Character Exploration - Part 2 - Week 16 & 17

There is is not a lot to say about the last couple of weeks, BUT there is definitely something to show. The last two week it's been about animating our character with a walk cycle and two traits.

If you haven't read the previous blogs then here the Golden procedure of animating; Research, research>Planning>Thumb nailing>Blocking in the key poses>Do the inbetween poses>Polish>DONE.

Actually the very first thing is to think about the walk/trait. Figuring out how the character moves and where it moves from and to. Then some do a rough thumbnail and then moves on to the video reference (acting it out). I found it better to act it out from the beginning. In any which way you do it, you have to have a clear idea of what is going to happen before recording your video reference. Here is some of my video reference:-

Heh.. The humiliations we have to suffer, all for the glory of animation:-) Allright, let's have a look at what that turned into. This is NOT the final animations. They are close, but they can undergo change before the deadline in two week:-

The copyright is reserved for University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this time. Next time it will be the final thing. Looking forward to it:-) Hope you enjoyed the reading and animations...

Character Exploration - Part 1 - Week 11, 12, 13, 14 & 15

Final project of the school year, and probably the most important one as this one is the project thats is going to be send to the industry for judgement in the Glammies for the best first year student!!
In this project we have to design, model, rig, and animate our own character. The animation is going to be;

1. Walk cycle.
2. Traits
3. Lip-sync.
4. Performance.

The walk cycle does not have to be a vanilla walk (see figurative) or realistic, but suitable for the character. The traits are characteristics shown through a situation, and how the character reacts to the situation. The lip-sync. (lip-synchronization) is the synchronization of the characters lips to a monologue. And the performance is the acting to the same monologue.

My character is a 10 year old naughty angel called Emilia. Emilia find heaven incredibly boring, and wants to spice up the place with some pranks. The problem is that nothing goes unnoticed by God... Ill leave the rest up for the animation, cause that is our main purpose of this project To portray these characteristics through the design and animation.

The first week was spend on the idea and concept drawings. Nailing down the idea is the hardest part, cause of the number of character that has been made so far. Something truely original not only needs a good imagination, but also a lot of development after the initial idea. My initial idea had a feeling of realism instead of cartoony. When I pitched my initial idea to out teacher, Gareth Cavanagh (his blog), he pointed out that my idea was not suitable for the amount of modelling/animation that we are doing for this project. So I simplified the idea.
The first week of this project was the week before the easter holidays, so I had 3 weeks off to develop the concept of the character further.
This past week we have been modelling and setting up for the rig, so we are ready for animating the walk cycle next week.

My concept drawings developed alongside with the story of the character. So first I tried to nail down the gender of my character, then avanced to the head where I had to convey 10-year old girl to the audience. Lastly the body, which also had to say 10-year old, but still making the character interesting by playing around with the proportions.
When I finally had a clear idea of the character, I went on to the facial expressions and action poses. The whole process can be viewed here, by clicking the image below:-

After getting your character down with expressions and poses, its time for a model sheet. A model sheet is the character view from different angles, where the most common is a front and side view. As the purpose of the project is to animate rather than modeling character has to be split into simple shapes, and linked directly to the biped rig. This is visualized on the model sheet (click on the image, to view a bigger version):-

Now to the modelling, the part I really enjoy:-) I dont really want to comment on the modelling process, cause it gets quite technical, but if anyone has any questions they are welcome to ask.
After modelling comes the rigging, which was quite easy as it was linking the objects directly to the biped. Now comes the rush of the whole project, seing your character move for the very first time. Very additive to breathe life into something you made!!!
Unfortunately I have not got any animation to show, that will have to wait to the next time. But I got a beauty shot (a rendered pose, with nice lighting), and simple turn around animation (the halo got adding after I did the beauty shot):-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this time around. I am really looking forward to start animating Emilia. Hope you enjoy the reading, see ya next time....

Animals - Part 2; 4-Legged - Week 8, 9 & 10

A human has two legs, and with just two legs there is a lot going on in the body when we are walking. Then multiply that with two, so you got 4 legs and "two" hips to control. There you have our project; animating a 4-legged animal.
As with the last bird-project we had to hit three motions:-

1. From rest to walk (start)
2. Walking (walk cycle)
3. From walk to rest (stop)

The first thing was to determine which animal to go for. Although our brief says 4-legged animal, it was not allowed to choose lizards, crocodiles and general reptilian animals, as these have a very different walk than a horse, cow, cat, dog etc. As I am very indecisive and I did not know which animal to go for, as they all are interesting to explore. I made a list of animals, I wanted to animate and draw one at random. Fate wanted me to animate a bison.

