Author: Yatharth Gupta

Term 3

Week 12: Animation Blocking & VCams

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 25th April 2025
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Advanced Body Mechanics: Blocking

I recorded some parts of the reference and revised my planning to add story to the character motion.

I also decided to change the ending to be just a simple jump rather than a spinning movement.

Recorded Reference

After the planning, I focussed on the timings of animation for the first blocking pass.

Unreal Engine : VCams

This week we tried to use Virtual Camera in Unreal Engine. It is a useful tool to quickly look around the scene and set up camera angles in Unreal Engine using just an iPad or mobile phone.

I attempted to take a few shots from my old project using my phone, but due to the vertical elevations in my project file, I could not record a proper take. But given the right environment, this tool can be useful for quick Pre-Vis or prototyping.

Term 3

Week 11: Advanced Body Mechanics

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 18th April 2025
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The workflow checklist was insightful from this lesson. I had struggled with managing my animations before and had often jumped from blocking to spline and worked on different body parts at different stages.

Advanced Body Mechanics: Planning

For the body mechanics animation, I wanted to try a character with a sword, inspired by a game character. Below are the reference and planning for the shot.

For my planning I focused on the overall timing first. Looking at my reference, I assigned the frame numbers with the key poses.
For the complicated movement of the flip, I made detailed pose breakdown, keeping in mind where toe and palm touch the floor.
I added a pause before the head lift up.
For the second half I exeprimented with a few sword movements for the initial planning.

Term 2

Week 8-9: Pre-Vis

Incorporating the feedback, I retimed the scenes.

I added pauses at moments of serious story moments to let the audience take in the feeling. I also decided to remove some moments from the storyboard as they were redundant and not adding to the visual story.

Term 2

Week 6-7: Pre-Vis (adding props)

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 2nd March 2025
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Over the 2 weeks, I worked on adding props and detailing the environment where needed.

Cars and flying ships to define the setting and steampunk aesthetic.
Massing of buildings to define the backgrounds in the scenes.
Architectural elements like arches and columns to improve the compositions and form a focal point.
Furnitures and Props to set and identity for the protagonist as a wood toymaker.

Term 2

Week 5: Pre-Vis (1st Draft)

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 16th February 2025
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I started working on the pre-vis, keeping the storyboard as a guide. For the 1st draft, I just positioned characters and camera in basic box environments and necessary props only.

Term 2

Week 4: Pre-Vis Still frames

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 9th February 2025
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To understand the rules of composition and ‘mise-en-scène’, I worked on some still frames. From my storyboard, I picked a few main story points, positioning placeholder characters and environment props to get a sense of the story.

Term 2

Week 3: Edited storyboard & Moodboards

Post author By Yatharth Gupta
Post date 28th January 2025
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I decided to work on the first story for my pre-vis. After making some changes to the story, I redid the storyboard and worked on a moodboard to define a theme and setting.

Term 2

Week 2: Storyboards

This unit was interesting for me, as I have struggled with story writing in my works. I wanted to experiment with basic stories for the storyboards and focus more on the story circle for each of them.