Chenwei Liao

Initial Idea

When I first decided to animate the character into the environment as a full animation it was based on the theme of “demons”, so the silhouettes were all for a masked demonic leader, without the silhouettes my ideas and the story were vague, I think it’s when you start to draw the ideas that the ideas start to iterate, I used to sit on the edge of my seat and visualise what I wanted the character to look like. , I used to sit in my seat and imagine out of thin air what the character I wanted to make would look like, it was obvious to me that using silhouettes to visualise my ideas was the best. The reason I drew the silhouettes with objects in their hands is because I thought that the leader of a team of demons should be holding something like a lantern or a bell that lights the way for everyone in his team. This also inspired my idea based on these silhouettes.

Finalised character idea

After a lot of primary research and secondary research I finalised the final character idea, I thought that since I was going to be using motion capture for animation I was going to utilise the technique to the end, my environments and characters including animation poses were realistic in style so I was perfectly capable of making the main character one and six supporting characters So I can make the main character a Japanese character that can compete with the six supporting characters, and this is of course just an idea for the game. Since my CG animation will be a promotional animation for the game, I’ll need to iterate on this idea a bit more. After researching the interesting elements of the game “Ghost of Tsushima”, I thought that a character who could fight the six supporting characters should be in opposition to them, so the character should be a human. Continuing with the previous idea, if the protagonist is not the leader of the demons, he can still wear a mask, which is an image feature.And having learnt a lot about how Japanese culture is reflected in games through second-hand research of game studies, I was inspired by the Japanese cultural context, and the ronin was most appropriate as the protagonist of the character.

Character Story

In a Japanese town on the night parade of one hundred demons festival, a ronin came to an empty tavern to drink, and the table of the tavern was prepared for him in advance for the wine he wanted to drink, the people of the town have circulated a legend that every year there will be a demon in the streets tonight, but people do not know whether this legend is true or not, and every year on this night, they all hid in their homes and did not dare to go out, and this ronin in the unoccupied tavern to drink the wine and then walked out seemingly aware of what will happen. Suddenly a vortex was formed in front of the torii in front of the shrine, and one after another “human beings” wearing demon masks and kimonos came out of the torii. They are the “ghosts” of the night parade of one hundred demons Festival, and every year on this day they come to the town in a parade, as if to perform some kind of ritual. This year, a ronin has appeared to stop them from appearing in the human world.

I designed these seven masks based on traditional Japanese masks as a reference combined with emotions and personality traits, and selected one as the most suitable mask for the main character to wear, and the other six as the masks worn by the supporting characters, and each of these six masks contain their own emotions or personality traits, which is what they represent, and if this idea were to be made into a full game, the skills they would have in the game would be different from each other. The skills they each possess would vary depending on the abilities their own mask gives him.

This is a photo I took while travelling in Japan a few years ago. I am particularly interested in Japanese shrines, so I focused my attention on these buildings and analysed how they were designed and built. In my analysis, I came to the conclusion that the entire roof of a shrine is made up of two or even three or four small roofs, so if I were to make a roof, I could also make a number of small roofs and then mix and match different small roofs, so that I could build different Japanese roofs. Because Japanese roofs are very unique, I can use this first-hand knowledge to design roofs for buildings in my environment. There are also some street shops in these photos, which I plan to combine with the shrine to build my animation environment.

It’s been a long time since I was last in Japan and I thought there was a lot of things in the scene that I didn’t have enough of in my previous photos, so I tried to use the 360° street view mode in Google maps for my research, and it was actually very useful, I found out that there would be a few stone statues around the Japanese shrines and each one of them was different, and each one of them differed a little from each other . I think I can also carve a few stone statues in my scene, including I have analysed some residential buildings and restaurants in some streets in Japan, their shop fronts, some bay windows, windows on the exterior of the buildings and so on can be used as a reference for me to make the 3D model later on.

As a Game arts student, I often find myself observing the structures of buildings on the streets when I dine out. I ask questions like: How were these buildings designed? How would I model them in Maya? Is there a quick and efficient method? After being taught by my mentor in specialized classes, I learned about a technique called “modular modeling”. The essence of this method is to analyze whether the building you’re trying to recreate can be broken down into smaller parts. Then, after modeling each small part, you assemble the entire environment. I took some photos a couple of weeks ago, and I believe that these types of buildings are perfect for the modular modeling approach. This is because they share a common characteristic: many repetitive elements. This means that I can simply model one section of a wall and then replicate it to construct the entire building.

Before deciding on a way to make a project I usually do some simple experiments to make sure I can apply the method to my own projects, so I did some small experiments in maya through the method our tutor introduced us to and some notes I wrote myself, modular modelling is very interesting, I didn’t know about this method before my tutor told me about it, and it can certainly be used in my environment setup as well.

“Onmyoji” is a mobile phone game based on the story of “night parade of one hundred demons”, the character design is very tense, and the characteristics of each character are very striking, The game is very popular in China, and all the costumes are based on traditional Japanese kimonos, which I really like. I think I can also refer the way of character design from this game and use this way in my project.

“Ghostwire Tokyo” and “Sekiro” are both 3A games set in Japan, with realistic environments, and many of these games have been released in recent years. Their environment design and character design can be used as a reference for fmp. I think the environment and character design of these two games are worth studying because of the unity of the character and environment styles, and I need to control the unity of the environment and character styles when making realistic animation, to avoid a sense of incompatibility between the two parts of the animation.

“Ghost of Tsushima” is the only game that interests me and for which I bought a PlayStation 5, I’m an avid gamer and a game maker, I make games from the gamer’s point of view, analysing good elements and styles of games. This gives me a better understanding of myself as to why I’m making this project I’m planning, and will this project be enjoyable for gamers? What are some of these great games that I can refer to? The immersion of this atmosphere is very strong as this game is fought from a third person perspective, and many of the elements are things that are found in traditional Japanese architecture. The character creation, the realistic style of rendering, the animation poses, all of these are things I learnt from the process of analysing. The animation of my project would certainly be the same production way if made into a game.

I collected some images of my ideas while I was making the moodboard, and I think I can keep following that sense of atmosphere as I go on to the next step of making it