Design Process 

​

1. This is my dog Brooklyn, he is three years old now and this frisbee is his favorite toy. He plays it everyday and because I am at home more than my parents do, I am the one who always play frisbee with him. However, for the past few weeks I am working hard for my midterm so I always refuse to play with him when I am working. And he usually would get upset. So when I chose the behavior upset I just thought it would be so interesting to depict my dog. After some research, I found every dog has different way to show it is upset. For my dog, he will make sounds like bird chirp. Also he will keep staring at me at the same time to show his eagerness for playing. Also, I want to add myself to the animation scene because I can also use my behavior to side reflect his upset.

​

​

2. I found this dog model in the unity assets store which is very similar to my dog so I bought it. At first I wanted to export to MAYA to change some details but the rigs just all went off when exporting to MAYA, so I decided to do it all in Unity this time. Another reason is I am quite familiar with MAYA but I had never done a project with Unity, so I found it is a good opportunity this time to practice.

​

​

3. There are built-in animations along with the dog model, so I have to figure out all the behaviors Brooklyn has while he is upset and connect them in the animation controller. I adjusted transitions between all the animation presets to make it more coherent.

​

​

4. The first animation, walk, for the dog is static although its leg moves normally. I ask one of my friends who is good with Unity how to let a object move automatically and he told me it needs to add a script. Although this is a C# script and I have never written it before, it is not hard though since I found reference on the Unity website. And it is not very different from other coding languages. 

​

​

5. Then is finding my own animation in mixamo, because my expected scene is Brooklyn wants to play when I am working, so I searched for sitting and eventually found sitting-typing and sitting-refusing. After I put them and connect both animation in the animation controller in Unity, I start to look for room models that fits the scene. And I surprisingly found that my model perfectly fits into this scene, I just need to do some minor adjustments for the chair and the size of my model.

​

​

6. The next step is designing the setting, to make the room more "livable" and realistic, I downloaded some shelf, plants, a laptop and a mouse. The most importantly, Brooklyn's frisbee! Then it is the light setting, I fount the original window is dark so I made a emission map myself in Photoshop and now the window looks more real

​

​

7. The last step in Unity is I set 5 camera angels and recorded the animation for each camera setting, this is because I want to make it a real, complete animation later so each angel is purposeful for my story telling.

​

​

8. The final step of the project is to edit the five camera angels in premier pro. I showed the frisbee to let audience know that's what brooklyn wants to play and I will give him a close up shot to show his emotions. Also, finding the sounds is a difficult part. I also panned the audios so if you watch it with headphones it will be really realistic sound effects. I also made a intro and a outtro to complete the whole animation. It is really fun this time because I experienced a thorough process of making a complete narrative animation. From animating to coding to scene setting to camera setting to video editing, it is a great combination of skill sets. However there are still some thing I can improve like next time I can try to model the dog myself and make the animation as well.