February 27th: 3D Modeling work progress

After my team and I discussed about making animatics and adding touches on the story, Huli Jing, some of my colleagues and I finally started on making assets. The assets were including the setting of the story which was the forest, houses/cabins, interior designs inside the main character's house, and the characters.

Since I have not mentioned what the story is about, I should explain what Huli Jing is all about. Huli Jing is about a hunter who lived by himself in the forest. He has a next door neighbor who known each other as friends. While the hunter went into the forest, he saw a fox being stuck from the animal traps. The hunter almost killed the fox because the fox was shown on the "wanted" posters. He noticed that the fox shape-shifts. He sees the fox looks almost like a human. The hunter felt that the fox seems like a good person, so he saved him and decided to take care of him, but he hid the fox at his place secretly from the neighbor because the neighbor also wants to kill the fox. While the hunter has been taking care of the fox, he fell in love with him. He is willing to sacrifice and protect the fox from the neighbor and from any other circumstances.

Since I was not involved from storyboarding, a couple of my colleagues want to make some changes on the story. They want to keep the same characters, setting, and all of the things that were involved. Only the story plot they might fix because they want to help and focus on LGBTQ. Behind the story, it creates a message to the audience who experienced living through LGBTQ life. Meanwhile, we also want to focus the Ming Dynasty era. Since this story contains Chinese culture, we want to research some artifacts, props, and all sorts of objects that were involved in Ming Dynasty. I knew a Chinese professor who taught me Arts of Japan course from Spring 2020, and she had traveled around Asian countries before. Currently, she is teaching Arts of China. Unfortunately, I had no room nor a chance to take the class. One of my colleagues is taking Arts of China, and he contacted her on researching some Chinese artifacts, clothing, hair, and all assets that were involved in the Ming Dynasty. This would be a great start on finding some good references before we 3D model any assets. I did try to find a bed that was made in China, but some looked too "rich" for the Hunter from Huli Jing. The bed I researched came from the Qing Dynasty. The beds during the Ming Dynasty looks almost similar. I kept the image references just in case if we need it.

As we were getting started on splitting up into groups: storyboarding and 3D assets. I was focusing on 3D assets. I am holding off on the interior furniture which was the bed because I want to see if my professor had found some good resources, so I decided to work on modeling the main character. My colleague, Jessica Fields, made a concept art of the main character. It looks absolutely gorgeous and well posed in a T-Pose form, but she might wanted to make a little adjustments on the body, so modeling the head is my starting point.

The 3D model sheet was made by Jessica Fields, and she drew the front, side, and back profile views for me to use as reference

I began working on the Hunter on Autodesk Maya. I was very excited to start working on this because character modeling and sculpting is my one of my biggest passion in animation. Fields' work really helped me a lot because the facial features were aligned perfectly and the T-Pose were outstanding and lined up well.

The image references were imported to Maya.

Over the past 2 weeks I modeled half of the Hunter's face (only exterior parts such as the facial features like eyes and nose).

Half of the exterior face is complete! While I came back in Production, I recently got some feedback to take a break on making the Hunter character because we are making an animatic. The animatic is one of the important priorities in our production because we have to create a final scene. I have participated on making a bed for the interior design from the Hunter's house.

Currently, it is in a primary form. It will be finalized as a tertiary form once we are making some camera movements in the scene.

While I have been working on both the Hunter character model and the 3D asset, I have been testing on cloth simulation in Autodesk Maya. The reason why I decided to test it was because I learned something new from my Advanced Character Creature class. It is an advanced class for those who experienced ZBrush software. My professor showed me a way on how I can make cloth sim in Maya. He created two pieces of geometry such as a planar and a cube. The planar had to be adjusted with higher subdivision. He changed his settings into FX. He set the cube as a passive collider and the planar as nCloth. The timeslider was caching. While it was done caching, my professor played the timeline. The planar animated itself, and it moved down and landed on the cube on like gravity. The planar just smoothly shows the cloth sim itself. I was very surprised. It really blew my mind away.

I believe this method could help my teammates who are working on simulation through Houdini. If my teammates are struggling with Houdini, then this method might be helpful for them and for preparing cloth simulation on characters.

Overall, for these past few weeks, I gained some new experimentation and more priorities for the Huli Jing team. Perhaps this week there will be more updates and more new duties for me.