Completed Animatic

I have now completed my animatic. It has been a very time consuming process over the course of the semester to get my animatic completed which was further compounded by my lack of previous animating experience. That said however I have learnt an incredible amount of skills over the course of the semester which has made it rewarding and worthwhile including:

• Character Modelling
• UV Mapping
• Texturing
• Rigging
• Painting Weights
• Keyframe animation
• Importing animations into Unity
• Unity Scripting

Overall although the visual quality of my animatic is not very good and there are some obvious rough spots I'm quite happy with it.

I think it is successful in telling the story of the dodo in a light hearted manner as I set out to. I believe the final scene also leaves viewers with a meaningful message regarding the role humans have played in the extinction of species throughout the course of history. A message which is especially important in this the international year of Biodiversity.

Technical

From a technical perspective I am really happy with how well I have managed to set the scenes of the animatic up in Unity. The animatic video was captured all in one take with no post editing. All sounds, subtitles etc. have been scripted in Unity. Also with the exception of scene three all scenes are scripted so that they play out without any user interaction. I found over the semester that it is very easy to setup a character and add a player character controller but it was time consuming to have to control the character while capturing video, as this would result in having to take multiple captures to get the characters movements just right. As the entire animatic is scripted to play out from start to finish I have also attached a web player version of the animatic which can be watched.

By setting up the animatic in Unity this way I believe next semester it will be much easier for me to make changes to assets to make them more visually appealing before just importing these assets into Unity to replace the old and then recapture the entire animatic again with just one take. I found by taking this approach I have also learnt a great deal about Unity and how to use it. I have created a number of scripts myself which control particular scenes which was very time consuming to work out but, a very good learning experiences once I overcame whatever difficulties I had encountered.

To see how each scene has been setup in Unity see these previous posts:

• Scene 1
• Scene 2
• Scene 3
• Scene 4
• Scene 5
• Scene 6
• Subtitles and Sound

Visuals

The visual quality of the animatic is not as high as I would have liked it to been. This has been primarily due to the steep learning curve which has meant I haven't spent much time concentrating on getting aesthetics as good as I would like to have.

That said I am quite confident that I have now learnt all the skills required to complete my animation to a high visual quality, it's just of matter of putting the time in next semester to get my model, animations, and textures perfect.

As you can see from looking at the island which is textured in two different styles I have been experimenting with different texture styles to work out the over look and feel I wish to achieve. I also experimented with the Unity Toon shader but wasn't completely satisfied with the result so I will be relying on my own textures to produce a cartoon appearance. I will also need to build a few more toon styled assets such as palms trees to populate the island with.

Sound

Once aspect of the animatic that is missing is sound. I am happy with the music I have chosen but, plan to add sound effects to the final animatic. A list of intend sound effects for my final animation next semester are as follows:

• Catapult firing sound.
• General island ambient sounds.
• Dodo 'squawking' sounds.
• Crash sounds for when the dodo crash lands.
• Tall ship ambient sound effects.

Viewing the Animatic

Download/watch my animatic video here:

http://chrisgordon.com.au/dodo/Animatic_LowQuality.avi

And watch in the Unity Web player here (in scene three you need to walk to the dodo to the top of the hill and then down the slope to trigger scene change):

http://chrisgordon.com.au/dodo/animatic.html

Scene Five Completed

I have now finished scene five of my animatic. After all the experienced gained setting up my previous scenes this scene was relatively straight forward to setup.

The one problem I encountered is that when importing my ship's model into into the planes which I had used to create the sail had disappeared. I attempted to fix this by tweaking my FBX's exporting options in Maya before decided to script the planes and instead use a cube to create the sails. Once I did this the FBX exported first time.

In unity the ship is set up to follow waypoints and again I have used trigger to crossfade between camera's and signal the next level to load.

Next semester I hope to add more detail to my ship and give it a wake as is moves through the water.

Scene Six Complete

For scene six I have made a bit of a change to my original story board. Instead of showing a grave stone for the dodo I have chosen to show the dodo as a museum exhibit, as this is all we have left of this creature today.

