Spirited Away is one of my particular favourite anime, it was released in 2001 and I already watched the anime when I was ten years old. After I had the idea of making Japanese environmental streets and characters based on the story of Night parade of One Hundred demons, I re-watched the anime to analyse the character designs, the animation of the characters, and the construction of the sets. Many of the characters in this anime are based on ancient Japanese folklore demons.I think I can also make my character with reference to demon archetypes and some of the masks etc. of demons that were aborted in Japan.

1.What era of Japan is this setting set in?

2.Is the setting a street or a corner or an alley?

3.What buildings are on the street? Restaurants or merchandise stores or residential buildings?

4.If characters are demons， how many demons characters do I need to make? Are there any parts that it’s particularly difficult to manage risk before making these characters?

5.If I make human characters, how do I base them on the story “night parade of one hundred demons”? How many human characters do I need to make?

1.The environmental background is modern Japan

2.The environment should be a street

3.The street should contain restaurants, residential buildings and some small stores

4.Demon crafting is very difficult and requires a great understanding of the muscular outcome of the character or it will affect the bindings later on.It may be necessary to make four characters and then make duplicates of multiple characters, and then differentiate them by differentiating materials in areas such as clothing or skin.

5.If the character is human, I would just sculpt a mannequin and then make costumes, masks, etc. on top of the mannequin to make it look demonic. I can copy some characters and then adjust the diversity of costumes and masks to differentiate.

Initial idea

In the street at night, the door of the antique shop is blown open by the wind, and the clock in the window is hundreds of years old, so why has no one ever bought it out? It made a loud noise as if it had been brought to life, but the noise sounded like the devil’s teeth chattering, making the whole antique shop tremble!

Idea after iteration

After watching “Coco”, an animated film from Disney, I was inspired to add characters to my scenes to make them more vivid. The film “Coco” tells a story based on the intersection of the Day of the Dead and the real world. The main character mistakenly enters the world of the dead and seeks a way to return to his real world, but on this journey discovers that many of the undead find ways to “return” to the real world during this holiday. “to visit their families and descendants in the real world during this holiday season. I think this story is very similar to the Chinese “Zhong Yuan Festival”. On the day of the festival, the guards in the world of the dead will pretend to be asleep, so that all the dead can go back to the real world to “walk around” to see their families, which also allows these dead to rest in peace. to rest in peace. I think in my original idea for the street scenes I could use this as a backstory to add characters and then iterate on my own FMP story to make it easier to animate in post-production.

Inspiration

The environment rendering style I chose was realistic, and it just so happened that the third idea, “Japanese Streets”, was more appropriate for me to make realistic streets and have a realistic character on the streets. Since my original idea was to create a dark atmosphere with some objects, and since there is a Japanese legend called “night parade of one hundred demons”, I thought it would be a good idea to refer to this legend to create a dark atmosphere at night.

hyakki yagyo(“Night Parade of One Hundred Demons”) is a concept in Japanese folklore, where a parade composed of a hundred kinds of yōkai march through the streets of Japan at night.

One of the spookiest things in Japanese folklore is the hyakki yagyo, or night parade of one hundred demons. On inauspicious nights, all the yokai, ghosts and other supernatural creatures parade through the streets of Japan, singing and dancing wildly.For anyone foolish enough to be outside, or even to peek out of their window, an encounter with the pandemonium of the dreaded night parade will result in death, or bring spirited away by monsters. In order to protect yourself from danger you can either chant a magic spell or obtain handwritten exorcism scrolls from onmyoji spell-casters. Best of all is to stay inside! 

The lore is rather scary, and my idea was to create a setting and characters based on this lore that would suit a realistic rendering style and not be as scary for a wider audience.

The First One

The Third One

These are the other two proposals I produced, both of which are ideas I’ve been wanting to produce for short films since I studied Game Arts, but I didn’t end up choosing them because they would have required a team of people to work together on them, but as I chose to work on the project alone in my third year of college I needed to take control of the risks of the project.

Unreal Engine Work Research

Make a beautiful realistic rendering style environment , I can choose to make characters or

not, most of the shots are to set off the atmosphere and texture of the scene, often controlled

within two minutes, and need to match music and sound effects.

In order to bring out the environment of atmosphere of the street, I think lighting is a very important part, and in the later research I think I will focus on finding some works with a strong environment of atmosphere of the environment as secondary research.

These three types of streets are the ones I’m most interested in making, but which one specifically should I choose to make and why did I choose this one to make? I need to think about what kind of things will happen in this street, this street is not only a scene for CG animation, but also used as a level in the game, so I need to design a rough rendering atmosphere for this environment.

