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. 

Animatic version 3 screenshots

Here are the frames for the 3rd version of my animatic. This one is just focusing on the main character of the animation and his body language and gestures. I think it looks quite nice, having an actual proportioned body that will really help with future efforts on the project. I will finish aligning this with my soundtrack and upload a video of it here soon.

Animatic V3 Progress

I am currently working on a third version of my animatic, mainly focusing on body language using the rotoscoping I did previously. I am over half way through and will finish it by the end of tomorrow. The rotoscoping is really helping me achieve a lot more realism in my animatic and hopefully that will transfer through to my animation.

Rig

So I chose my rig. It is the Morpheus rig off of the 11 second club resource page. It has a lot of customisability, is easy to use and has great facial control which was something I was very worried about. Because of the customisability I won't need to change the rig for the other characters in the clip.

Rotoscoping the face?

Last time I posted I said that I was planning to rotoscope footage of my face. I've decided not to do this. The reason is that I really can't see how useful it would be compared to the actual footage of the video itself. I may be wrong in this and will bring it up with my lecturer next week but for now I think I will just work on the animatic itself. Below you can see the face footage and the layout I would have done for my rotoscoping file.

Rotoscoping

This week we were set the task of doing some rotoscoping. This involves recording video footage of something and then drawing over the top of it. In this case I am just taking the most extreme frames of my footage as it is just reference for my unlike if it was being done for a 2D animation.

The first one I did was of just a random action, me looking for something I had lost. First is the video footage, then the most extreme frames and lastly my rotoscoped skeletons showing what I got out of it. The result was surprisingly effective, there's a lot of subtle body movements and language which would add a lot of authenticity to an animation. 

The next piece of work is the same process but done for my actual 3D animation idea. Whilst not perfect in terms of body language it still shows a lot of information which I would have likely missed if I went straight to 3D animation. 

I have footage and extreme frames of a zoomed in shot of my face for my animation too which I will do soon, though I am having a bit of trouble as there are a lot more shots for it. Honestly for that part I think that the video itself would be more useful but I will do the exercise anyway as it could inform me of important features that I am missing. 

Animatic version 2

So I redid my animation last night because I wasn't really happy with my original. I've kept it all very similar but have just made the animation frames a little cleaner and a bit more flowing. Anyways, new, cleaner animatic here.

Ball animation

It's a ball! I still need to add squash and stretch to it but ballsssssssssssss

Storyboard update and Animatic

So recently I made a digital version of my storyboard and created an animatic of it as well. On the storyboard I kept most everything the same yet when it came to the animatic I found that a few things worked better in different ways, for instance the falling girl falls behind the main character and is visible when she hits the floor, which is better in my opinion. Honestly, I feel that I've been doing really bad in this module and that it deserves more time yet I have been stressed trying to keep up with the workload of my other modules as well along with having a bit of a personal nightmare of recent. Hopefully in future I will make some better work. 

Storyboard

So here is the first version of my storyboard, sorry for the bad quality of the photo. This along with the script get across the idea of my animation concept and will hopefully make some great work! The drawings aren't detailed but then being a storyboard it just needs to show off the general concept at this stage, plus the rigged models I am looking at using are very cartoon-y, having very few details on their bodies. Despite my initial worries about this module I am enjoying it quite a bit at the moment. 

Script

So here's the script for my animation. I think it's all correctly formatted but there may be some errors that I can't recognize. I've had a look on the internet through various scripts (The BBC site particularly has a good variety) and think this is fine. It's a simple but effective script and I'm happy with it.

Sound Clip

Today I found my sound clip that I wish to use for my 11 second animation. It's an excerpt from 'Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs'. During the clip only Sid the Sloth talks so I think that the animation itself shouldn't be too bad, but I will start as early as possible to make sure I finish it to a good quality. The next step for me is to write a script and after that, plan and create the storyboard. I already have a pretty good idea as to what I will do with the animation but that could change later. I can't link the sound but here is the download address: http://www.dailywav.com/sites/default/files/wavs/nobodyGotHurtExcept.wav

Presentation and getting to know Maya animation

This week I had a group presentation on the golden age of animation to present to my course mates. My role in the group was to do some methods of animations they used during the age (1920 to 1950) and any ways they could improve the quality of them. I researched into stop motion, the technicolour strip camera (both 2 and 3 strips) and the creation of animation studios. However, on the day the other person talking about methods didn't show up and so I had 20 minutes to research into Cel animation as well which was not ideal.

Stop motion was used a long time before the golden age, as early as 1897 with the production of 'The Humpty Dumpty Circus'. It involved taking many photos and just putting them together. They could use dolls, clay or Plasticine models or even people as the subject of these photos. Whilst not huge in the age, some people did still use this method. It was incredibly cheap, not needing any cutting edge technology. Big teams weren't necessary for production. It's a simple process. However there were cons to the method, them being that the animations they created were rarely as enthralling as the new animations being produced by Walt Disney or other big names of the day. There were a few gems of the time though such as King Kong in 1933.

Cel animation was very popular during the age. It allowed animators to separate different parts of the animation, allowing them to reuse certain frames or processes such as a walking animation, saving time and thus money. It reminds me of photoshop in many ways, allowing them to keep many layers the same yet just editing a few such as the face or mouth. This was called limited animation. This was very popular for TV animations as it allowed studios to release their work much quicker enabling them to have weekly shows and the like.

The studio system saw a group of people all working on the same project with their own roles. Many people were hired to tween, that is to do the in between frames to make the animation look smooth and polished. The first know studio is that of Barre Studio in 1914 which quickly caught on in the industry. The system helped Disney brothers Animation Studio win the first ever Academy award for best Animated Short Film. The pro's for the system is that it enables work to be produced quickly, leading to weekly broadcasts being viable or longer feature films to be produced. However it came with the downside of having to hire an entire team of people costing a lot of money.

Technicolour cameras enabled people to saturate the colours of their work by splitting them and having them go through different colour filters, red and green initially before they added a blue filter too. It was used between 1922 and 1952 mainly and was originally a tricky device to use. It originally had to be operated by a trained professional in the cinema to keep frames aligned and looking correct. However, over time they managed to improve the process, adding another filter and eventually helping the film The Flowers and the Trees by Walt Disney to pick up the first animated film award.

Since the presentation I have looked at animating in Maya. I have got to know how the graph editor works (just the basics of course) and looked at how to insert and edit keyframes on the timeline. There is still a lot for me to learn but I feel I have taken the first steps in a long path.

Brief and first presentation

In this semester I will be learning and doing several things. I should finish the module with a basic understanding of animation history and principles, planning an animation, key framing, paths, graphs and dope sheets, timing and spacing, weight and mass, secondary motion, anticipation and follow through, deformers, forward and inverse kinematics and blocking. What I will actually create in this module is an 11 second animation using an existing rig and audio of my choice, making the rig animate to the audio and seem correct.

So far we got a quick look into the very first animations and animation methods through history and I now have to give a presentation with my group on the golden age of animation. I am talking through some of the methods they used during this period.

All in all I'm quite looking forward to this module, it seems like it could be a lot of fun and using a preexisting rig makes things a lot easier.