/ Design Process / 

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1. League of legends is my favorite game and Akali, this oriental female ninja, is my favorite champion in the game. So I think it would be really fun making a interaction between me and her. In addition, another incentive for me to do so is one of my childhood buddy, Richard, switched his college major from Maths to Game Design. As his only friend in this field, I really would like to make something that could tell him how cool the things we can create and support his sudden decision. Finally, since I made a 30s aniamtion film in the midterm so this time I am confident that I would make something bigger and more delicate.

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2. The first step was actually very complicated, since the midterm feedback is my dog is more realistic than my avatar, this time, after trying all the tools we used during the class, I gradually selected the head model we made in the blender Facebuilder. However, this means I need to connect the head model to the body. Hence, I downloaded a body with the motion-capture suit and a ninja body then I spend one night combining my head and these body models.

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3. After finding Akali's free 3D resource on sketchfab, I downloaded her and put her into Mixamo for first-phase animations: A backflip, a front flip, an attack, a walk, a talk, and a turn. Then, I added more actions to her mixamo animations like spinning her weapon in Maya. Also, there is a bug that I cannot import her weapons to mixamo since it will distort the weapons, I have to also animate all her weapons frame-by-frame in Maya. This step spent me the most time.

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4. After I finished animation in Maya, I export the fbx for different Akali models into Unity, where I am going to build the scene here. At first there is some minor material problem but fortunately it did not take me too long to fix this. After finding all the animation works well I decided to work on the animation of my avatar. (The reason why I seperated the different animations on different Akali replicates is actually saving my time choreograph the whole story. Since it is a 1-minute long animation, it is hard to calculate how many frames each action takes if all the animation is on one Akali and matching the counterpart interaction on my character, having each animation in seperated character saved me tons of time rendering and recording)

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5. Then is I began working on with my avatar. Again, like I mentioned, I store different animation on different replicas of myself. At last, there are 13 different models with different animations: 4 for Ninja Kevin, 3 for normal Kevin and 6 for Akali. All the materials and animations worked well in Unity. After assuring this, I started my scene buiding.

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6. Scene Buiding is the funnest part, since I already had experience in Midterm, and for one of my humanity courses in NYUSH, I actually build a bridge, a park and a shopping mall in Unity, it is not very hard. Also, I downloaded this summoner's rift from the Internet which is free liscensing for student work. After correcting all the material problems, I exported it into Unity.

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7. For my story there are two scenes, where the first scene is in a room, it is so similar to my midterm project so I finished this setting really fast. I downloaded pictures from the game interfaces and put them on to the screens in the room

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8. The new features I used here in advance of my midterm project is I leveraged the skybox function in Unity and changed the normal realistic sky into this game-liked purple-pink magical sky. I also added fog in my scene to make it more realistic.

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9. Then I set up the cameras, since I have so many animations, I set up more than 15 camera angels and I used this official plug-in inside unity to record all the camera angels. The process is really fun and it did not take too long since I planned all the story boards and the recordings are just the same as they supposed to be

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10. The final step of the project is to edit the 15 camera angels in premier pro. This time I deliberately used Chinese caligraphy font and bilingual subtitles to match the style of my animation. I also used Akali's sound and also recorded my sound for the final movie. I also played with some clips by using After Effects to create a vfx, like my clothes change and how I appear inside the game. In summary, this project is really challenging but I enjoyed each progress I made. I think after this semester I am able to produce such content individually and fluently. Maybe I will consider do a part 2 during the winter break.