nothing seems to be a big deal if you take a good look on my lip-sync. WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?! I smashed my face when I exported my clip. Nothing is synchronizing and nothing looks nature. And my storyboard is making everything looks even worse. I have little shots on mouth and all of them is horrible. My plan of distracting attention away from the mouth backfires on me just as I worried. As this plan only works when I got a solid, perfect lip-sync animation.

Some problems, with the help from Jess and Hannah, was solved. For instance, I was trying to draw a movement that the lady uses her arm to hold the body and adjust her sitting pose. The action ends quickly and it should cost few frames. It turned out that I really am a fool to believe that I could do right judgement. Under Hannah`s wise suggestion I edited the audio to make a longer pause and I also spent some time reducing the background noise. Longer pauses gave me more time doing the movements and adding anticipations into the movement to make everything looks better. The outcome is better.

But still I need to do a lot of re-draw and clean ups. And here comes the last disaster. Data lost.

It`s too old-school that all of you will think this is just a stupid excuse for my lazyness. But it did happen. So if you don`t want to believe me, I understand that but please keep reading.

In the last week, only three days away from deadline. My tablet suddenly cannot work. It is the only tool I have to draw animation. So I reset my whole laptop but I forgot to backup my data. So, Everything was lost except some sequenced images I exported to run some tests on. That was the lifeline to me. I quickly imported them and make a new animation out of them. With the same warping lines and disgusting lip-syncs. I did my best to correct them all but my time didn`t allow it. I still had coloring and editing to do at that time.

I jumped to coloring and I did what I could to enhance the view. But the result still looks disappointing. I finished something that is not good enought as a normal animation, and far worse as a lip-sync project.

Anything l learned from these five weeks is that animation is based on multiple pre-productions. Doing them right makes doing animation right possible. My biggest failure may be that I underestimated the importance of pre-production. It is a precious experience but still some one smarter than me could figure this one out easily at the start of this project.

And I need to back up my files.

https://youtu.be/mgsSi0ISnhY

That should be all I want to talk about. Thank you for reading till the very end. If you want to know more about this project, I have 6 posts about a more complete step by step of this one on myblog. Please take a look.

https://youtu.be/4kcTNREaliY

I have never encountered such annoying software in my life. That thing had no relation with the word Harmony. It should be renamed as Chaos or Pain.

Still, I found my ways and survived this week. And I don`t know what will happen to me after this. I heard we need to color it right?

With PS and Harmony?

Animation is already bothersome enough. Please do not make this harder. At least give us a better software that won`t crash with no reasons or strangely designed.

My scene still changes too fase even with a enhanced storyborad. I may need to find ways to adjust the length of different parts.

And my lip synch looks terrible. Truly Terrible. It may has some reason with my x-SHEET. But I guess the main reason is my character design. Most of my mouth shapes looks exactly the same.

I also need two more backgrounds to fit with my close-up shots. I think I will just re-arrange the layers in the original background and make a new one.

There are still works to do but at least some part of it is done.

Minor updates on the storyborad: more facial close-ups and less camera changes.

And my key frames + timing charts:

Comparing to the examples I saw during lessons, I chose a style of less ease in or out and more constant speed.

No idea if I`m doing it right. I hope I am.

Anyway I will find it out in the next week.

I spent most of the time doubting myself if I`m really doing things that will come useful. And finalizing some details. cleaning up line works and coloring.

Not much change between those mouth shapes, S,TH,L,T and R looks almost the same.

I covered half of her face so all my expressions depends on her mouth and body language.

I will have a hard time designing those movement.

Don`t judge me. Most of it will be covered by my character. So it won`t be shown. Mostly

if I have time i may animate all those creepy machines in the back. They may look better when they are moving around.

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I have never done this before. I don`t know if i did this right. Maybe I just generated a pile of trash. And my English is terrible. My voice break down will definitly looks weird and confusing.

Well, eventually I am the one who will be working with this sheet so no big deal.

Someone speaks to me inside my head like that. So I gave up teaching myself English basics.

That should be all of my pre-production assets. I hope they will turn out to be useful and I don`t need to redo any of them.

Update on the storyboard and background designs.

I believe the current problem of my work is that it is not strong enough compare to characters with exaggerate movements. Mine just sitting there and moving her mouth.

So fixed camera won`t work as it can`t express much. After realizing that I made this:

You can see that there is much more partial close-up scenes compare to the old one. Emphasizing body language and anxiety. Including moving body parts. reacting with objects and pauses.

I have no idea what an X-sheet is before this session so I did what I would do if I `m going to draw someone talking. Write down my clip over the storyboard and see where it goes.

I hope this storyboard is better than the last one.

