Another few weeks have passed since I have last posted an update, but I have still been very much hard at work. Its been a frustrating few weeks for me with the snowstorm that hit the US, I live in Chicago. While things did not get as bad as elsewhere in the US, I did have some frustrations in the sense that 3 snowstorms in a 14 day period dumped over a foot of snow each time. My car was literally buried under a mound of snow, and most of the streets and alleys were not plowed. Luckily the snow has started melting
After the Oberth, I switched into animation mode, and during the past few weeks, have animated 1670 frames (roughly 70 seconds), as well as rendered them, then found things that I've needed to fix, then rendered again, then found more things to fix, then rendered some more!
Here are some stills so far, some might already look familiar:
I've updated a few materials here and there for the ship exterior scene, most notably the materials on the Utopia planitia stations using the textures and materials created for my Miranda class ship
The characters were made last summer using Adobe Fuse. I had to push on getting as many characters done and animation ready before Adobe killed the app last fall. I have 23 characters made from Fuse, they were then brought into Adobe Mixamo, then imported into blender. From there I downloaded Mocap from Maximo and transferred the animations onto the characters along with some custom animations. For facial animation I am using Facecap for the iphone, then using Animation nodes to transfer the Facecap data to the Mixamo shapekeys.
Hair, was something I spent a few days on per character. The hair was made in blender using blender's particle hair systems. I like the hair one some of my characters more than others.....
The uniforms were modeled based off of the Mixamo default characters, then used textures for certain things such as the lines on the shoulders, zippers... I have tried using blenders cloth modeling tools but I have found it difficult to get a shirt to look like a shirt so.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Also found that the sim was super slow on my laptop. I was also considering looking into learning Marvelous Designer, but apparently you have to be rich to afford it, and I do not believe in subscription based applications for something I am doing for fun (for now)
Then 2 weeks ago the Unreal Metahuman creator announcement came out, and now I am sorta continuing on with these characters, even though once
Metahuman creator comes out I will be ditching them.
The next scene in my animation is in engineering. Currently setting it up now. This week I have updated some of the materials on the lights on the warp core, previously I was using an animated texture that when I ran an animation test, the order of the blinking lights was just not that great. I have since updated them using a color ramp material where I animate the UV mapping of the material.
I also created some LCARS for the consoles in Engineering, based loosely off of how the console is seen in
Voyager's science lab. Again created the LCARS in blender, then rendered using an Orthographic camera, then used as textures, including one that drives the aluminum look. Each of the individual screens that would have been a monitor on the show, are animated, I the models and materials setup to make them swappable.
I'm considering adding something to the middle of the room, either a console or dare I say it... a pool table. Reason why is that it will make animating the room with characters easier similar to how the pool table was used in TNG to keep the characters in the one section of the hallway for filming, or how in DS9 Obrien is always standing in 1 of 3 places in the Defiant's engineering...