Final blog update

Today I finish my trip through the introduction to 3D animation. It was a hard, frustrating yet strangely fun module that overall has been fun and worth doing. Today, I brought all my work into Adobe Premiere. Using the numbered stills option made the images link together into a video and, after importing my audio file too, they were easily but into the sequencer. After this I simply chose high quality settings and then clicked export and it was done. I'm really happy with the final animation that I produced. After finishing this post I will submit my work on UDo and then I will be done.

Overall I think there are areas which I could have done better on in this module. I should have made more updates to the animatic, the animation itself could have used with a little extra polish and just having a stronger plan from the off would have helped. However despite all of this, I came out with some nice work which looks good, coordinates with my audio file and runs smoothly. I come out knowing the basics of the 3D animation and am very happy with what I produced, I look forward to future work in the area. 

Link to the video uploaded onto Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec0v5x8idDU&feature=youtu.be

My final animation video

The video in Adobe Premiere, ready to be exported

Maya done!

So today I can happily say that I have finished my Maya animation and rendered out the frames, ready to be edited in Adobe Premiere when I can get into the computer labs after the Easter weekend. To finish the animation I did a number of things.

First of all, I made a floor so that the people lying on the floor had some kind of placement in the world rather than just floating on the spot. I used a simple plane and left it at that. Next I moved onto creating the next set of rigs that would be introduced, the 3 lying to the left of the main rig. These rigs were easily made and positioned, beginning from the bottom rig and simply building them up. These were actually really fun to make and once positioned I moved onto the final rig in the scene. 

This rig is the falling rig, the one that screams and has the main rig reacting to it. Whilst getting the original position for the rig was fun, the animating of the rig was problematic. I did the face first, making sure to make it scared at the start and then leading into pain and releasing the audible scream. Whilst the positions themselves looked good, when played real time it was way too fast and cycled between too many expressions. This made me reevaluate and remove some of the faces, keeping the facial expressions more similar once it hits the floor. The fall itself wasn't too much of an issue, I did have it falling too slow, then too fast before I got the right velocity for the fall. Again, I struggled to get the impact to look significant. I improved it more yet I'm still not completely sure why but I'm not all that happy with the rig. However I decided to move on so that I will definitely hit the deadline. 

Next I moved onto checking the camera and making it fit everything into the shots at the right time. I had to change the position of the camera along with the rigs around the scene to get everything in at the right time. The right rig simply needed moving back and to the right a bit and then that fitted fine. The 3 rigs to the left were more of an issue. I couldn't seem to get them into the shot right as the camera faces front instead of towards them. As a fix to the issue I had the rigs slide into place when the camera turns right to focus on the other rig. This allowed it to be out of the opening shot whilst being in when they are meant to. The falling rig needed some subtle moving but very little. 

Next I moved onto checking that it would render out correctly. I had some issues with lighting and added an ambient light into the scene. I tweaked the light a little but I'm quite happy with how it renders out, the floor is clear and the rigs light quite nicely when using the Mental Ray render-er. After this I set it up to batch render with numbers in the name to keep it organised and to easily be imported into Adobe Premiere. All I need to do now is bring it into Premiere, add sound and then save the file out. Overall I am very happy with the animation, being something I'm not confident in, I'll give a proper evaluation of the project when I add my final update to this blog.

The finished scene in Maya

 Example shot of rendered frame #1

Example shot of rendered frame #2

An overdue update

So I'm posting after quite a while and I've made quite a bit of progress since last time! I animated the tongue with ease and went through the mouth animation again, this time furthering the extremity of the smiles and anger. The reason behind doing this was learning more of how to use the rig from a friend and turning on the smooth mesh layer rather than the dummy layer. This enabled me to get a lot more control over the mouth without getting ugly artifacts. I also made sure to add some awkward smiles between the dialogue like I first decided in my animatic. 

Next I animated my camera roughly. Obviously since I didn't have my additional rigs in yet, this was just more to have it frame the scene and I will likely change later. I then added my second rig. So far he is simply lying on the floor but I may do some small animation for him too, just moving slightly or something of that nature. Anyway, the animation is coming together and I have higher hopes for it than I originally did! Next I plan to get the rest of the rigs into the scene and do any animations that I want to with them. Following that I will adjust the camera (if necessary), animate the main rig's eyes and look at rendering things though I may decide to add a backdrop to the scene then too. 

Showing the angle and location of my camera along with the first additional rig

A more detailed version of the anger/wince towards the end

Some beautifully awkward smiling to add flavor and variety

Progress!

Since my last update I have made quite a bit of progress on my animation. I cleaned up what I did previously quite a bit as their were some problems and mistakes whilst also adding a lot more animation to the face specifically. As for the previous problems these included accidental keyframes (only a few!), arms that turned the wrong way and the entire leg sequence which just seemed weird.

As for the facial animation, I started by animating the jaw opening and closing by having a mirror next to me as I worked for reference alongside my rotoscoped video's and pictures. This took a while but was relatively smooth. Next came the wideness of the mouth, again using the same method and going pretty well in my opinion. I did a little work on the eyebrows but I will have to touch these up again at another time. 

Next I plan to animate the tongue followed by the eyes and eyelids. I'm not too worried about the tongue but I think that I will struggle to make the eyes believable. I also want to animate how much he is smiling throughout the animation as it should look more forced towards the end though that will be done last if I have the time today.

An example of the mouth animation

A screenshot of some of my cleaned up animation

My Maya setup featuring a front camera, facial camera, 

side camera and perspective camera

Facial expressions study

This week we were set the task of using the Morpheus rig (from the eleven second club) and displaying 5 important emotions with it. This task taught me a lot about just how much the face moves with emotions, it surprises just what parts of your face move from them. I have run into a problem however as I cannot get the textures onto the rig and thus I have to render it using the Maya Hardware 2.0. renderer which also keeps the rig controls in the render and so the face is slightly obscured. I have all the files saved however so I will update the blog with new renders tomorrow most likely.

Anger

Disgust

 Happiness

 Sadness

 Surprise

Rig change and block out

I finally started my animation today. I also decided on a change of rig after playing more with the Morpheus rig. The reason I decided to change rigs was that Morpheus had a lot of options and I felt for my first human animation that it would be better to use a more simple and user friendly rig to start with so I settled on the Max rig from the eleven second club site.

I took my animatic's screen shots and made them with my rig. At the moment they're not perfect but get the general gist of the animation down. Next I'll be adding in some transition key frames and then going through and polishing it off. 

Animatic version 3

This is my third and final animatic. This focuses on the body gestures and language. I'm really happy with it and I think that it could be really helpful for my final 3D animation.