This week’s session introduced 360 Video. I learned that 360-degree video does not present only one fixed camera view. Instead, it allows the audience to enter a space and look around freely. Therefore, when creating 360 video, we need to think not only about composition, but also about where the audience may choose to look. Creators can use sound, movement, lighting, or character placement to guide the viewer’s attention and avoid important information being missed. This class helped me understand that 360 Video is more like a form of spatial storytelling, creating a stronger sense of immersion than traditional video.
This week, I started working on Assignment: Advanced Animation Shot (Blocking). My plan is to create an animation shot of a girl dancing, so at this stage I mainly focused on using the reference video to define the main actions, key poses, and overall rhythm.
During the blocking stage, I placed the reference video next to my animation and compared the character’s body poses with the dancer’s movements. Dancing is more complex than simple actions because it requires attention to body rhythm, weight shifts, and the coordination between the arms, pelvis, and torso. At this point, I have completed the rough key poses and the general direction of the movement.
Ting’s feedback was that the main problems in my animation were the pelvis rotation and body weight. This made me realise that the pelvis and centre of gravity are very important in dance animation. If the pelvis rotation is not accurate, or if the body weight is not properly placed on the supporting leg, the character can look unstable, stiff, or even like it is floating.
This week, we continued learning about Reality Capture. Compared with last week’s basic introduction, this session focused more on how to process and use scanned models in practice.
I learned that scanned models usually cannot be used directly after they are generated. They often need to be cleaned and optimised first. For example, we may need to remove unnecessary parts, fix incomplete areas, reduce the polygon count, and organise the textures. This helps the model run more smoothly in Unreal Engine and reduces performance issues.
After the model is processed, it can be imported into Unreal Engine and placed into a virtual scene. One of the biggest advantages of Reality Capture is that it can preserve real-world details and textures, making digital environments look more realistic.
Through these two weeks of learning, I think Reality Capture is a very useful creative tool. It can help us quickly collect real-world materials and connect reality with digital art. In the future, if my work involves cities, buildings, objects, or natural environments, I would like to continue experimenting with this technique.
This week’s tasks mainly included two parts: Creature Locomotion polish and Advanced Animation Shot planning.
For the Creature Locomotion task, I continued working on the butterfly flight animation. During the polish stage, I focused on adjusting the rhythm of the wings, the up-and-down movement of the body, and the flight path. I wanted the butterfly to look more natural and gentle, rather than moving in a mechanical way.
At the same time, I also started preparing for the Advanced Animation Shot. This assignment will continue from Week 16 to Week 19, and the final outcome should be a 5–12 second advanced animation shot. I plan to create a shot of a girl dancing. Compared with a simple action, dancing requires more attention to body rhythm, weight shift, and the flow between movements. It is also a good opportunity for me to practise more complex body mechanics.
This week’s session was about Reality Capture, also known as real-world scanning or photogrammetry. Sara introduced how we can turn real objects or spaces into digital models by taking photographs from different angles. In simple terms, Reality Capture is a method of bringing real-world materials into digital creation.
During the class, I tried scanning my own face. This helped me understand the process more directly. First, photos need to be taken from multiple angles to cover the shape and details of the subject as completely as possible. Then, these photos are imported into the software, where it identifies matching points between the images and generates a 3D model. After that, the model can be cleaned, textured, and optimised before being imported into Unreal Engine or other 3D software.
I found this process very interesting because it makes the boundary between reality and the virtual world less clear. In the past, I thought 3D models were mainly created through manual modelling, but Reality Capture offers another approach. Real faces, objects, buildings, or natural environments can all become part of a digital artwork. Scanning my own face especially made me feel that the real body can also be transformed into digital material.
This session made me realise that Reality Capture is not only a technical tool, but also a creative method. It allows artists to collect materials from the real world and reorganise them in a digital environment. In the future, if my work requires real objects, facial forms, or spatial textures, I would like to continue experimenting with Reality Capture as part of my visual research and production process.
This week, we completed our group Creature Study Presentation. Our topic was Insects & Bugs: Arthropod Locomotion in Animation. We mainly studied how different insects and arthropods move, and divided our research into three types: flying, such as bees and butterflies; walking, such as ants; and crawling or wriggling, such as centipedes and caterpillars.
There were three people in our group, and each of us focused on a different type of movement. I was responsible for flying insects, especially bees and butterflies. Through the research, I found that bees and butterflies create very different feelings in motion, even though they both fly with wings. Bees have compact bodies and small wings compared with their body size, so they need very fast and high-frequency wing beats to stay in the air. Their flight is usually direct, stable, and purposeful. They can move quickly between flowers and also hover before landing. In contrast, butterflies have light, slim bodies and large, flexible wings. Their flight is slower, softer, and more floating. Their wing movement has a larger amplitude, and their body often moves up and down along a wavy path.
