ProjectⅠ: Everything sucks

The highlights of two advanced & experimental projects

This is my term2 showreel in which I combined two of my Projects altogether.

Due to the limited time and just one of my own laptop for rendering 🙁

it’s not that perfect but I’ve already tried my best for them.

This overall showreel of the combination of the two projects companied with one of my favourite song.

Hope you can feel the beats of it and enjoy it.

The Showreel of Project I – Everything sucks

Inspiration & Concept

The first project I’ve settled down on is an emotion-driven animated music video, which is kind of therapeutic and lovely. I picked up a beloved song called everything sucks’, which I could feel totally related to its lyrics and emotion. it strikes my chord to some extent when I listened to this song, many scenes just popped into my mind so I decided to incorporate this song into my project. Here are the lyrics:

I want my project to be artistic and visually enjoyable. I’ve been researching all kinds of references before starting my scene design, such as some artistic music videos, films, and emotional photography.

Priority

In this project, I decided to focus more on the visual effect, camera movement, and composition but not on animation, which I would also combine with, However it won’t be my priority in my ProjectI, so the animation included would be quite simple and short but still meaningful.

I hope this animated music video just like a breath of fresh air that can calm audiences down and put them in the good mood.

Development

At first, I was doing all the stuff in Maya only, but I felt I was stuck and it seemed like I came across a sort of bottleneck that held me back that I couldn’t move forward. The visualization and result of simulation or render couldn’t up to my expectation to a large extent. I realized I was staying in my comfort zone and I need to absorb something new after having Heman’s C4D lessons. So I tried to learn Cinema4D and combine it with Maya. I felt some simulations and the render engine in C4D is way more reasonable than in Maya( just in my opinion!) I was so glad that my project could go back to normal and move smoothly when I picked up Cinema4D.

Basically, I was modeling and rigging as well as animating in Maya, and I exported it to the Cinema4D to add the material, light, and VFX then finally it in octane render.

On top of that, there are tons of process recordings, I think I just go for posting the overall screenshots here otherwise it might be a lot.

Overall Pipelines

I use the whiteboard in order to sort out my pipelines and keep it as a reminder, which I think is a very helpful way for me to put my project in order.

Even though I didn’t fill them all due to the limited time later 🙁 However it is super useful at first, every day when I opened the whiteboard, I won’t feel adrift about what I need to do.

I tried to list the emotion of the lyrics and imagine each concept of the scene.

Storyboard– In my mind x

To be honest, I didn’t draw my storyboard beforehand, instead I structured all of them in Maya first, which I felt it’s more flexible and useful to me. Eventhough I know the storyboard is needed, I still didn’t want to do it this time just because I wanna be real and don’t want my blog to be a curated place, where I think it is supposed to be the place for documenting my real experience of my research. 🙂

Story Scene Split Illustrations & Process

According to the lyric, the scene that comes to my mind is the protagonist drops into the deep ocean, which is suffocated and world-weary.

I design the transformation between Scene1 and 2, the first Scene1 just becomes the piece of crumpled paper and my protagonist just throws it away to the emo bin, which means just throwing the bad mood away.

Besides, In order to make my scene way more artistic and imaginative, I put the protagonist sitting on the sofa as well as set the scene on the lawn with the fantasy sky.

When the lyric comes to :“Everything is great”，this scene just poped to my mind right away mainly because I felt it might be in good mood when we are sitting in ferris wheel(also express the feelings that I really wanna have fun in the London eye(but I still haven’t…x)

This scene is kind of artistic and I m quite like it:) the idea is from one of my favourite movie “The Frech dispatch”

it presents the experience that I received many negative also annoying messages or talking from others, which I didn’t wanna give it a shit.

When it comes to “I haven’t thought about my ex today…oh wait” I was trying to imagine the condition when someone broke up with her/his ex, which is really lonely and sad.

On top of that, I can say I really care about the atmosphere of the scene, meaning that the light and the emotion are quite important , so I tried to research the lighting inspiration from some atmospheric photography

I tried to simulate it also twit it a bit on my own way

The next scene is so bright and shiny, which might fit the lyric of “But I went outside…”

Besides, the highlight of this scene is that I used the blossom of the flowers to present the emotion of it.

” In the few days , it feel nice..~”

I imagined hundred of thousands of times that I was lying on a cloud companied with the ocean.

“I might try to do some exercise”

very straightforward and easy to tell the meaning of it 🙂

I have imagined it will be so chilled if I have exercise in the blue sky with the blooming and swayed flowers.

Some new stuffs I learned:

• Trying to simulate dropping into the ocean also waterflow
• Using emitter to create bubbles

• ncloth -to simulate the crumpled paper

• Knowing about the setting of the background and some knowledge of alpha channel, meaning that if I would like to render the customised background I have to give the material to the background also open the alpha channel.

• lens focus

• blowing curtains – wind / add cloth tag / select fixed points / adjust the figures

• rigid body / collider body – in order the objects won’t insert by the other, I should know how to set

• clouds / ocean & the ocean material

• floras/booming flowers/grass/plants

• volume – it takes ages for rendering tbh x

Editing

Simply brought it to PR for final composing.

The main point for it is to match the lyrics and the rhythm

Issues & Reflection:

• The overall water, bubble simulation, and the final render are not up to my expectation, to be honest. Mainly because it’s still not that realistic. however, due to my limited technical skills and the resources I could get online, this is what I could accomplish in Maya.