Then the decision has down, the research could begin. I was actually surprised of how much video reference, there is on the net, of bisons. If you did the same search, but a more common animal like a cow, there is a lot less material. But if you chose a cow, you should be able to get some first hand video reference. And that was actually my backup, if there wasn't enough material on the net, I could use the cows motion as reference.
To be honest I did not do as much research and studying as I did with the bird project. This might have been why the project didn't turn out great. The method of research and study of the motion was the same as always; research > study > thumbnail.

If anyone is interested in the research and planning, here is some videos and my flat-work:-

The research is down and done, now the fun starts; animating. I got to say that it is much easier to animate a grounded animal, than a flying one. The walk cycle went very fast; keys > passing position > inbetweens > done. As our walk cycle was one the spot (the animal is not moving forward) there was a lot of issues that I didn't encounter until the stop and start. One BIGGG issues was the way I had constructed the rig. The rig is basically a biped (see the Figurative project's pull and lift) that is posed bend down to walk on all fours. The problem was that I put the feet/hands on the bones right above the hooves. This meant that the pivot point of the feet/hands wasn't centered on the hooves, which messed up my curves in the workbench. Sorry for the very technical talk, but in the end I had to do a lot of bodging (local animators term of having to do a lot of work, like keying every frame). The messed up pivot point also meant a lot of sliding feet hence the bodging.
This project got really tiring in the end, because I felt that I wasn't animating but just adjusting all the time. Alright lets have a look a the labor for the last three weeks:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In my opinion the is lots of stuff wrong with the whole animation. Some basic stuff is things like I didn't get enough weight in the movement. As the bison is such a heavy animal, you should REALLY feel when the animal steps and the weight balance is off-setting. I think my time could have been spend on improving the animation so much, if it hadn't been for the pivot point problem and sliding feet/hooves. I spend most of my time fighting against the rig, where we should have lived in harmony:-) But then that is a lesson to learn for the next time: make the rig properly!
I don't really have any wise words to say about this project. It kinda did the job, but I don't think I am going to sweep anyones feet away with this one.

The next project is going to be a long one; 6 weeks!! And we are getting into the easter holiday with 3 weeks off!!! So the next update to this blog lies quite a long way into the future. But maybe I will update it during the project, or maybe a surprise article... ehh, who knows, just a little head up on the time between this update and the next one.

I am all out of words now, and to be honest a bit hung over from my birthday, so I will rap it up here.

Animals - Part 1; 2-Winged - Week 5, 6 & 7

If anyone thought it was/looked difficult to animate a human character, then try animating an animal..
Our assignment was to animate a bird, going through it's whole range of flight motion. This was split into 3 parts:

1. Take off
2. Flight cycle
3. Landing

As always the first thing is to determine which bird you are going for. As our bird had to be able to go through the whole flight motions, then our choises were somewhat restricted. E.g. we couldn't choose a orstritch or a penguin, as these are non-flying birds.

At first I did not have a clear idea of which bird I wanted to do, so I just started on researching random birds. In my research I stumbled apon a lot of video reference of doves in slow-motion. When I first saw that dove's way of flying, I was immidiately hook on that. The dove's flight is actually very graceful, therefore I don't want to try and describe it with my halfbaked vocabulary so I'll show you; http://corbismotion.com/Popups/ViewClipDetail.aspx?clipID=7fffab13-0000-d4ed-2b02-162b20291941.

The dove's wings has a very wide range of motion which I imnidiately found interesting, though this would actually be the ting that would be biting my behind later on.

The whole research stage was pretty straight forward; find video and still image references. On the net there is a lot of reference material for a dove in slow-motion. The primary websites I use is; http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/, http://www.corbismotion.com/, http://www.gettyimages.com/.
These are great for getting video/still images references of any kind of motion, and the material is royalty-free. The first week went with only doing the research part. In the Computer Animation class we were kind of forced to only do the research for the first week, as they didn't teach us how to rig our bird untill after the first week. In my opinion this was a good forced choise, as it forced us to do all the research and planning for both 1. and 2. part of this project. The second part is about 4-legged animals, but more on that in 3 weeks:-)

In the same week as the research we went to Bristol Zoo Gardens with our lifedrawing class, which was a great oppertunity to get some first hand references material. Unfortunately for me it waas hard to catch the dove they had on camera, though they had an outdoor cantine area which provided the oppertunity of catching some pigeons on camera. Whenever you cant the first hand reference, then expand to animals/motion thats near the one you are lookng for.