Another group member researched ant walking movement. Ants have six legs, strong jointed limbs, and clear body segmentation. Their main gait is the tripod gait, which means three legs support the body while the other three legs move forward. This alternating rhythm helps the ant stay balanced while walking. The leg motion can be divided into four stages: lift, swing forward, touch down, and push back. During walking, the ant’s body also has a slight sway and small adjustments when changing direction.
The third group member focused on centipedes and caterpillars. Centipedes have many repeated body segments, with each segment connected to a pair of legs. Their movement uses a metachronal wave gait, where the legs move one after another and create a wave-like rhythm. The front part of the body moves more to control direction, while the back follows with a delay. Caterpillars move in a different way. Their motion mainly comes from the body rather than the legs. The soft body compresses and stretches, creating a wave that travels from the rear to the front.
Through this group study, we summarised that arthropod motion can be analysed through the body, limbs, coordination, and secondary motion. In reality, insect movement can be very fast, complex, and chaotic, so in animation we need to simplify the timing, enhance rhythm, and exaggerate body motion when necessary to make the movement clearer and more readable.
During the class presentations, I also learned a lot from other groups, such as the movement of birds, bears, and rabbits. Different animals have different body weights, skeleton structures, and movement rhythms. This made me realise that creature animation should be based on observation and analysis, rather than imagination alone.
This week was Project Feedback. My classmate Songyeu Huang and I are planning to work together on an experimental animation project this term. We shared our initial ideas and visual references with Sara.
At this stage, we are interested in creating an animation with a woodcut printmaking or sketch-like texture. The overall visual style may be mainly black, white, and grey, using rough lines, strong contrast, visible textures, and unstable image changes. We want the atmosphere to feel slightly unsettling or horror-like, but not through direct jump scares. Instead, we hope to create a sense of pressure, strangeness, and unease through the visual language.
For the theme, we are currently focusing on human inner emotions, such as anxiety, fear, and pain. We do not want the animation to simply tell a clear traditional story. Instead, we hope it can work more like an externalisation of a psychological state, allowing the audience to experience the emotional changes of the character. For example, the space may become distorted, the character may be duplicated or transformed, and the images may shift like fragments of memory.
We showed Sara some animation references, including Body Echo and Forever. In Body Echo, I was interested in the idea of another self and overlapping spaces, which made me think about how a divided character could represent inner conflict. Forever uses LiDAR scanning and point-cloud visuals to explore memory, data, and death. Its non-traditional visual form also inspired us to think about experimental animation language.
Through this feedback session, I realised that we need to further clarify the core concept of our project. We need to ask: where do the anxiety and fear come from? How can the visual style support the theme? Next, we will continue collecting references, developing the story structure, and testing woodcut, sketch, and black-and-white texture effects.
This week, Ting’s class focused on Creature Animation. The teacher introduced the basic research process for creature animation, including choosing an animal topic, collecting many video references, and observing how the creature looks, walks, blinks, moves, and behaves. We also learned that we do not need to become anatomy experts, but we should understand the basic structures that are useful for animation, such as leg types, body proportions, spine movement, and gait rhythm.
This week, we will work as a group on a Creature Study. Our group plans to research the movement of insects. There are three people in our group, and our rough division of work is: one person will study crawling insects with legs, one person will study wriggling insects or larvae, and one person will study flying insects. This allows us to compare different types of insect movement, including crawling, wriggling, and flying.
Through this class, I realised that creature animation should not be based only on imagination. It needs careful observation and research. Next, we will continue collecting insect movement references and analyse their gait, body weight, wing movement, and body deformation to prepare for the creature locomotion animation.
This week’s session was about VP / nDisplay. Sara introduced the basic concept of Virtual Production and the nDisplaysystem in Unreal Engine, which is commonly used for large-scale screen displays and multi-screen visual output. Through this class, I finally understood how many of the naked-eye 3D displays in commercial streets are created.
The key idea behind naked-eye 3D is not that the image is truly three-dimensional, but that it uses perspective from a specific viewing angle to create the illusion that an object is coming out of the screen or that the space is extending inward. To create this effect, artists usually need to build a virtual scene based on the real screen’s size, position, and viewing angle. Then, 3D content and camera settings are designed in Unreal Engine. The image must be adjusted according to the main viewing position of the audience, so that the screen edges, building corners, and virtual objects align correctly from that angle.
The basic workflow can be divided into several steps. First, the screen size, ratio, and viewing position need to be measured. Then, a matching virtual space is built in UE5. After that, 3D models, animation, and materials are created. Next, a suitable virtual camera angle is set up to match the real perspective of the screen. Finally, the image is output to the large screen through nDisplay or a similar system, followed by on-site testing and adjustment.
This lesson gave me a more direct understanding of virtual production. In the past, I only thought naked-eye 3D was a cool visual effect. Now I understand that it combines 3D modelling, animation, camera perspective, real-time rendering, and screen output technology. It also showed me that Unreal Engine can be used not only for games and animation, but also for commercial displays, public art, and immersive visual experiences.