Before I started this project I thought that the character would be simpler than the environment project because it was just one object, whereas in the environment project there are many different objects. But I was proved wrong. Over the last four months we have been working on this whole character under the guidance of our professor, from the initial research to the final animation, which has taken a lot of time and I think is much more complicated than the environment project. Because I chose Overwatch as a style reference, I opened Overwatch a lot during the project to research and find references. I think it’s very different to play a game with an eye for appreciation and study at the same time. How were the materials adjusted? Why does the game flow so well? How do they make such interesting animations ? These are all questions that I often think about when I play my chosen game. I think this is a kind of “learning” for us Game arts students.

At the beginning of this project I watched some of the 3D character making process posted by some of the artists on Art station, I was a bit timid after watching the process because at that time I thought I would not do well with the whole process, but then I thought I would lose my confidence if I was worried about not doing well before I even started. In my previous projects I had found very little reference and research which made the next part of the painting process very difficult and resulted in a low grade, but in this project I found a lot of reference and research to support my character design, High Poly sculpting, Low Poly topology, animation and so on. So I think that’s one of the things I’ve done well. But at the same time I did not do enough in this part. After all the steps I realised that I could not only look for research on my chosen game, but I could also look for other games that are similar in style to my chosen game as a reference and I think this would also enrich the character. This is something I can improve on in the future.

During the sculpting process I abandoned some parts of the project because I couldn’t sculpt them and I think that was a big problem for me in this project. I had to consult with my professor to get everything right. To be Honest, I learnt a lot from this project, not only in my field but also in my future. I learnt the whole process of character creation in this project and although there are many companies in my research that have different positions, learning the whole process of character creation will allow me to be more efficient in my future studies in the field of game art. I am grateful to the professor for teaching me the standard character making process, I did not understand the standard before and just thought it would be fine to make it, but this was wrong and I will remember the professor’s teaching and correct it in my future learning process and career.

Collaboration With Game Design

At the beginning of the project, I aimed to be fully responsible for a whole section and to act as a part leader for the whole project. For example, I was responsible for some of the animation and the design and drawing of the entire UI. In my opinion, the core of a collaborative project is ‘collaboration’. The power of a team is huge. For example, I was very confused before the project started, but after discussions with my team members, I was given a lot of advice and help, which gave me a concrete direction to complete my part of the project. During the three months of the project, the whole team met weekly at school to discuss and communicate in detail, communication skills and social skills are very important in this kind of collaborative project, having good communication skills makes it twice as effective. At the beginning of the project, I was always afraid of communicating with others because I was afraid that I would be looked at differently if I didn’t agree with them or if I was responsible for a part that didn’t please the other members. However, I also realized my shortcomings in this project, for example, I was not familiar with the software. We used Unity to create the game, but I was not familiar with the game-making process in Unity, so I needed the help of the game design students when I imported the work into Unity for editing in order to create it successfully. I think I should learn more about different software in my future studies, and I should master the basic process of different software so that I can use different software and work with my team members on different projects. I think my shortcoming in this project is that I did not produce much and did not contribute much to the team, I hope to be more active in future projects and contribute to the team. I also learned a lot from this project, including the laws and drawings of pixel animation, the drawing of pixel characters, and basic concepts of game UI creation and interaction. In terms of software, I have improved my knowledge of pixel software such as Piskel and Aseprite. I also learned about the Unity UI production process and some basic operations in Unity.

A Bone To Pick

In my professional practice work, I chose to produce two projects as my final product, which I had to do in collaboration with my game design classmates, and I chose the project “A Bone To Pick” as my second project because I was interested in 3D scenes so I thought I could produce two projects at the same time. I was interested in 3D scenes so I thought I could work on two projects at the same time. As this project was optional, I created a few pages of what I thought were the more important steps in the process. Although there wasn’t much communication between students on this collaborative project, this project tested the communication with my tutor, who was like an art studio director in his work, he needed to guide and control the style and quality of all the work, so I had good communication with our tutor throughout the project and I was able to make adjustments to the project in time after my tutor made suggestions and feedback. I think this is one of the things I did well, and I think I also strengthened my communication and problem-solving skills through this project, not just with my classmates and friends, but also with my mentor or leader. Because there are so many roles in a team, I need to deal with each one of them. However, through this 3D game project I have also deepened my understanding of scene modeling, including the use of Boolean operations, become more proficient in modeling techniques, and deepened my understanding of the underlying logic of materials, which will allow me to add more detailed materials to different models in the future PBR process. This project was a real-time render in Unreal Engine and as I am interested in this area I studied a lot about the material nodes, the sky background, and the involvement of lighting during the project. The performance of the materials directly determines the quality of the rendered image and the visual experience of the player. I think I left a lot to be desired though, such as the fact that I used free plants. Although I have the support of my tutor, I think I need to plan my time so that I can do all the scenes in my future projects by my own hands, which will also make me feel more confident in this direction of my learning 3D scenes.