After the research there is the planning of the animation, and here there is no shortcuts. Get the best reference you have got and start drawing your keys (key-poses). Personally I get the best understanding of the motion, by analysing each key then analyze and write down the motion between the keys. This kind of relieves you from drawing the inbetweens, but you still have the motion down on paper which is easier to look at when sitting infront of the computer instead of shifting between programs.

If anyone is interested in the research and planning, click the image below:

With the research out of the way, we can start animating!!!! BUT no, we need a rig first. In this part of the project we are going to build our own rig from the bones in 3Ds max. For this stage it is extremely important to have some proper reference material of the proportions and the skeletal system of your bird/character.
Understanding how the bird's skeletal system is build is going to help you very much when making the rig. Not only do you then know the proportions of the birds wings, spine and legs, but you also know how each bone interacts with the next one.
I learn quite a bit from rigging this bird, and I now can seen how rigging as a specialisation could be fun as you decide how the character should be able to move.

Now for the animating. Nothing special to tell here except for the usual; pose the keys > do the inbetweens > space the keys > time out the animation > polishing > done:-)
Sounds easy enough doesn't it?? Well it would have been if I wasn't so stupid as to forget some basic stuff, like proper spacing of the keys. I tell ya, if I were training to be a ninja I would get a beating from the master for forgetting the basic stuff. Luckly I am only training to be a ninja animator, where it is up to yourself to beat yourself up for poor animation:-S
Well enough about the mental pressures of strugling animator, time to show the labour:

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

If you want to have a look at any of the tests, here is the link; http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-1148849394693293515

In my opinion the level of quality animation increases from take off to landing. The take off is far from getting my own recognision of a job well done. This is of course my own fault, and I know where the problem occured; in the research stage. I did not have good enough reference material for the take off motion.

The flight cycle is decent and I dont terribly mind handing that in for assesment, though there was a big problem here aswell. In this stage I did actually have the proper reference material, the problem lied in the speed of the wings flapping. If you time the wings of a dove/pigeon flapping, you will probably notice that a whole wing action is 4-5 frames or 1/6 of a second long. If I had to hold true to this, and make the wings complete it's motion in 4 frame, it would be so fast that you would only see a blur of motion where the wings should be. So I had to compromise and use 8+ frames for the wings flapping, though this still kind of works. It doesn't scream dove/pigeon, but more of a generalized bird flight.

The landing is the best animation that came out of the last three weeks. I wouldn't nesseceraly say that it screams dove/pigeon, but it comes quite close to the real thing. That is not so much for the landing, but more for the small step after the landing which gives the animation that extra touch. Definately going to remember that for part 2 of this project:-)

Well, thats was everything I had to say. Hope you enjoyed the reading, and Ill scribbling some words down in 3 weeks for part two of this project...

Figurative - Week 2, 3 & 4.

Full on animation now!! Our first taste of animating humanish characters with arms, legs and spines. Our objective was split into three categories:-

1. Walking
2. Pushing/Pulling an object
3. Throwing/Lifting an object

The walking had to be a "vanilla" walk, which is a straight walk with no character like drunken walk/sad walk/happy walk and so on. Its actually really hard not to add any character to the walk. Further everyone in the world know how a walk should look like. They may not know about animation, but as everyone has seen people walking their whole life they immediately know if there is something wrong with the animation.
For the second and third objective we could choose between pushing/pulling and throwing/lifting. On both I put the responsebility of choosing to a coin. I figured that if I hated the decision I could blame the coin instead of myself:-) The coin decided that I had to do the pulling an object and lifting an object. There wasn't really any restictions on the two, only that it had to look realistic. So we could do cartoony pulling and lifting.

