FAS1. Be able to use industry standard animation packages.
Animation Fundamentals
01. Squash and stretch – It gives your animated characters and objects the illusion of gravity, weight, mass and flexibility
02. Anticipation – Anticipation helps to prepare the viewer for what’s about to happen. When applied, it has the effect of making the object’s action more realistic.
03. Staging – You should use motion to guide the viewer’s eye and draw attention to what’s important within the scene.
04. Straight ahead action and pose to pose – There are two ways to handle drawing animation: straight ahead and pose to pose. Each has its own benefits, and the two approaches are often combined. Straight ahead action involves drawing frame-by-frame from start to finish. If you’re looking for fluid, realistic movements, straight ahead action is your best bet. With the pose to pose technique, you draw the beginning frame, the end frame, and a few key frames in-between. Then you go back and complete the rest. This technique gives you a bit more control within the scene and allows you to increase the dramatic effect of the motion.
05. Follow through and overlapping action – different parts of the object will stop at different rates, I f your character is running across the scene, their arms and legs may be moving at a different rate from their head.
06. Slow in and slow out – The best way to understand slow in and slow out is to think about how a car starts up and stops. It will start moving slowly, before gaining momentum and speeding up. This effect is achieved by adding more frames at the beginning and end of an action sequence. Apply this principle to give your objects more life.
07. Arc – Most objects follow an arc or a path when they’re moving
08. Secondary action – Secondary actions are used to support or emphasise the main action going on within a scene, secondary actions add more dimension to your objects.
09. Timing – If you move an object more quickly or slowly than it would naturally move in the real world, it wont be realistic looking.
10. Exaggeration – If an animation is too realistic it will look static and boring, adding exaggeration makes the animation feel more dynamic.
11. Solid drawing – you need to understand how to draw things in the 3D space, understanding the basics of art (anatomy, weight and volume e.x.t)
12. Appeal – The characters, objects and world need to be interesting for the person to watch or look at this helps if you have an easy to read design.
Here is an animation I made of a fast moving object, a slow moving object then an object that looks more to be accelerating and decelerating as it moves to and from the middle.
This is my first attempt at making a pendulum swing. I feel like I want to try to make it look smoother.
I have learnt how to pose to pose animate, as well as using slow in and out to make a more smooth moment for the pendulum swing, this covers FAS1 I found making a more smooth, realistic motion quite challenging however i’m quite happy with my final animation as I now think it feels quite smooth.
For The Birds
For The Birds is a Pixar animated short film that embodies a lot of the core principles of animation, more notably such principles as arcs as well as slow in and out. This is shown well in the birds flight at the start of the animation, they come in quickly on an arc then slow down as they get closer then drop onto the wire, also in the motion of the heads at about 50 seconds as they turn to look at the bigger bird the birds move their heads down on an ark. At the end when the birds fall onto the floor after being sprung up into the sky they hit the floor then squash and stretch quickly when they hit the floor.
Bouncy Ball
Today I learned to use the graph editor in conjunction with pose to pose animation to animate a bouncy ball bouncing across a screen this learnt use of the graph editor improves my understanding of Maya as an industry standard package for animation (FAS1). By getting my main peaks and dips pose to pose animated I could go in and refine the animation with the graph editor. I found this a lot easier to achieve arcs because I could much better see the path of the center of mass and create a more organic feeling to my animations movement. I used the principles in my work such as arcs and slow in and out at the top of the arks compared to the actual bounce at the bottom of the arc with the varied speed to try to create a more realistic bouncing animation. Originally before using the graph editor I struggled making an organic feeling arc, however once using the graph editor it much better allowed me to control the movement of my animation.
Overall I am quite happy with my final animation, i’m still not completely happy with it however. I still feel like when falling down from the first bounce the ball moves a little bit slower than I would like. I’m also not completely happy with the rotation but i struggled with the stretch and squash if the ball wasn’t rotated on a multiple of 180. This is a limitation of the rig I had been given as I couldn’t squash on the side I needed to be able to squash on it if It wasn’t completely rotated correctly.
