with Nigel
This week’s session focused on continuing the development of research design strategies and methods. We explored how different methodological approaches shape a project and how choosing the right method depends on the research question.
The lecture helped clarify the relationship between research design and methodology, especially how they work together to structure a study. We also looked at key reference materials that can support our understanding and guide our decisions when planning research.
with Ting
This week in class we were introduced to creature animation and started preparing for a group creature study presentation. We were divided into groups and asked to choose an animal, then prepare a presentation for the following week focusing on its anatomy, locomotion, movement patterns, and overall characteristics. My group chose bears, so we started researching references, watching documentaries and locomotion videos, and analyzing their movement frame by frame. It became one of the most interesting parts of the course for me because the deeper we looked into the anatomy, the clearer it became how directly structure affects locomotion, weight distribution, rhythm, and balance. Observing how the spine, shoulders, hips, and paws work together during movement was very useful from an animation perspective.
For the dialogue shot assignment, I decided to focus entirely on polishing the body animation before moving into facial animation and lip sync. This was also the main direction of the feedback I received. I worked on making the poses feel less floaty and more grounded and snappy. One of the biggest challenges during this process was maintaining continuity through the spine, neck, and head movement while still keeping the performance dynamic and readable. After several passes, I managed to make the movement feel more connected and natural. I also pushed the poses further by exaggerating them more and prepared the shot for the following week’s feedback session.
with Serra
This week’s session focused on learning the basics of NDisplay in Unreal Engine. After being introduced to the technical setup and seeing examples in class, we experimented with creating our own animated visuals and environments using the NDisplay system.
I especially enjoyed the hands-on aspect of the session because it allowed us to freely test different visual ideas and immediately see the results in real time. Creating my own animation setup was both fun and useful for understanding how projection, camera perspective, and screen space interact inside Unreal Engine.
Outside of the class exercises, I also started discussing ideas for our group project. We decided that we wanted to experiment with TouchDesigner and explore AI as the central theme of our project. At this stage, we mainly focused on research and idea development. We watched tutorials about TouchDesigner AI plugins, training models, and interactive workflows to better understand what kinds of systems and interactions we could create.
During this early brainstorming process, we developed a few possible concepts related to AI learning, behavior imitation, and data visualization. These ideas became the foundation for the feedback session in Week 4.