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!!!

Character Design - Week 7 & 8

The last couple of weeks we have been thrown into the world of character design. This process is very important for the industry. With this process helps the people working on a movie to get a feel of a character within the story. The brief for the two weeks was:-

• Research, conceptualise and design a character for animation.
• Construct and moel a three dimensional macquette from a set of design sheets.
• To understeand the significance of character deisng and realisation in relation to the animation process.
  

A macquette is basically a sculptured model, made from steel wires (as the core), foam (polstering), and plastasine/clay on top.

The difference between our assignment and the industry's process is the purpose of the character. In the industry the character is made for a motion picture, and conceptualized from the story of the movie. While our character has no concept relation, except for our imagination. This turned out to be the biggest problem!!
To brainstorm an original character from nothing, is harder than you'd think. Actually the idea of a completely original character is impossible. The character will always have some kind of realation to something on this earth, cause this is where our inspiration comes from. The brainstorm consisted of listing columns of form, personality, profession, and time. After this the different elements from the columns gets stitched together randomly, eg. form=lamp, personality=depressive, profession=doorsalesman, time=present day. So that's a lamp that goes around trying to sell light bulbs to people, but cant because he's depressed and doesn't shine himself.
Now these random characters are just to spark some creativity, some do without this and just throws ideas around in a group. The next step is to determine wether the character works, and doing some first concept art on it. This is were my weakness comes in; drawing. Damn that hand-mind coordination, would love the one inventing a pencil you just plug into your mind. Enough selfpetty, practise instead!!
In the process of delevoping the character you'll have to do some research, which could be lamps and doorsales men. Along with the development and research, theres action-, expression-, model- and in situation sheets. All this can be viewed in the final presentation, click the picture to continue to the presentation:-

The design developement was mentally hard work. Creating a background for the character and understanding why the character acts the way he does. All the development work was done the first week, the second week was reserved for the macquette.
Doing the macquette was great fun!!! I really like the sculpting phase, and painting the macquette reminded me of the days when I used to paint Warhammer characters. Funny how all this takes me back to what I did as a child. The drawing, using my imagination, painting is all things I used to do when I was a child, and loved doing it. Though I lost my patience as I grew up, and lost interest in those things. Maybe I'm destined to this line of work, just had little detour of growing up?? Spooky stuff:-)
Aaaahhh, nostalgic and philosophical moments. Moving on to the macquette, heres some picture of finished model:-

Final thoughts on this project is properly that I learned how much I like sculpturing, and will properly invest in equipment to do personal sculptures in the future.

On others things the last two week i got to mention our lifedrawing class in week 8. The class was about artistic inspiration and expression. The teacher (Nick Price) brought music in, and played different genres for the class. Our assignment was to associate the music with our drawing of the model. This was the most fun lifedrawing class I done so far, and heres some of the best ones I did:-

That was the words for last couple of weeks, hope you enjoyed the reading...

Painting & Film - Week 5 & 6

As an animator you will have to know how the camera moves. In the understanding of camera movement, you get a better overview of what you are trying to accomplish with your animation. For these last couple of weeks we have been studying camera movements and the way it effects the audience's perception of a piece of film.
The brief for the two weeks was to:-

• Research, investigate, and interpret a painting
  
• Demonstrate storyboarding skills


• Convey thoughts and meaning through the use of cinematic language
  

For those that dont know what a storyboard is, here's the wikipedia description; "Storyboards are graphic organizers such as a series of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of previsualizing a motion graphics or interactive media sequence, including website interactivity." We had to do a 1 minute film with the painting, where we pan/zoom/cut/etc. between different areas of the painting. And through the camera movement portray the meaning of the painting.

When we got the brief, my initial idea was to do some painting to the song "Pictures" by System of a Down, though the fixation of this song would come back to haunt me. The song has a military feel to it. For that reason I looked for civil war-like painting, those old ones where theres tons of stuff going on. I my search for my painting, I came upon a painter that had the style that I was looking for; John Singleton Copley. After a lot of searching through paintings by John S. Copley, I finally found the proper painting;-

The Death of Major Peirson

As you can see the painting glorifies the death of Major Peirson. Major Peirson was a young british major that stood against a french invasion of Jersey, though in reality he died before the battle started and so John S. Copley plays with the truth to emphazise that Major Peirson's death contributed to the defeat of the French.
Now if you hear the "Pictures" song and look at the picture, they dont actually fit together very well. I wanted to do something alternative, but this turned out to be too difficult. I worked on the storyboard for the film, with a lot of quick cuts/pans to fit with the song. In the storyboard process I realized that the song and the painting just didn't fit together. Though I liked the painting, so I trashed the song.
The painting is really staged, like a scene in a theater play. This lead me to search in cinematic soundtracks, where I found a song from the film "300". The song is "Immortals Battle" by Tyler Bates. The song has a nice glofying feel to it, which fitted perfectly with the painting. Further the song has a sudden change of pace, which I could use to portray the death of Major Peirson. Thats enough talk, now it time to show. Heres the pages from my polished storyboard:-

This is the final piece I handed in (Warning! There is sound on this video, just if you are a sound-sensitive enviroment):-

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

Though these two weeks projects have been a little painful because of the struggle with the music, is has been a good lesson in planning. I definately learned how important it is to do the research and planning properly. I must say that I'm happy with the result. I think it captures the feel and mood of the painting pretty well.

Could only get one anothers work, which is Leon Roberts;-

Those were the words for this time around... Hope you enjoyed it.

Tasters Week - Week 4

2D-Animation...

To truely be an animator you will have to have some experience with 2D animation, or thats what the tutors say..

This week all the animation class gets moved around, so that everyone gets a taste of a different kind of animation. Us, the computer animation guys, have to give 2D animation a try, and the 2D guys have to try computer animation. The stop-motion group is doing computer animation aswell.

The brief (assignment) is to make an animation with a tennisball, canonball and a balloon. The animation needs to show the weight of the different balls, by drawing them falling down a staircase. I have never drawn so many drawings in a week before. Allthough the drawings wasn't anything but a circle most of the time, I most have drawn at least 200+ drawings. For a second of 2D animation you will have to draw 12 drawings, so thats means I'm never going to be 2D animator :-) Its such a lot of work, but when you put the drawings together and they start to move it's worth the trouble. As much fun as 2D animation is, I am still a Computer animator by heart.

The experience of 2D animation was really good. I thought it would be a pain to get through, but the resulting product was worth it ( said that twice now:-) In the future, the knowlegde of 2D workflow, is properly going to be beneficial for a career in 3D.

And thats enough talk about it. Time to show the products of the week, I must excuse the poor quality in the bottom-right hand corner:-

Tennis ball

Cannon ball

Balloon

All copyright is reserved for the University of Glamorgan, Cardiff school of Creative and Cutural Industries.

The best of the three is in my opinion the balloon animation, cause the timing and spacing of the frames comes pretty close a real balloons movements. The worst of the three is the cannon ball. I dont really know why I dont like that one, maybe it's because I haven't actually seen a cannon ball fall down a staircase. Yep, thats right. They didn't allow us to roll a cannon ball down the stairs. Jeez, the nerve of the tutors. And they expect us to do some proper research ;-)

On the other stuff that animation, I finally got the grant from the Danish government through. So at this point I dont have to worry to much about money, which frees a lot of "thinking" to focus on my animation.
Thats the words from the week, hope you found the reading a bit interesting.