Before doing any work on the computers, you have to do the prober research and planning. Here the internet is a very good place to look for reference material. Especially places like BBC's motion gallery; http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/. But nothing beats doing the motion yourself and recording it, cause then you can get the exact angle and motion that you need. Personally I dont think I did the prober research for the walk, cause I relied too much on the stuff from the internet. I experienced on the pulling and lifting that I made it easier for myself to do the planning, by recording myself doing the motion. Here is some of the recordings we did of myself:-

The research for the pulling and lifting is a lot better than for the walk, in my opinion. We (Leon Roberts, Leon Dexter and I) set out one afternoon and did it all. When doing the research it is a lot better to be in a group. In a group there is more heads to get good ideas on how to do the action, more people to record and you look less silly if you are in a group:-)

The next step is to make the planning. This is done with simple thumbnails to illustrate the key poses. These key poses are also the ones that you use when making the animation. The planning stage is, if possible, more important than the research stage. The planning is basically what your animation is going to look like, so if you planning is crap then your animation is going to be crap. I found that the best work flow was to make the key poses, then describe what happens in between the key poses. In this way you will have the whole animation in front of you on paper, when working on the computer. Heres the thumbnail and planning I did for the three animations:-

The animations was a bit more work than I initially thought it would be. The best workflow I experienced was to make the key poses next to each other on the timeline, then do the poses in between. From there you space out your poses and work on the timing of the animations. Finally you start ajusting and polishing the animations. Since the walk was a "vanilla walk", there is kind of a formula that you can go by. You make two strides and loop it. Here you can get by with just 9 poses. So then you dont have too many poses to ajust. Where as my pulling and lifting had 32 and 27 poses. Still I found the walk to be the hardest one to animate, because the walk has to flow, where the pulling and lifting does not have to have this fluid motion. Allright wont bore you anymore with this animation talk. Ill bore you with the animations instead:-) Heres the product from the last three weeks:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I liked the "rig" (Rigging/rigged, in computer animation, parts of a 3D model are rigged so that an animator can easily select and move parts of the model (such as an arm or leg) without having to painstakingly select every single vertex in the desired part. The rig also helps the animator with constraints and movement of other attached parts.) from the walk a lot, so I played around with it whenever I got bored with the walk. Heres some of the stuff I made, while playing around with the rig:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Well that was it for this round, hope you enjoyed the reading and animations, I did making them:-)......

Timing & Mechanics - Week 11,12 & 13

Our longest project so far, and properly the funniest one. The project it self is like an avanced version of the Pacman project, in which the aim is to further our skills in animation and our understanding of timing within animation.
Our brief was split into three sections, which corresponded with the three weeks of project time:-

1. Single Objects
2. Linked Objects (Forward Kinetics)
3. Linked Objects with Inverse Kinetics

The first week we had to do a series of animations showing acceleration and deceleration. We were given a toy car to animate. It was good that they kept it simple for us, but they wanted us to animate the toy car like a real one which proved to quite a challenge. Though it gave me a good chance to really work with the timing in my animations. Further we got an introduction to the curveeditor within 3ds max, in which we can better control the timing and speed of our animations.
Two very important terms that we had to keep in mind was anticipation and followthrough. Anticipation is about showing a build up before an action, so in the car example the car would oves slightly backwards before accelerating forward. Followthrough is the action that extends the primary action, again in the car example the car would bounce forward when it stops harshly.
Heres a couple of examples of the car animations:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In my opinion this part of the project wasthe most boring bit. Its very restricting to animate the toy car, because it lack movable parts. Now the second week was a lot more interesting, where we dealt with linked objects with forward kinetics. Forward kinetics is when you move each seperate part individually. In this week we had to put aerials on our cars, then move on to make a swinging pendulum and an swinging arm.
I really liked doing the aerials, which were all about the bounce from the followthrough. I learned that if you get one part of the aerial to work, the rest comes automaticly. The same kind of goes with the pendulum, which is basically an inversed aerial. Now the swinging arm was our first taste of figurative animation, sweeetttt.... The biggest challenge about the swinging arm was not to caricature the movement too much. In animation we have to caricature the movements a bit to get the message across to the audience, but it easily gets too much and controlling this balance is what makes the diffence between animators and NINJA animators (aka briliant animators).
Talky talky, now showy showy:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I think the pendulum is the worst one of the three. We had to end the animation at some point within a reasanable time frame, and this makes it just a bit unbelievable because a pendulum would properly swinging for quite a long time. The arm is in my opnion a good start on the figurative animation. All ninjas need training before mastering the stuff:-)
Lastly the third week with objects linked with inverse kinetics. Inverse kinetics is when you only have to move the "master joint". In the case of a leg you would only have to move the foot or the torso and the knee would bend accordingly. Whereas compared to forward kinetics where you would have to bend the upper and lower leg to move the foot into the right position. if someone dont understand this stuff, I really wont blame them cause this stuff is even hard to explain as a tutor without showing it. Unfortunately I cant show you it because you have to sit infront of a computer with 3D Studio Max installed.
The character that we made and animated in the third week was a one legged egg with an aerial. Sounds a bit crazy, but heck its animation so you can do what-ever you want:-) Our objective was to animate the egg bouncing across the screen 3-5 times and coming to a stop. At first the IK (Inverse Kinetics) was a pain to animate with, and it still kind of is but Im begining to see the anvantages of it. Lets look at what came out of that week:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