I also made this.

I was thinking of old houses with wallpaper falling down, Decades of unwashable stains piling over the surface.

This is something that I thought I would use as background, and then I woke up and made a more realistic one. Well, comparing to the last one.

This is one of the sketches I did, you can see a wine bottole and a table, a desk full of non-senses and a strange composite on the right side. There is also a painting of a mysterious creature on the wall. I am now thinking to animate most of this but with least movement. Most of them will do meaningless movements such as spining or going up and down. The point of all those is to create destraction. Within the idea of how people seeing the inside of another no matter how much destraction there is. Body language, face expressions, or background movement.

I may even add someone walking pass behind the lady, maybe.

Some of them are made of bronze and others are sliver. I had the idea from Harry Potter book. When Potter entered the headmaster office for the first time. there was a description in the book saying: There are lots of strange tiny sliver machines that are spining and spraying steam quietly on the desk. There was no illustration about this in the book and the film didn`t show this either. That`s what I wish to show. A desk full of mist from bottles.

That should be all. Next update should be something on the X-sheet.

I am too tired right now to write down anything. I `ll jusy upload these and I will do a summery when all these things ends in summer.

Storyboard. I am going to do a fixed camera animation. So it`s more like movement designs.

Maybe I will redo all of those things later. Or maybe I won`t. I am going to catch some sleep. My brain cells are dying.

The sound clip I chose is about a girl talking about millionaire which is, this one:

And I had several ideas for the storyboard down below.

And I guess I have to make a moodboard too. Never make any moodboard before so I just found some pictures I think is. or will be connect to my work. Most of them is about color tones and character designs.

Ok, that should be all for the first day.

When I say log#1, be aware that there might never be a log#2…

It has been some days since my last update as I was not so productive during Christmas and I was wasting time by rolling on my bed for like 5 days.

It is much easier than I thought to work with others. Perhaps we got lucky and both of us got plenty of time indoors.

Perhaps it is me who was lucky to find a gentleman who can bear with me and work with me.

I was responsible for most of the animation part. drawing moving cloud. stars and so on.

Mr. Tong helped me with his gorgious background image and excellent editing skills. I got nothing when I face with modern softwares like Pr and Ae, so he may be the reason why this animation is what it is now instead of some sad crap.

I will not show his work in my blog as it is much more appropriate to find them on his own website. This animation cost two men`s strength and I will say that both of us did our best.

Or at least he did, as now I can see major flaws in my part.

Another great achievement is that we finished 90% of this project a week earlier. This may be something that won`t happen again in our later ual life. I really hope I could use this extra week to polish our work but I found myself start rolling on my bed again.

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There is a name on the third one. Masanobu Hiraoka is a great animator who creates incredible visual experience through frame by frame 2D animation. I learnt a lot by looking at his works over and over and took great reference from him.

Sometimes I feel desperate for myself, for my dried imagination. There is something locked up my works that it cannot achieve what I want them to be. Or to say, they are not free, but something grow up on other`s works. I see more of others that myself when I look down to my works. This is wrong.

Another weakness in my part of work is the anticipation. It is hard to control a story into 20 seconds and still hold the phase and rhythm, but it is important for us to learn how to control it especially in industry works. My anticipation was terrible on the first few takes. Thank you Luca for pointing out those parts for me and giving me great suggestions which turned out to be really helpful.

And many thanks to my teammate who spent long time trying to minimize the disobedience parts through editing.

There is still some works for us to finish. I hope I can work with him more. Great teamwork.

I can`t read that but I chose it as my topic anyway.

The idea was widely used in games, novels, movies and all other human-made media. I cannot recall what made me or when did I start to pay attention to disasters. Maybe it`s the Fallout series? or Bioshock? I never know. Tragedy is said to be the peak of all dramas as the hope inside would be more important and weak comparing to the despair hidden behind. And that works on this genre as well.

It`s still in progress and even when I claim that it`s finished we can all find more to improve. So here it is.

https://youtu.be/GaUxpdHXFKg

Pretty boring and hard to understand? Yes, I agree. Even it`s in progess still the quality is way lower than the level of acceptence. The story is about a girl is forcibly awakened from her hibernation silo, and her memories are transferred to her brain through those tubes and she wakes up in this post-apocalyptic world.

I will find something to do in the next week and hopefully I would do something better.

Please don`t fire me after you watch my work.

I did all my stuff in gif format and then I put them together in PR. Here is all the raw materials. You may find it`s a bit different from what I have shown in the video. It is because of my poor editing skills and poor imagination. Sorry for that.

That is all. It will be wise to not expect anything from me. The same as I don`t expect myslef.