Lamp Animation
The video shown above shows lots of principles of animation such as Exaggeration, when the characters jump up to move they go very high, this exaggeration of the movements gives the characters more appeal, another principle that works well with exaggeration is anticipation, just before the characters jump up they squash down then jump back up. Anticipation greatly increases the appeal and makes the movements feel more realistic and natural. Follow through is also a principle that is used a lot in this animation, at the start when the bigger lamp is pushing the ball it wobbles a bit backwards and forwards this is an example of follow through and provides the animation with a more realistic look. Another example of follow through in this animation is the way the wire of the smaller lamp moves in waves after he jumps up and down.
I’m really happy with my animation that I made of the lamp. During the animation process I became a lot more familiar with the graph editor as well as stepped animation, this helped me get what I think is quite a smooth feeling animation. In addition to this I was introduced to the dope sheet, this really helped me out with timing things in more depth and timing things separately to each other.
I tried to use a lot of anticipation before the main jump as well as follow through as he lands, I think I did quite well with the follow through of the lamp as well as its general animation. Despite this I don’t think my animation is perfect, i’m still not happy with the two little jumps at the start, I really struggled making them feel organic, I still feel like it looks quite good however but it was a result of a large amount of tweaking and small changes.
Final Products –
Animation Project
Flour Sack Character –
Scene Ideas –
-Factory
-Market
-Bakery
-Kitchen
-Sword Fight
– Movie Scene Recreation
Factory
Production Line – Could involve either the creation or the use of a flower bag, each using different machines to pick up the bags, move them around, fill & empty bags and use of conveyors e.x.t.
Market
Selling Flour – Could try to show different bags getting sold and the main bag looking sad in the rain as it has not been sold when a character comes through and needs it and it suddenly brightens up and becomes more perky because it is going to get used.
Final Idea –
Adventure Alex is my mid 20’s, excited, eager, clumsy Archaeologist. He will be in a temple that is obviously trapped with a very obvious gem at the end like possibly a golden duck, he then “ducks” and weaves through traps and it is quite tense, when he sneezes and accidentally triggers a trap causing him to hit a pressure plate or something and get hit by an arrow and pinned to a wall by an arrow and get stuck… maybe then some change falls out of his pocket or his hat falls off triggering another trap which fires arrows in a perfect silhouette around his body then he just leaves deciding he doesn’t care enough and walks out.
Here are the notes I made throughout.
My idea started as a guy running through traps and getting a gem, this changed when I wrote it down to the character getting hit and killed by an arrow due to a sneeze or something that changes the tone of the scene from tense to a comedic mistake. After my first discussion we decided that the gem at the end could also contain comedic value and thought it would be funny if it was a solid gold rubber duck, we also talked about the actual scenes, how I should probably pan him into the front door of the temple then cut to another shot of the long room, instead of trying to fit the entire modeled interior into the exterior I had made, I could fix this by building my temple into the side of a hill giving me infinite space to work with on the inside however. Finally in my second session we talked about making it more child friendly and possibly just having him pinned or dropping and losing the valuable item instead of being shot and killed.
This moodboard conveys the syle, look and feel i wish to achieve of different aspects of my scene, I want to have quite an old, overgrown aztec room that is highly detailed with different models so I can show off my modelling skills well in the project.
This room plan is showing me well how I am going to structure and build my environment.
Thumbnailing for Animation
I enjoyed the process of thumbnailing, and think it is a very good way to very quickly sketch out ideas and plan the structure of an animation from the perspective of the camera, because of this I now have a coherent structure for my animation that I can refine and take into the next stage of story boarding to refine, I added two thumbnails to my original 10, these included one of the bag tripping over a rock as a result of the sneeze as well as a clear shot of what the goal is. The golden rubber duck.
I now feel ready to create my final storyboard now I have vaguely planned out my shots, Im going to try to make a more detailed refined storyboard.