Dont pay tooo much attention to the second animation with the egg falling. It was done as a quick reminder of how fun animation can be, when I got a bit tired of the primary animation.
I think I pulled the bouncing off quite well, but the ending is definately something I will get questined on in the critique. I just a hard a really time figuring out how to stop the egg, then spend some time in my room jumping back and forward to get the feeling of the stop. I realised finally that when you have that amount of momentum in you action, you dont stop suddenly. The momentum from the bouncing pulls you forward and to stop you have to do the extra small jump.
The final handed-in video was a compiled version of the best animations, which you can view here:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

In other subjects we handed in our first essay and did our first proper presentation in Contectual Studies. The presentaiton did go that good because I totally ran out of time and hand to rush things a lot. The objectives of the essay was to pick a 40-60 second scene from a movie or animation, indentify the themes and mood and analysize the ways these and conveyed to the audience through the filmic language. I chose the live-action version of Aeon Flux as my film and the final scene in that. It was a good study to get us into the academic way of looking at movies.

I think Ill stop here, because I WANT HOLIDAY!! So these were the words for this time, I hope you enjoyed the reading... Ill continue again in the new year, where we start on figurative animation!!! wuuuuhhuuuu, looking forward to that...

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE, AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Sound Sync. - Week 9 & 10

In the two weeks that's past we have been doing sound syncronisation. This project should give us an understanding of syncronizing our animation to a piece of sound clip. First we got teamed up in groups of three and twos, where after we got a random piece of music-soundclip. Our objectives after that was to;-

• Visually reprensent the dynamics and characteristics of the sound.
  
• Create a short animation based on the an abstract soundtrack.


• Work succesfully in a team situation.

As you can get from the brief this was our first team based project. The soundtrack was 30 seconds long, and we should split the 30 seconds between the group members. In our group we looked at the flow of the soundtrack and divided the soundtrack at the appropriate times. Luckly the flow of the soundtrack allowed us to split the sound into three parts with approximately 10 seconds each. After that we looked into the characteristics of the sound in our group, trying to find proper research areas and inspirations. With our sound we landed on a very simplified look, with inspiration in geometric shapes and bright contrasting colours. From there on it was every man for him self, with the occationally helping hand.

When I studied my part of the soundtrack (the last part) I somehow saw flashing light in my head. Fortunately I wasn't passing out or going insane, it actually worked for this piece of the soundtrack:-) So my inspiration would also come from neonlights aswell as the geometric shapes. With these things in mind, I continued to sketch down the idea that was forming in my head:-

And for those interested heres the research pages for the project:-

The first thing you have to do whenever you have a piece of sound you are doing an animation to, is to break it down. This is where we got introduced to barcharts. In the animation world barchart consists of bars in which you can indicate a sound, whether its music/beats or speech, on a frame by frame basis. Maybe a bit hard to understand, soo Ill just show it then:-

As you can see in the barcharts I had five beats to syncronize my animation to. I split the cube idea into those five beats, which you can see in the previous sketch. This was actually the hardest part of the project, in my opinion. From there is was just building the cube and setting up the lights and generally organizing my scene for the animation.
The animation part was really just a case of building the first animation then copy/pasting the animation to the appropriate places. This is where the reward comes in, if you did a good job on breaking down the sound. Because you can basically just look at your barcharts and copy/paste the animation in, according to your barchart.

I think this is more than enough talking, time to show the stuff. First video is my individual peice, and the second is the whole teams joint up animations:-

The copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries.

I think the project was really fun. Sure you get very tired of the sound that you got, but when you've successfully broken down the music and you do the animation and it actually syncs up is a great feeling. Though I properly got a bit too overexcited and work through last weekend, so I basically finshed my piece by tuesday. So I went on to start on a personal project of mine; reconstructing Calvin and Hobbes in 3D. Still working on this, and hopefully Ill finish it up soon so I can show it to you guys:-)

Well that was kind of it for this time. Hope you enjoyed the reading, looking forward to coming home for Christmas and New Year!!!