Assignment 4: Me, Myself and I

 

Today I have finished my final project of the course which is Me, Myself and I. I faced some difficulties and challenges, but I have learned a lot with this project. I also believe I was able to succeed in creating a visual expression. 

So there was two options given to us for this project: either a 15 second lip-sync video, or a 30-second open topic. I went for the 30 second open topic as my animation skills aren’t great, and I find the sculpt layer to blendshape animation work-flow to be too cumbersome and it’s easy to mess up (in my opinion). So, I opted for the latter option.

The main concept covered in my open topic is the use of Arnold Sky domes and HDRI maps. Using both I can “place” my head model in a lit environment using the texture of the HDRI to create the background and lighting all-in-one. Cool right?

Except I encountered an issue where my Arnold Renderer wasn’t able to render a sequence. My suspicion from my answer-seeking online is that because my root user folder in my laptop is labelled using a special character: my name in chinese (纳瓦夫） and that maya can’t deal with special characters. Turns out you can’t change the name of the folder, unless you go through a very complicated advanced process. Unfortunately I can’t use skymaps without using the Arnold Renderer, what now?

I opted to still see this project to the end, luckily I can still render individual frames with the Arnold Renderer, so I got to work on creating a visual expression inspired by surrealism, horror, and liminal spaces. Inspired by the movie SAW, where the entire movie occurs in one room, my final movie uses two render frames for the final scene. 

 

All in all, I really liked the final product especially how the final rendered scene almost looks like clay animation.  I will leave the interpretation to the audience as I don’t want to spoil the experience.