Hogan and his ice cream xD

Hogan's expression Before, and After dropping his ice cream.

Initially, i wanted to make Hogan mimic a TV-advertisement where the ice-cream sales person did a stunt by dropping an ice-cream into his mouth. But i did not know how to make an animation appear in the TV i modelled thus i cut that out and made Hogan do the stunt instead :D. Hope you all like it!

Motion Capture

Kai Lin and I were talking about Motion Capture and we were talking about how good they actually look. If you have seen her blog, you would have seen the Hatsune Miku's Levan Polka dance and the opening of Final Fantasy X2 (sorry for being a final fantasy freak hahaha).If not, it's at the bottom of this post. Im now wondering if those videos were mixed mocap + keyframe animation because they look pretty impressive!

Remember the video that was shown to us in class by Mr.Willy?
The zombie dance from Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within?

The entire movie was actually Mocapped as said. While searching for other Final Fantasy mocap videos, i stumbled upon this :). I thought that it's pretty cool so i shall share it will you guys :)




It is actually the process of how mocap works and what the actors do behind the scenes :).
If you have seen the description of the video, it is actually the"first theatrically released motion capture feature film". xD
That was actually released in year 2001.. so considering the amount of time that has passed, mocap actually improved(in my opinion) as can be seen from the videos below!

Hatsune Miku's Leven Polka


FFX2 opening, Yuna's song

Expressions

This exercise made me think about factors such as

In my opinion, "Trust" and "Disgust" is two of the toughest expression to capture as "Trust" is a believe and I tend to observe trust based on verbal contexts instead of expressions.. Google did not help much with this.. so all I can do is to visualise the expression of what I have seen in Japanese Animations when a character says "I TRUST YOU" xD.

It is difficult to get "Disgust" right as over-exaggeration will make Hogan look like he's angry or sad. After googling, a "Disgusted" face is usually observed by the lifting of the upper lips,a parted mouth, narrowed eyes and a wrinkled nose. Hogan don't happen to have a nice nose and I couldn't wrinkled it even if i added the nose in.. This took away some chances to make the expression "Disgust" more realistic. I hope he don't look too angry in this picture @.@.

The rest of the emotions were pretty straight forward to capture. Thus, I hope i did a good job with them! :)

Props

This keyboard was referenced from K-ON Mugi's Korg Triton Extreme 76-key keyboard

 

A Retro Microphone on Tripod

My Favourite 3D Clip

Well, I know this is suppose to be about a favourite movie.. But instead, i would like to blog about the reason I am inspired to be in the 3D industry.
When I was 10 or so, my brother was playing Final Fantasy 8 and I happen to see the introduction clip of the game. That was the first time that i've seen such a realistic "cartoon" and that was the reason that led me to play Square Enix's games

The production of this game took 2 years to complete(from 1997-1999). During this era, I believe that the 3D industry was not very well established yet. The tools available then was probably very limited(not like what we are able to do now).LOOK AT MATRON'S HAIR Oh My Goodness!(the female sitting alone with her REALLY LONG hair flowing like nobody's business). The special effects used in this game was also amazing. I personally felt that it was an amazing feat to be able to produce such quality work at that time.

Just to include a rough timeline,Toy Story(movie) was released in 1995 and it was Pixar's first animated film... Considering this, I would say that the scenes from Final Fantasy 8 was really well done. If anyone plays the Final Fantasy series, you would know that Square Enix made a huge jump in the graphics production from FF7 to FF8.

Final Fantasy 13 was released in December 2009, production probably took around a year and a half.


Good Job to all the members involved in these productions!!! <3<3

If you have time, do check out the final fantasy series:). You will probably love the cutscenes! :D.