#projectbees

[diebrigkuchler]

Seillean - 3D Animated Short Film

And here is the final version of my short film Seillean, I hope you like it!

Thanks so much to everyone who’s been following my blog these past few months. It’s been a steep learning curve but also a lot of fun and super rewarding! I hope the progress I’ve put on my blog can help/inspire other people, if you feel like you want to do something similar, don’t be afraid to go for it! 

Also, plant seeds and show the bees some love! WE NEED THEM

[diebrigkuchler]

Worker Bees - Texturing & Render [Maya + Substance Painter + Unity]

I created the low poly model of the worker bees in Maya, textured in in Substance Painter and then put it together in Unity for the final render. I ended up making some parts of the model glow so they looked more like they’re guarding the queen. 

[diebrigkuchler]

Bee Queen Clothing - [Marvelous Designer + ZBrush]

For the cape and skirt of the queen statue I’ve used Marvelous Designer, I don’t know a lot about this software -so please excuse my primitive technique- but it got the job done! Now it’s time for UV mapping and texturing!

[diebrigkuchler]

Unity Particles Progress + Tutorial Links

For the magical atmosphere and bee-whirlwind I chose to use the particle effect within Unity itself. This is the first time I’ve used it and it’s very user-friendly in my opinion. There’s loads of tutorials for creating all kinds of effects (on youtube for example). For the bee “storm” I followed a tutorial on how to create a tornado and tailored it to my concept. For the magic effect when the water drop falls unto the earth I used a magic wave impact effect tutorial. And for the atmospheric “dust” particle effect I mainly messed about with the settings until I liked it enough + I loosely followed a snow effect tutorial. 

[diebrigkuchler]

Animation WIP Playblasts - First Pass [Maya]

I put together all the rough playblasts I was working on for my short film "Seillean". After some feedback from my animation tutor Brendan Body, I scrapped, changed camera angles, created new and refined some animations to an acceptable standard which can be seen in my final film!

[diebrigkuchler]

Alembic Honey Simulation in Unity Test #1 - WIP

Here’s a little preview of the liquid simulations I’ve created in Maya without the post processing on (so you can see the outlines better). The main one coming from the statue is a bifrost liquid and the floor pattern was created with nParticles. Ideally I still need to create 4 more bifrost liquids for the rest of the fountain and one simulation that fills up the main hexagonal stone basin. Wish me luck~

[diebrigkuchler]

Intro Reliefs [ZBrush + Substance Painter + Unity]

For the intro of the film I wanted to have bas-reliefs that told a story combined with a voice-over. I created a simple plane in ZBrush and made 4 different panels that pictured a part of the story. I then baked it as a normal map in Substance Painter and when I combined everything in Unity turned the normal map very low so it looked more shallow but with a clear outline. 

For the light I wanted it to look like someone was passing by the walls with a torch. I created a light in Unity and put a script on it to make it flicker like fire. Then I animated the light itself and the camera to move slowly. I also put the audio track into Unity so the timing was a perfect match.

[diebrigkuchler]

Animation in Unity - FBX Problems and the Alembic Cache Solution [Solved + Links Below]

After a lot of issues (see pictures) when trying to export my animations from Maya as an FBX file and bringing it into Unity I found a way that worked for me. 

This is what I wanted to do: 

I was trying to create a base model FBX with the joints and blendshapes attached to it but without any animations. I then wanted to create separate animation FBX exports so eventually I would have one textured model and attach those animations to it, which would be smaller file sizes than exporting every model + animations.

The problems:

The FBX exports were acting weird when I imported them back into Maya, it looked as if random blendshapes and corrective shapes were turned on. I tried a lot of different ways to export the model with the joints/rig but in the end I found out that my rig (made with Advanced Skeleton) was too complex to handle in a game engine. Game engines use single hierarchy rigs and no complex face rigs. I had created a separate face rig with blendshapes that wasn’t a single hierarchy with the body rig. So even if the animation did work in Unity, the “intricate” facial expressions were lost and looked odd.

The solution:

After trying all the solutions I could find online and failing, I rediscovered the alembic plug-in for Unity. I had seen it before but didn’t try it at that time because the instructions were in Japanese. But since it was the last thing I was going to try I figured it was worth a shot. I luckily found some video tutorials on how to install it and it worked perfectly! The only downside to using alembic caches is that you have to texture every cache you use in Unity (but maybe there’s a script for automating that? I’m not a coder at all). I’m also using this for exporting Maya’s Bifrost liquid simulations into Unity.

Links:

ADAM: The Evolution of Alembic Support in Unity

Alembic Cache Plug-in for Unity

How to install/use the Alembic Plug-in for Unity (skip to 03:40 in video)