Peihang's 3D computer animation Blog

Month: January 2026

Categories
Maya

WEEK5

This week’s course content focused on Walk Cycle and body weight. The teacher explained the basic structure of walk cycles in class, and also analyzed how body weight is distributed in the hips and legs, as well as its importance in motion performance. My assignment this time was to create a basic weight shift animation, which helped me gain a deeper understanding of how body weight moves and changes in actions.

During the process of making the weight shift animation, I clearly felt the key role of the body weight’s movement path. By continuously observing and adjusting the character’s center of gravity, I realized that whether the body weight’s path is reasonable and smooth directly affects whether the motion looks natural, rhythmic and weighted. Especially when a character moves from one pose to another, the lifting, dropping and forward-backward movement of body weight decide the stability and visual believability of the motion. A proper body weight movement makes the animation look more realistic, while an unreasonable path will make the motion appear stiff or unbalanced.
Besides, I also learned the Pose to Pose animation method with Ting. This helped me master the skills of connecting key poses smoothly. When making the weight shift animation, I first confirmed the body weight position of each key pose, and then adjusted the transitional movements in between. This made the whole motion more fluent and natural in terms of vision and rhythm.

Categories
Maya

WEEK4

In the 4th week, George gave me further suggestions on my tail animation to make it more natural. I also refined the juice box animation assigned by Ting, moving it from the blocking phase to the polish phase, but the timing was a bit too drawn-out and needs further improvement. Besides, I created three Golden Poses with different emotions using the Frankie rig.

Golden Pose

Categories
Maya

WEEK3

This week, George gave feedback on my pendulum animation, and I made improvements accordingly to make it smoother. We had an assignment to create a fox bouncing animation, focusing on the tail movement. I studied squirrel tails as a reference to understand how the tail moves in tandem with the body. Ting’s assignment required adding performance elements to animations — she specifically asked us to make a short emotional animation for simple objects like a juice box that falls on the ground, so as to help the audience understand the ideas conveyed by the object. In addition, I also completed more emotion-driven Golden Pose practices with references.

Categories
Maya

WEEK2

In the second class, I readjusted my bouncing ball animation, and George gave me plenty of crucial feedback, including the unnatural state of the ball when it touches the plane, overly slow bouncing speed, and failure to return to its original shape at the highest point — these suggestions were really helpful to me. He also taught us pendulum animation in Maya, discussed how time and energy specifically affect motion, and I made a simple pendulum animation following his guidance as well as drew some corresponding animation sketches.

In class, Ting first explained timeline operations and knowledge related to animation timing, covering various speed variations such as constant speed and ease in and out. She also emphasized that proper control of distance and a sense of weight can enhance the believability of animated movements. Focusing on this knowledge, I finished the relevant assignment: creating falling animations for an empty juice carton and a full one to clearly show the motion differences caused by different weights. I also continued practicing golden poses at the same time.

Pendulum Exercise

Gesture drawing

Golden Pose practice

Juice box exercise

Categories
Maya

WEEK1

In the first class, we introduced ourselves to one another first, and got to know many friendly classmates and teachers. Afterwards, we previewed various basic animation exercises we would work on this semester, such as those related to bouncing balls, action overlap and weight shift. Meanwhile, our teacher explained some basic animation principles to us and recommended a book titled The Animator’s Survival Kit. I have purchased its e-book edition, which is very practical. Besides, Ting introduced us to the golden pose in animation and its significance in class. A good golden pose has a clear silhouette, enabling viewers to understand the action at a glance while being dynamic and appealing. Thus, my first assignment is to copy different golden poses.

Categories
Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language

WEEK1

In the first week of the unit Design for Animation, Narrative Structures & Film Language, the class mainly focused on understanding the purpose of the course and how research will be developed over time. Instead of choosing a final topic straight away, we were encouraged to think about possible research directions and what kinds of questions we are interested in exploring.

I started by reflecting on my own animation background and what I want to improve during this course. At this stage, I am particularly interested in how visual elements, such as lighting and environment, can influence storytelling and audience experience. This made me realise that film and animation language is not only about technique, but also about how meaning and emotion are communicated.

We also discussed how animation can be used to engage with broader social and cultural ideas through visual choices. This week helped me understand that research does not need to be fixed at the beginning. Developing clear questions and exploring ideas gradually is an important part of the process.

