Final Project: Amazing Spider-Man
Created by: Alisa Yang
Date due: May. 13, 2022
Final Animation
1. Storyboards and Description:
For my final project, I really wanted to make a short animation that has strong motion in it because I love action movies. Thus, I animated Spider-Man!
1. About animation: Spider-Man's poses are the most important, at the same the most challenging part for me. I followed a tutorial online and learned the basic poses of Spider-Man. Then, I found many other Spider-Man shorts featuring his jumping movement and then applied these references into my animation. I also animated a new camera, which is very hard for me to get it's movement right since the Spider-Man's movement is so fast.
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2. About modeling and texturing: I got the rigged Spider-Man model from the link attached in the tutorial. I modeled the whole building environment myself by mainly using polygon cubes and cylinders. The buildings and roads' texture images are downloaded online. I used UV editor to make their textures right.
3. About lighting and rendering: I linked an HDR image to the aiSkyDomeLight, which makes the entire environment more real and cooler. I also created several directional lights and area lights to accentuate Spider-Man. I used Arnold to render my whole animation in HD 720 quality because it will take a very very long time to render the animation in HD 1080 quality. However, I do want to render it in HD 1080 quality later when I refine it. I initially tried to create a kind of night scene but I didn't know how to light up my buildings (since it's strange if only buildings in the HDR image are lit up).
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4. Animation principles I used: pose to pose action, staging (camera position), anticipation (when he jumps), appeal (Spider-Man is of course attracting😆), arcs (his whole jumping path), timing and motion, slow in and out, squash and stretch (stretch his legs and body, etc.).
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Sources:
1. Animation tutorial link: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1QE411R7Cn?spm_id_from=333.999.0.0
2. I don't know the exact website address or the URL of the rigged Spider-Man model, since I directly downloaded it from the tutorial host's Chinese social media.
3. Road, building, HDR, and signboard texture images:
Frames from the animation:
Some Final Thoughts:
I learned a lot from making this project. I really enjoyed doing it! There were many aha movements when I was doing this project. For example, I learned to think differently and thoroughly to solve my problems from multiple angles.
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There are still many aspects I can improve, such as the camera movement, Spider-Man's poses and animation, the environment setting, image noise, and color difference, etc.. I will refine my animation very soon after the critique. Please give me one more day to refine it.
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Update! Finally finished refining and re-rendering. I refined Spider-Man's poses, camera movement, and figured out how to get rid of these white dots--by uploading the specular map as well as the base color map and normal map.