- 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:
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:
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):
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