As of now I am about a quarter of the way through my final storyboard, I have been using my thumbnails as a guide but thinking a little bit more about the correct perspective as well as blocking in colour for the scene, As you can see in the partially finished storyboard below I’m not adding objects to the storyboard that aren’t necessary to the scene, e.g. i plan to have rubble in the final animation at the sides of the room and I also plan to have stone brick walls which I haven’t shown in the pictures just to make things more clear. I’ve only added the things he will interact with or are focused on by the camera.
I’m happy with where I am with the process so far and happy with how it is being portrayed at the moment and hope I can continue to create the storyboard in the same way. I didn’t really come across any challenges with the process and everything seemed to go quite smoothly.
If I wanted I could put more detail into each scene in the storyboard to get a better idea of where I could put rubble but I dont think that this is necicary for the storyboard and would rather devote more time to the asset creation stage.
Greyboxing
overall I really enjoyed the greyboxing process, which is where you use basic shapes and low poly models to imitate the feeling of the things you are going to put into your scene and I think it has really helped me to build up my scene making it more natural and more full, changes I managed to make over my original idea were things such as making the room taller and adding supports to make it feel more structured, these things helped because they make the room feel less cave like and more like a temple which more closely resembles what I want to achieve with my scene.
So far I have set up 3 camera angles as you can see in the images above, however while I am generally happy with the composition of the first two I feel like the third camera angle is a little bit too bland and could do with a bit more life bringing to the background, this is something that upon peer feedback I have understood as something that needs to be changed/edited. Also The comment was made that I need a better transition from the rough stone floor into the smoother floor where the gem is being held, to do this I am going to add a small wall and set of stairs up onto that section so it transitions better.
I have placed objects where they are not just to give the room a sense of being filled but also with things such as the statues I needed models from where things like the arrows could come from. In my new design as well the pressure plate is no longer a long flat plane as you can see in the storyboard, it has actually turned into many smaller pressure plates to give an organic feel.
This greyboxing helps me build the environment as it gives me a better sense of what models I need and how nice my scene will look at the end. Now that I have completed my greybox I can update my asset list and create a production schedule. The final animation deadline is the 8th of may.
I am now quite a bit more of the way through the creation process, I have completed a few more models and am well on my way with others, as you can see in the screenshots below I have started to implement some of my models into the scene, things such as the pillars which were made modular so that I could play around with different designs and sizes in unity as well as the platform, the plinth, the swinging axe and the wall torches all of which have close up shots below.
This morning I started to model my final version of a dragon head for the statue models at the side of the room, by the end of today I plan to have finished all the high poly details on the high poly model and unwrapped the low poly version.
Here is a reference image I used when creating my dragon head.
It is now the end of the lesson meaning the end of about 6 hours of work on this dragon head, you can see above the final high and low poly dragon heads as well as the UV map for the entire head as well as the spikes and eyes and below you can see the stone texture it has to be placed in my cave scene as the statue that it is.
I am really happy with the quality of my model, however I still feel that the texturing could be improved and I am going to continue to work on the stone texture for my model at home as well as an actual dragon head colouring. I did achieve my goals for this session though because I finished my low and high poly models and got my UV done for my low poly. As homework I am going to finish my dragon head model as well as make a rope model.
Rendering using Arnold
3DCTM2. Understand the function of different types of textures.
3DCTM8. Be able to work within a brief to ensure models fit within a wider project.
Today we started practicing Rendering using Arnold, originally we were going to render using unity, however the flour sack character that we have to use is rigged in a way that isn’t compatible with unity. For this reason we are now learning how to import textures into maya using this video (3DCTM2) –
We also used it to practice light and rendering using Arnold (3DCTM2). This is a much more traditional way of rendering and will provide a higher quality of animation. The downside of this is that the Arnold renderer is much much slower than how we would have been rendering in unity, this means we are going to have to set up other computers to run in the background throughout the day as we work, rendering our scenes bits at a time.
To practice using the Arnold system I have imported one of my models that I have already created, a wall torch, and brought it into maya to practice applying the textures in maya as well as achieving a render.