Categories
Unreal Engine

Week 12: Detail Polishing, Final Rendering

I added a lot of life-like small items to the original scene, such as scattered odds and ends and old newspapers. This was mainly to reduce the common “emptiness” of 3D scenes and make the space look more like a real, lived-in room. At the same time, I also put two character models into the scene. Their presence added a layer of narrative tension to this rather depressing Chinese-style apartment, instead of leaving it as just a static environment.

Camera and lighting were the parts I adjusted repeatedly the most this week. For the camera, I fine-tuned the Depth of Field again. I hoped to guide the audience’s eyes more clearly in key shots. I also adjusted the Motion Blur, so that there would be a bit more blur and trail when the camera moved, instead of the overly clean look of a virtual camera. For lighting, I added some local fill lights to the room. For example, I put a bit of rim light around the edges of the characters and furniture, and used the contrast between warm and cool tones to enhance the layers of the images.

Categories
Unreal Engine

Week 11: Rough Cut Preview and Audio-Visual Experiments

This week, I made a simple rough-cut preview and exported one or two versions of the video. I arranged the shots in the order set out in the Week 5 storyboard first. After putting them together like this, I could clearly see if the transitions between camera animations were smooth, and whether there were any parts where the pacing felt off.

During the editing process, I also tried adding some ready-made external video footage as an experiment. These were mainly used in the flashback scenes that haven’t been rendered yet—for example, some imagery related to social pressure. This step was more about previewing the overall effect, to check if the final video would look too visually monotonous.

At the same time, I started trying to add music and sound effects to the footage. I compared the rough-cut video with music of different tempos. Through this process, I gradually found a suitable vibe: a sound atmosphere that feels somewhat depressing but also carries a touch of nostalgia.

Categories
Unreal Engine

Week 10: UE Camera Animation

For every shot, I directly set keyframes on the camera. I mainly adjusted the camera’s position, rotation and focal length. By doing this, I first got the overall narrative rhythm of the video right.

The storyboard included some “shaky” shots that feel more like memories. So I spent some time figuring out how to create camera shake in UE5. I tried using the Camera Shake Base blueprint, and also experimented with manually setting noisy keyframes in the sequence. This was to mimic the feel of real handheld filming, instead of using a perfectly steady virtual camera.

By the end of the week, all the key shots had a basic camera animation draft. There is still room for improvement in smoothness and detail control. But this moving preview already lets me see more clearly how the scene will look when it’s fully animated.

Categories
Unreal Engine

Week 9: UE5 Scene Building and Material Tuning

This week, I officially started building the scene in Unreal Engine 5, gradually putting together all the separate assets I had created in previous weeks into the same 3D space.

First, I set up the basic structure of the room, and then imported the textured models I had finished in Week 8 into the engine. To avoid slowing down the overall progress, I used white boxes as placeholders for some assets that hadn’t been refined yet. This was mainly to check the overall composition and proportions, making sure they matched the shots planned in the storyboard.

The task that took up most of my time this week was adjusting materials, especially the Roughness parameter. This setting has a huge impact on the look of Chinese furniture from the 2000s, like worn wooden lacquered surfaces or plastic-like finishes. If the value was too low, the furniture would look too new; if it was too high, it would appear dull. So I tweaked it several times, focusing on whether the light reflection on the surfaces looked natural.

As for lighting, I kept it simple at first. I added some basic light sources and used Lumen’s real-time effects to check the light and shadow balance in the scene. Even though the lighting was basic for now, it already gave a rough idea of the nostalgic atmosphere I was aiming for.

In-class Learning
WEEK9

In the ninth week, we learned and practiced Post-processing Volumes. Serra shared a simpler method to adjust them with us, which is using LUTs (Lookup Tables). We can change the overall scene effect by importing pre-adjusted LUT files, which function similarly to filters. The key advantage is that adjustments can be made in external software like Photoshop, making the process easier without having to tweak numerous parameters repeatedly in the engine.

Modified Pre-LUT

Modified Post-LUT

Comparison of effects in UE and Photoshop after applying LUTs

In addition, we learned about rendering, focusing on exploring various practical methods to optimize rendering effects and enhance visual quality. For example, regarding console variable presets, Serra provided us with many useful ones, and we also tried them out in practice.