Stylized Rendering

Project Name: Azalea

Skeletal animation is an animation generated by rigging various parts of the character's body model to the "bones" that are connected to each other, and to make character act by controlling the bones position, rotation direction, and zooming in and out.

Toon Rendering is designed to give computer-generated images a hand-drawn-like effect, in order to make the image look like a comic or cartoon. It is a new technology that emerged around the early 2000s as a by-product of computer graphics and is mainly used in video games.

Character animation is generally defined as the art of making a specific character move in a two- or three-dimensional environment. The final outcome of this project is a 6-minute 3D character animation short film.

Azalea is the name of the heroine of the animation, and at the same time, Azalea is also the name of a kind of flower. The azalea flower is the thread of the whole story. In the animation, the heroine chases the azalea flower, leading the audience's eyes from the beginning to the end of the story.

The theme of the story is about war and peace. The story’s historical background is set in a fictional country in East Asian in the 1920s. The girl Azalea's father is an army officer, but in order to escape the war, Azalea is still displaced. The animation contains a traditional saying that when an azalea falls, it indicates that a person will die, and all the storylines confirm this telling.

In the physics engine, the system that simulates the effect of cloth through physical calculation can be called the cloth system. It can not only be used to express the fabric effect of characters' clothes, but also can be applied to hair, pendants, etc. In this project, a mass spring model was used to simulate the cloth, and a lot of cloth decomposition computation time was spent on the process, as the character Azalea was wearing a long dress and long sleeves with a bow on her head. Also, since the clothes are very long, to avoid bugs, the number of collision iterations is adjusted very high, which greatly increases the rendering time. In the mass-spring model, the cloth is modeled as particles on a mesh, which are connected by spring dampers. Each spring connects two particles and generates a force based on the particle's position and velocity. Particles can be affected by gravity, and springs can be set to different types, such as extension springs, shear springs, and bending springs.

I tried two different cartoon rendering scripts, direct cel-rendering and cartoon texture rendering. A comic-like render output can be achieved. But requires light sources from a specific angle.

After completing the animation part of the project, I render the project for first time. I found many bugs and problems in the first render, and then spent the remaining half a month rendering the final version while modifying the Maya file. The whole project as an animation is completed. But in fact, the final version still has some limitations.