I modeled a rough museum set in Maya for me to build upon next semester, imported it into Unity and setup a camera moving along waypoints to give the effect of zooming out. As background music in this scene I'm using Louis Armstrongs 'Wonderful World' with subtitles explaining that 75 years after the discovery of the dodo humans had completely wiped out this incredible species. Once the camera is fully zoomed out I intend to roll a credits overlay in the completed animation next semester.

I'm quite happy with the over all effect this scene has, hopefully it leaves viewers thinking about biodiversity and how humans have repeatedly made the same mistakes throughout history causing the extinction of hundreds of species which played a part it the ecosystems of earth.

Subtitles and Sound

As part of my goal of completing my animatic without using any post editing I have managed to put together a script for subtitle text and to play my chosen background music.

The script for subtitles uses a GUI Text object and changes the text at required times. Behind the text I have created a GUI Texture which provides a black background to the white text. When hiding and showing the subtitles I have used the iTween script available here: http://itween.pixelplacement.com/ to faded the GUI Text and GUI Texture out with this line:

iTween.fadeTo(subtitleholder,{"alpha":0, "onComplete":"destroy"});

This solution works well and I have applied it to multiple scenes in my animatic.

The second new script I have put in place controls the animatics background music. I thought adding music would be quite simple until I realised that when moving between scenes all audio sources would be removed and all sounds from the previous scene would stop which is not ideal for background music.

To correct this I managed to work out the following script which goes in the first scene. It sets up a singleton which is accessible through all scenes, and prevents my audio source from being removed between scenes loads.

//Create instance of class.

private static var instance:GameMusic;

//Create singleton instance.

public static function GetInstance() : GameMusic {

return instance;

}

function Awake() {

if (instance != null && instance != this) {

Destroy(this.gameObject);

return;

} else {

instance = this;

}

//prevent audio source from being removed between scene loads.

DontDestroyOnLoad(this.gameObject);

}

In subsequent scenes I then load new background music by removing the object the above script is attached to and add it again with a different audio source.

Being able to do subtitles and sound within Unity should make it possible for me to capture the entire scene in real-time with not post editing.

Scene Five Progress

Scene five shows the arrival of humans on the island of Mauritius. To do this I am showing a tall ship arriving at the island. I spent tonight modelling and texturing the ship.

Modelling and especially UV mapping the ship were much easier now that I have had much more experience with these process's.

The screen capture below shows the ships in it's completed state for the animatic.

Scene Four Complete

I have now finished scene four. This is a skit of a dodo trying to fly by launching itself in a catapult. It fly's over a group of other dodo's lying in deck chairs on the beach.

To complete this scene I modeled and animated a catapult and then wrote a quick script which waits 5 seconds from when the scene loads to fire the catapult and propel the dodo along a line of waypoints. There is also a trigger which the dodo passes through which switches camera.

Next semester I hope to add some splash effects for when the dodo lands in the water. Also I hope to add greater details to the dodo's lazy on the beach to show them with cocktails, beach umbrellas, and towels etc.

Scene Three Progress

Scene three is progressing to well as I have run into a problem. As part of achieving my goal of having the entire animatic play out in unit with no post editing I have been using a waypoint script to control character movement.

This worked well for scene one and two but, in scene three I require my fat dodo to walk up a hill to attempt to fly by jumping off a cliff. The waypoint script is not appropriate for this as it only allows the character to go in straight paths from waypoint to waypoint. On uneven terrain the characters catches on dips and bumps and then starts bouncing around as its collider and rigid body hit the terrains collider.

If I remove the terrains collider then my character simply passes right through the bumps and dips in terrain.

I'm going to leave this scene for now while I think of a solution.

Update 30/05/2010

As I am beginning to run out of time to complete the animatic I have decided to just add a character controller to the dodo and have the user manually control it's movement. For the rest of the scene setup there are two triggers. The first of which switches the camera when the dodo gets to the top of the hill. The second loads the next scene.

The animation for the dodo trying to flying and roll down the hill is obvious quite rough. It will take a considerable amount of time next semester to get this just right.