Category: 1.1 3D Computer Animation Fundamental
In a near-future vision of Jaipur, Jaipur_2042 explores the consequences of unplanned urbanization—a cityscape where roads, bridges, metro lines, and commercial structures clash against the context of architectural heritage and nature. This short presents a jarring juxtaposition of the old and the new, an exaggeration of the rapid urban sprawl of Indian cities.
This is not to choose side of old or new, or disregard modernization. Jaipur_2042 calls for a harmonious coexistence, where development does not overshadow heritage and nature but finds a way to complement it. A world where the old and new can stand together, not in discord but in thoughtful juxtaposition.
At the center of the city lies a ruined fort, a silent witness to centuries of history, now engulfed by the relentless growth of the urban jungle. Neon lights and massive commercial billboards obscure the natural horizon, cutting off the flow of sunlight to the space. This chaotic cacophony of development poses a stark contrast to the timeless solitude of the fort. An AI droid, programmed to restore the fort, works on repairing the ancient structure. Resulting in an unintended side effect, the city begins to deconcstruct. Modern constructions go backwards in time, dissolving into the sands of time. Slowly, the chaotic cityscape fades away, leaving only the restored fort standing alone in the vast desert.
I wanted to present the contrast seen in above images between the heritage and Urbanization. Looking back at my time in Jaipur, the speed of development has increased with passing years. While imagining a version of the city nearly 30 years in the future, I came up with the idea for this short film. To recreate the Rajput Architecture, I refered to some elements from the existing forts and palaces.
Process
Working in Unreal Engine was new experience, both exciting and challenging. My knowledge of the production pipeline in blender was useful to translate into Unreal Engine. It was a quick process to visualize and blockout the shots in Unreal, with easy to setup cameras and sequencer.
After blocking out the scenes, I created different building assets in Blender, updating them simaltaneously in Unreal to see what looked better. Using 5-6 different types of buildings I managed to create the cityscape scene. The skylight and directional light worked well as I planned. I did the animations in Blender as well and imported them in Unreal, placing the character in different positions.
Challenges
The main issues I faced was to get the physics simulations right. With a number of physical property settings it was difficult to adjust and get a smoother fracture simulation. Another challenge was the post processing, I could not manage to get Depth of field in the shots. The color corrections did not work out as I wanted too.
I had done an upstairs cycle for an older personal project which looked choppy so I wanted to try out any of the staircase movement. I chose ‘Walking Downstairs’ exercise for the body mechanics. Below are my planning, 2D test and keyframe animations.
We started walk cycle with the blocking of key poses for the 1st week and then cleaning up the spline in further weeks.
For the blocking, the 4 main poses were Contact, Down, Passing and Up. I started by fixing my contact poses and then went on to key the middle poses. I had to integrate my learning from weight shift exercise in the process. And also, maintain a uniform motion graph and arcs for each subsequent cycle.
This week we learned different lighting setups.
I experimented in class with different types of lights (spot, area, point). Using IES light functions, I managed to create dynamic moving lights with varying color and intensity.
For my project I used mainly skylight and emissive materials to light up the scenes. The city scape however required a few spot lights for lamps and some blinking lights on top of tall structures or construction cranes. I created a basic Light function to have a blinking effect for the point lights.
Understanfing Rigs and character animation in Unreal was a bit complicated. The Riging process was using node based coding which I could grasp, but keyframing the animation was time consuming.
I used Blender for my character rig and animations. For importing the animations, I imported the character model with rig first as an fbx. And then imported animations as separate actions to plugin on the character rig.
This week we focussed on weight shifts and posing.
To understand the concept of mass and action lines, I sketched some poses. While posing them on the character rig, I made sure to exagerate the action lines and keep the center of mass balanced.
For the weight shift, we made a blocking for week 5 and then spline for next week. Comparing the 1st test blocking and final spline animation, I can see the difference in movement.
For my story, I needed broken building parts reconstituting into the original state. To get the right fracture amount, I tried multiple fracture seeds and setting until it was looking as needed. For creating further damage, I added 2 or 3 levels of fractures to some assets.
I used 2 different Chaos collections to record the fracture on the dome and wall parts. Recording and then keyframing the static pose time on the Chaos Cache managers, I managed to get the rebuilding animation in the sequencer.
The task this week was to fix the errors in blocking and create spline animation.
The first try was not right, particularly the ball motion was easing at each bounce and following asymmetric arcs. To fix that I went back to clean up the ball first and revised the tail accordingly.