Untitled

This is my final animation for this module. I have felt that during this process I have learnt a lot about how I would go about the process of making and animating characters in the future.

To begin with I started animating body. Allowing me to focus on the movements. I believe that the later half of the animation in this respect especially was much smoother, with the first half having multiple jittery and slow movements. With more time, I would have fixed these, and brought the entire animation up to standard. I also believe some of the movements were a bit too exagurated, confusing the animation somewhat.

Second I focused on the lip sinking. This was a challange due to having unlabelled assets, and no clue as to exactly which mouth positions I had. While I eventually figured out where each mouth I needed was in the set, it does mean the movements are significantly more fluid by the end.

Lastly I focused on the eyes and I eyebrows. I tried to make them move around a lot during the animation. With the character being jovial at the beginning, before her eyebrows lower towards the end, giving her a slightly more annoyed appearance. Next time, I would like to make more eye shapes and eyebrows available, maybe even seperating them into their own objects.

The majority of the body is rigged using a basic skeleton, with certain parts having used weights to minimise the amount distortion in areas where it wasn’t wanted.

The difference comes in how I chose to handle the face. Since I needed parts of the face to move indipendantly of the skeleton, I decided to instead parent all aspects of the face to the skeleton, allowing for the inner eyes and eyebrows to move indipendantly during animation. It also allowed me to edit the sizes of certain elements when needed.

I decided to do this to the whole face due to the amount of distortion it was recieving when the arms moved. Given more time, I would have utilised this more to my advantage, moving more elements of the face, such as the ears.

After doing a basic UV of the model, which proved to be easier due to the use of less polygons. I moved swiftly into the texturing stage.

I used my regular style of drawing the textures by hand in a drawing program, making them appear more painted than other textures. The style of the head and body do not quite match and this is due in major part to a switch of programs between the two elements, which lead to me not having the same brushes.

The sides of the mode suffer from stretched textures due to being UVed with the back of the model. In a second attempt I would resolve this issue by UVing them seperately.

The sides of the arms are also uneven due to me attempting to use lineart on them, to pore effect. Next time I will forgo this.

The face is made up of several elements. Due to time constraints I chose to limit the shape of the eyes for the animation. Instead seperating it into multiple assets. The eyes, the inner eye, and the eyebrows. In the hope that they would move seperately.

If I had more time, I would have also drawn the sclera. But I was already unsure as to how this would go in the rigging stage. So I refrained this time.

The mouth is similarly made of numerous images that are placed in the same area. I animated the visibility so that the mouths would switch depending on which one was needed. There wer issues caused by my descision not to label the planes, as in the process of animating, it was hard to find the appropriate ones for a given mouth movement, causing some moments to look slightly odd.

I also noted too late that I had the facial features too far from the face, causing them to look strange when the model turned it’s head. This could have easily been aleviated by editing both the positions and angles of the features.

The body was made using a selection of primitives that I edited to roughly emulate the human form. I decided to forgo using quadraw, instead combining the seperate objects into one.

I find it hard hard to note if there were any significant reprecutions to this move, as the model worked well enough, with only the armpits having major deformation issues, due to me not weighing them properly in the rigging stage.

My first issues when making the model, was the texture type to use in order to get the right effect from my character. Most types ended up having strange visual glitches in the viewport. While I eventually settled on surface shader for the head. I would later use Standard surface instead for other parts of the model.

It was also hard to properly line up the planes of the model, in part due to the inacuracies of the viewport, and else due to suface shader making the transparent parts of the image appear as white, blocking some elements from view.

This is the storyboard for my animation.

For my second year facial animation project, I decided to use an alternate technique to doing facial animation. Using a series of image planes, which I manipulate individually, as apposed to a head which is modelled and rigged like the rest of the body.

My inspiration for this is The backwater Gospel, which utilizes the technique to great effect with one of it’s characters, and helps add to it’s asthetic.

My final project of the module, ended up being a mixed media, 3D and cel animation. This was in part due to time constraints, and partly due to the limitations of the model I chose to use for it.

Using both helped me to show my full range and ability in animation, but came at the cost of differing quality, depending on the segment. It was split into 6 segments.

I found it hard to use squash and stretch as the limitations of my model made it so that deformations happened in the wrong places when it was animated. While in the 2D sections, the parts I chose to animate in that style didn’t call for squash and stretch to be used. The effect of timing varies. In some places it is used effectively, such as the blood flowing from the tree, and in others it is weak, namely in all movement where the knife is involved, where it is too slow. The jump between the last two segments is also rushed, leaving no time to process how the characters hand went from one position to another. I found it difficult to apply most principles such as these in the larger context of a full animation, especially in the 3D sections. Overlapping action is attempted but stiff and anticipation isn’t used. I believe I used staging to good effect though, even if the 3D segments are all filmed facing the same direction.

A major downfall is my inability to effectively use Maya to animate, as I find it hard to manoeuvre in and even harder to effectively animate complicated models in. This is a major reason why I chose to use 2D as well, since my model had no facial animations, I thought it easier to try and use the 2D elements to help get across the emotions of the animation.

My chosen emotion was anger, and my chosen action was hiding something. While I believe the former is able to be grasped, there are a lot of emotions expressed by the character, including horror and sadness as well. This is my fault for using one of my premade characters, as I find it difficult to limit them to one emotion, especially given the freedom of 2D animation. The latter was harder to convey, due to cutting multiple segments thanks to time constraints. The character was supposed to bury the knife at the end, but animating digging would have taken much longer.

A task that I remember doing, but have no screenshots to show of, due to all other group work having been deleted. Is when we had to dissect the scene in the movie UP which focusses on the adult lives of Carl and Ellie from an outsiders perspective. We then had to answer questions about it.

In this group task we were given a short questionair to which we were to find a clip and answer the questions to.

We chose the scene where Frodo wakes in in Rivendell after throwing the ring into Mordor. For this our group effectively worked together, over a zoom call, in order to answer the questions.

Our first group task was to look at an animation clip and describe what the character is thinking in a certain scene. This would set into motion the whole module.

In this group task we had to describe a tool in maya and how to use it. for this we chose blocking. This is a very simple, tutorial that though gets the point of blocking across, could probably have been explained better.

For this task we had to use basic models in order to portray different emotions using poses.

I am unsure exactly which emotion I was attempting to convey in the first one, though I do believe it was anger. This just shows how much I needed to work on this pose to make it more effective

In the second pose, I was attempting to portray happiness or sxcitement, but the pose wasn’t exaggerated enough, so it more looks like someone is stretching.

For this animation task, we were told to animate a character to a scene from a movie showing the same emotion as our character for our final project. I animated a sequence from the movie bones and all. Specifically the scene where the character Lee, starts a fight with a man in a shop as shown in the clip i used as reference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrGDomkpU3c

While I didn’t match this scene perfectly, I did make an effort to emulate the subtle movements of Lee in 0:30 - 0:32 of the clip. This was also where I first tried facial animation, though due to not having the sound file for the clip, I did not attempt to match lip movements.

The movement of the torso in the animation, lead to the entire thing being twisted, probably due to a part of the rig being left behind, when the walking starts.

I believe the animation is quite stilted, and the arm ends up moving in strange ways, in part due to my attempt to overcorrect movements. I think the intended emotion comes off well enough though, despite this, if only for the facial movements.

Our third animation task was to animate this character dancing to a song. I chose the Macarena for this piece.

While the beginning of this animation is effective, in it’s timing to the song, due to not being able to playback the video with the song playing, it very quickly loses pace, becoming much slower.

It also did not follow the dance of the song.

If properly animated this could have been a very funny dancing cowboy.