Before getting round to starting to animate the main scene I needed practice actually using the program to pose the character model and using the programs I was recommended. I decided that I'd make a render inspired by the war photography I researched alongside the concept art I made. More specifically I was planning on rendering an image that is a slight recreation of Don McCulin's photo.
The first thing I did was load up the model in blender ready to export as a FBX file, this file means I can save the model's textures and other bits of data inside the file. The original file is an obj which means I have to save the textures in a separate file.
I then opened up a program called Cascadeur which is a free program with built in tools to help me rig my characters and animate them, something required if I want to be able to pose my character. On their website I found a tutorial detailing how to rig a humanoid character in their program.
The tutorial was really useful, from the get go they specified each step in a straightforward manner and also provided a short gif showing what they explained in words.
I began work following this tutorial so I could have my character ready to pose and animate. However, I very quick ran into a problem. This program was made for models that already had a skeleton, I wasn't able to make the entire thing from scratch with just a mesh. To fix this I had to go on to the site Mixamo which has a built in auto rigger where I can upload my mesh even if it didn't have a skeleton.
Here is an example of how the program can use the range of animations in its database to animate any model/mesh I upload. It's really effective but the issue is that when using it the textures mess up, that's why I have to use a range of different programs for different things.
Using this I was able to create a skeleton shaped for the model but now I needed to find a way to either fix the textures or fix it to the mesh with working textures.
I went to get help online from people who had more experience working with blender and mixamo as hopefully they would know the solution. I found one person on an instant messaging platform called Discord which was where I was contacting others for advice previously. I spoke to one person who managed to figure out the issue.
They figured out that the program Mixamo added its own textures alongside with duplicates of the originals from the mesh. I was able to remove these and it meant I now had a rigged mesh ready for animating and posing. Next up would be importing this into Cascadeur so I could pose it for the experiment.
I was essentially back at the starting point of exporting the model as an FBX file and importing it into the program Cascadeur although this time the result was much better.
I started work at posing the model, trying to match it somewhat to the original image by Don McCulin. This was realtively simple as I just had to rotate the joints and such. The most difficult part was modelling the hands as it was unclear to see them, this required me reseting the model and modelling the hands before moving the actual arms. In the end I tried my best to make sure both hands were alligned enough and everything in the pose looked natural. These are screenshots of the work I did with posing.
Now I just needed to export the now posed skeleton to Blender and retarget it to the character's skeleton. However, this is where I ran into an issue. The program I use in Blender called Rokoko, which allows me to take animations from one model and put it into another, was not working with the skeleton I just posed.
I had to reuse Mixamo and find an animation that would fit this experiment, in the end I found one that was posed for holding a rifle. After exporting it to Blender I needed to get a model of a gun for them to hold, this was easy enough as I could just extract the model the same way as I did for the character. I resized it and rotated it to fit the soldier's hands, it wasn't perfect but it looked good for the experiment. Now came for actually rendering. I didn't use a background for this as I wanted it to feel like it was taken with only a flash in a very dark environment. I also kept the camera very close to the subject to make the photo feel claustrophobic. I also decided that since this pose was saved as an animation, I was going to also render this as a video for comparison with the image.
This was the final result:
I was pleased with this despite the many issues that came up whilst creating it. It helped to combine my idea with the influence from War Photography and build upon from my concept art. Though this also gave me some realisations. Making something as small as this took me an entire day to do and it had a lot of problems that needed solving or alternative solutions. The main scene of the film would be significantly longer than this and requires more complex work in terms of animations. This made me consider going straight into working with stills instead of fully animating it but I decided to stay on course. I'd have that as a backup if things didn't work out as planned and the benefit was now I knew how to use mixamo for the animations.