Month: February 2024

We plan to introduce some intriguing elements to the first part of the animation. For instance, the person being chased actually has a monster relentlessly pursuing them from behind. I’ve designed a sequence where the pursued individual uses a car in front to make a sharp turn, skidding on the ground like a cat before colliding with the vehicle. However, I realized this lacked a sense of humor in the animation, so I decided to have the character skid in place due to uncontrolled speed, followed by a zombie in a thrilling chase.

It’s not just similar; it’s identical.

Following this, I opt to stay true to the original animation, where after a brief chase, the character is finally caught.

Furthermore, the motion from the first shot to the subsequent one should be coherent, preventing the audience from feeling disconnected from the narrative.

 Subsequently, we can observe that some shots may be modified for enhanced animation effects. For example, characters can exhibit more dynamic movements when dodging; akin to dodging bullets, characters can perform evasive maneuvers to avoid the Taoist priest’s talismans (Zombies! Quick, use the Z-shaped dodge!).

In this context, we discover that our animation production often draws more inspiration from two-dimensional animation silhouettes.

This week marks the beginning of building our scene characters. We can use cubes to represent our basic characters. First, we open MAYA to create characters, and by altering the model shader colors, we can quickly differentiate each character. In the second step, we attach controllers to the entire character, allowing us to control the movement of our cube characters more efficiently. In fact, we can establish a parent-child hierarchy between the cube character’s head and body, eliminating the need for an additional controller ring.

At this stage, we can start creating our animation files, initiating camera movements based on our preliminary animation shots. This gives us our initial camera files. Through this process, we can roughly understand the direction of the entire animation and make timely adjustments, which facilitates the subsequent import of animated characters and accelerates the completion of the final piece.

We have two characters: one is a zombie, and the other is an infected zombie.

 In the character design phase, we annotate the character’s backstory, the setting of the story, what happened at that time, and why the character acts in a certain way. This allows us to understand our characters more deeply and ensures that we stay true to the original concept during the animation production. Moreover, due to the distinct character designs, we can create different animations tailored to each character to better align with their individual traits.