As I am rendering a wall torch It would be good to practice using effects such as fire and fog, which I plan to use later to make my scene feel more dingy and realistic. So I did some quick research and found this post about rendering fire using Arnold – https://answers.arnoldrenderer.com/questions/8438/how-to-make-fire-and-render-fire-animation-using-a.html
I then read up about maya fluids using this link – https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFMUG/Maya+Fluids
And imported the fire into my scene and played around with the emission and colour settings to get fire that looked right for what I wanted. I then looked into the menus a bit more and found the generator and decided that it would look nice to have a bit of a fog layer on the floor of my scene, however I had a bit of trouble with getting fog to look how I wanted it. I was getting part way into renders and deciding that the fog falloff was too harsh and so I did some more research. After a bit of research I came across this video –
This video covers creating AI fog using the render settings in Arnold. This made a much more subtle looking fog effect for my scene.
All of this as well as changing the settings for the render in Arnold meant my render took a very long time for just the image you can see below. If I was to do this for my final animation I would have to sacrifice many hours into rendering my entire scene and might even think about hiring a render farm service as otherwise it would take way too long to render my entire animation. If I cant do this however I might have to scale back the fog which will decrease the render time.
With all that said, here is the final, unedited render I got out of maya –
It involved re exporting the textures as a PBR metalicRoughness from substance and plugging the different textures into different channels of an Arnold shader. I then set up a 2 point lighting system with a main light to the torches top right and a fill light to its bottom left. I also added a fire particle effect system which rendered really nicely onto the torch and comes animated using maya fluids (see above for how this was done).
Overall I am happy with what I achieved this session, learning about Arnold and creating the fire effect in my torch. I am really happy with the final render especially with the quality of the fire that I managed to get using the maya fluids.
My goals for next week are to get my entire scene over to maya and have most of the lighting in, this will involve importing and making the materials for all of my current assets as well as constructing them back inside my scene. If I manage to get this done I will try to work on my final assets as there is only a few more to go. I will try and finish the pressure plates and the back wall piece, however these are more stretch goals as they might take longer,
Rigging
Parent Child hierarchy – A hierarchy is a series of ordered groupings. for 3D animation this is where a parent attribute controls child attributes, for example if the parent attribute is translated the child attribute would also rotate however the child attribute could move independently of its parent attribute.
An example is with a car and wheels, the wheels of the car would be child to the main body of the car because they move with the car when the car moves forwards but they also rotate independently of the car so they are the child of the hierarchy.
This is useful because it allows things to be more structured when animating, so you can get the main core movement down then refine each individual limb or section of the model.
We have just done some practice with parent child hierarchy in a model to create an animation, here is the hierarchy I made and the model it is for as well as a quick play blast of the animation
In my animation I will use parenting to rig my swinging chain because it is the most logical and quick way to get convincing swinging for all the links. I am happy with my quick parenting experiment and am happy that I will be able to do it when it comes to actually animating in my scene.
My goals for homework are to finish all of the last main models and have my scene textured and in maya.
Animation Principles
In this animation we can see use of overlapped action, in the way the man’s arm bobs down and back up again when he is lifted out of bed, this was used to make the character feel more alive and less fake. If it had fallen straight into the position it would have felt strange and mechanical.
Another example of one of the key principles is build up, or suspense. This is used during the part in the animation where the character is pulled out of the window and out of the tree, multiple attempts are used to pull the character out of the window, this suspense adds a sense of comedy to the animation as the watcher wonders what is going to happen and then the quick release of the character when he is finally pulled out of the window shows use of squash and stretch as he is stretched out of the window and then returns back to his normal shape when he get
This is the work I did today of my axe animation. It took quite a long time to get done as I had a lot of issues with it. I animated it using a parent child heirarchy, parenting each chain link to its next link down.
