Isabel Raymond's 2nd Year Animation Blog

Over the past 3 months, I have been working on this project designing, making, and animating my own character for a story. Along the way, I found some of the process rather easy and simple, but there were definitely also points that I found challenging and a bit harder, which took me longer to complete what I needed to do to move on.

Throughout this project, I’d say one of my strengths has most definitely been the animating part, as I feel I have pretty much got the hang of showing a ‘sense of weight and realism’ in the movement of my character in each animation I did. Another strength of mine that I found I had was in the modeling and sculpting area of the making process, as I really enjoyed creating my character in Zbrush, using Zspheres to create a base structure and then using the ‘adaptive skin’ to sculpt right onto the model after. Even though the sculpture of my character may not have been perfect, with more practice using the software, I know that my modeling skills will most definitely improve. One final strength I have that I can think for this project would have to be in the design area, as, in my opinion, I feel that the design of my character and the look of the final outcome is rather impressive, due to the fact that, at the beginning of this project, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do for a design of a character.

I would say my first area for development/improvement would be the retopology part of the process, as, even though I feel my retopology on my character wasn’t too bad, it wasn’t perfect, so I don’t think it would qualify as an industry-standard, top-notch piece of work. Fortunately, it ended up being fine and I didn’t have any problems at all with it when it came to rigging and animating the model. One major area for improvement though that I agree I need to develop in is my rigging skills, as, for this project, due to me struggling an incredible amount, my tutor very kindly rigged my model for me, so that I was able to move on to the animating stage quicker. But, in the future, my tutor won’t always be around to help me, so rigging is definitely something that I need to try and put a lot more effort into learning how to do. Apart from those two major aspects of the development stage of my project, I don’t actually feel like there were any other areas that needed significant improvement if any at all.

“Destiny” - Character Reel

Own Animation Final - Destiny’s Dance

Here are some play blasts which I took to show how my character’s dance developed through the iteration processes I went through

I started by blocking out my animation in ‘stepped’ mode to make sure I had the timings of each arm movement correct before I moved to ‘spline’ mode, where Maya adds in its own ‘in-betweens’ for you.

...But sometimes those ‘in-betweens’ are not at all what you expected. Especially when they turn out like how they did in my playblast above. Apart from the arm problems which definitely need attention, the motion and timings of the knee ‘bobs’ are actually pretty decent.

In my next iteration, I decided to put the arms back into ‘stepped’ mode, as this made it a lot easier to make the alterations without the confusion of the arms moving in weird directions.

After having sorted out the arms so that they moved in a more natural way, my next steps were making their movements look more realistic so that they moved around the shape of the body, instead of going through the model as if it were invisible.

Live-Action Reference for Animation of my Choice

We also had the task of creating a 3rd animation for our character where we could choose what we wanted the character to do, so long as it was something that we believed our character would do in real life. I was finding it hard deciding on a final animation as I felt that just doing an animated jump was too simple and I wanted to challenge myself by animating my character to music. In the end, I decided on getting my character to dance to the ‘Macarena’ as my song choice, as I knew the dance, and it also contains some animation principles, along with including negative space at times.

Walk Cycle Final

After receiving feedback from my tutor and just before rendering my animation, I made a few changes to my character’s head motion by giving it more of a ‘Bobbing Swing’ whilst it was walking to help it look a bit more natural. I also altered the keyframes of the feet so that they touched the ground quicker, as my tutor told me that he thought the original movements made the character look too light, so the feet needed to show a bigger sense of weight.

Here are some play blasts which I took to show how my character walk cycle developed through the iteration process.

I started by blocking out the movement of my character's legs and feet to give me an idea of timing and the pace that my character would walk at.

I then changed my 'stepped’ animation to the spline setting so I could see what the automated in-betweens of the leg and feet movement looked like. I also managed to animate some head motion.

I next animated my character’s right arm and made sure it moved in time with their left leg.

Then I animated my character's Left arm and did the same as above but with the other leg.

Live-Action Reference for Character Walk Cycle

Character Posing

Character Turnaround Final

Here is the outcome of my character turnaround once I had rendered it and composited the background in order to make the character more clearly visible and the main focus.

I’m fairly certain that the title is pretty self-explanatory for this post.

As my character is very monster-like, I wanted to see what it would look like in a pose that also told the audience the character was acting like a monster, by having my characters arms out in front and bent a little as if she was ‘growling’ in a cartoon-like style.

Here is another simple pose, where I just had my character have her hands on her knees with her legs bent a little whilst leaning forward, as if looking at something that she found on the ground.

I decided to go with a sort of ‘Hero’ Pose for my final test, as we were told we should try and think of a pose that we thought our character might do that also wasn’t too simple/basic looking.

My next step was to bring my coloured textures over from Substance Painter and hook them up with my model in Maya. I managed to do this part fairly quickly due to having already done it once last year. Although, I did need a bit of help from a technician to correctly add the textures ‘height’ as I hadn’t done this part before, and I was unsure as to why my model didn’t look quite right the first time I rendered it to check how the texture looked.

Here is a really good example I found of professional modeling for CG using Zbrush. I am amazed at how good the final outcome is as it basically starts out as just being a ball of clay with some lumps sticking out of it that resemble the snout, mouth, and ears of the wolf’s head. What also impresses me, is how well the person has used the build tool to build up and add extra clay to create the perfect shape of a wolf’s head.