I used principles such as slow in and out on my animation you can see the slow in and out more in the non stepped preview section at the end of the video, this is because the slow in and out was done using the graph editor
As I start planning my flour sack animation I am going to make sure I use a lot more of the principles like squash and stretch, as well as anticipation. I also plan to make good use of arcs as I make the character do a flip past the swinging axe. I am quite happy with my work but I still think it looks a bit too smooth. I want it to feel more clunky like they are acutually big chain links. As homework I am going to continue to try and work on filling out my scene again with the objects as well as making their materials.
Feedback (From Teacher) –
Working towards (Anim, Portfolio) : Distinction Outstanding work all round. I can see the amalgamation of all the skills you have learnt in all areas of the course in this project here and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I love all the little breakdowns you do of your work it and it really shows that you are evidencing your learning on your blog skillfully. You are pushing yourself and progressing your skills in a really mature way. Keep this up and have the end goal in sight – that animated film!
Created By Matthew Hall on March 27 2020
I am currently working towards a distinction, I would like to achieve a distinction because I feel like I am capable to with enough time and effort so I should aim for anything lower. At the moment I am starting to animate but I really need to folcus on finishing my assets and bringing them over into the scene in maya, this is something im struggling with because I dont feel that maya is as intuitive for compositing as unity is. I also feel like my textures look different in maya in comparison to when they are imported into Unity.
I plan to recreate the scene I have in unity in maya but without the blockout pieces. Then I will continue to build and replace things in unity as well as in maya, because then I will be able to have a back up incase one crashes and I will still know exactly how I had the scene. I am going to start today by importing the wall torches and the dragon head statues into the maya scene, and if i have time after I will try and work on modelling a convinving arrow for the final part of the animation, for this I plan to research arrows then look at some examples of people’s models on sketchfab before modelling it.
I have placed in and added the textures to the wall torches and dragon head statue in my scene. I also added the flame effects to my wall torches so I could start to get a feel for how the scene was coming together.
Cameras – 21/4/2020
Shot types
Close up – fill frame with a face, draw attention to the expression of the face or a particualr object.
Long shot – shows entire body of the subjet as well as the location, used when people are running or fighting or during motion.
Extreme long shot – Making the subject look even smaller e.g. cars through a desert.
Medium shot – shows about half of the person. used when the person is holding or using something.
Single/solo – One person.
Two Shot – Two people.
Three shot – Three people. e.x.t
POV shot – camera is pointing at whatever the person is looking at, so you want the audience to feel like they are the person.
Camera Angles
Eye Level – used to remain objective
low angle – makes the subject appear bigger or more dominating.
high angle – makes the subject look weaker or less powerful.
top angle/ birds eye view – you want to show the topography of the location
dutch angle/ tilted shot – the camera doesn’t have a fixed level. this draws attention to the fact that something is off kilter.
Over the shoulder shot – used in a confruntation way usually.
Motion
Pan and Tilt – the camera stays in the same place but it moves left right up and down, it makes the audience feel like they are a spectator watching something from a distance.
Tracking shot, crane or dolly shot – tracking shot moves sideways, left or right. dolly moves backwards and forwards and a crane can go up or down. they can be linear or curved. This type of shot follows the person or object to make people feel more involved in the space and location.
Zoom – allows you to get a closer shot without making an emotional statement.
Random Motion – camera just shakes around a certian point, gives a shot energy to make it come alive
360 degree shot – showcase a character.
Single take shots – the combination of lots of these different movements, techniques and angles. they are the most complicated shots possible taking lots of time.
Overall I am quite happy with my choice in camera angles, i think they correctly reflect the shots that i was trying to make and the feelings that I was trying to convey when I origionally thought about my animation.
“depth of field is the difference between the neareest and farthest objects that are in acceptably sharp focus” this basically means how much the camera can make be in focus at any one time.
This video is the final playblast of my animation project, I would have liked to render properly, but unfortunatly this would have taken too long and I wouldn’t be able to hand it in in time. Overall I am very happy with the scene I have made and mostly happy with the animation. there are a few parts such as the flip that I feel moves too slowly and also I feel like I should have built up the sneeze more so it created more tension. I am overall happy with the animation project however. you can also see some individually rendered images from different parts in the animation.
James' Next Gen 