#knb211

This video is the rotoscoped animation of the following video: https://youtu.be/0N6MG8xb2B8?t=5m16s

ASSIGNMENT TWO: ONLINE PROGRESS UPDATE ONE - PLANNING

The overall aim for my project is to have a fully modelled character rig with animation/motion capabilities that can be demonstrated in Unreal Engine.

I will be working with Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Mudbox in order to create the actual rig itself, and will then be importing it into Unreal Engine to showcase it’s functionality. After creating a sequence in Unreal I will then use Adobe After Effects for any post-production touch-ups that are necessary for the final render. Obviously, I would like my rig to be high quality and have good functionality as an animate-able asset. 

In order to meet these requirements, I will be planning to use my time as follows:

Week 7: Begin to revise and research the process of creating a Rig in Maya. Week 8: Finalise revision/research and begin work on Rig. Week 9: Continue working on Rig, add extra detail with Mudbox. Week 10: Begin to finalise Rig, add finer details. Week 11: Have Rig completed at this point. Week 12: Import all assets into Unreal, finalise movements and animations. Week 13: Finalise render and sequence, post-processing in After Effects.

So, getting my marks back was quite the surprise, as I got a mark that exceeded my expectations. Funnily enough, I suppose I got the last laugh when people would be quick to point out that I was overthinking everything with my assignment. I owe it all to the 6 P’s - Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

I’ve always been someone who thought that to make animation as believable as possible, it becomes a science of its own - to understand the anatomy of whatever it was we were animating (sentient or not), the way that nature behaves, and about trusting your intuition to discern what “feels” believable. Mind you, as per what our learning providers have taught us, sometimes we need to bend the aforementioned conventions and exaggerate for effect (depending whether you opt for realism or for a more stylized effect) - just having that extra bank of knowledge grounds the whole animation back into a degree of realism.

Anyways, to get myself familiarised with Assignment 2, let’s have a look at what the Assignment exercises are this time round:

Exercise  1: Heavy Weight Lifting Focus on conveying believable mechanics, and WEIGHT, using the animation principles. Upload your sketches, blocking passes and reflections to your tumblr blog.

Exercise  2: Character Acting Given a provided line of dialogue, focus on conveying believable lipsync, facial expression and body acting using the animation principles. Upload your sketches, blocking passes and reflections to your tumblr blog.

Excercise 3: Revise and Polish your animation exercises Implement feedback and polish your exercises for clarity, smooth motion with weight, appeal and belivability. Upload your reflections to your tumblr blog.

Excercise 4: Lighting and Render Apply the lighting rig and to all your excercises and render them for final output. Upload your final render videos and reflections to your tumblr blog.

My first impression for each exercises is as follows:

Exercise 1: Assuming that the object is going to be on the ground at rest, then what we’re looking at in terms of animating it, will be in reference to a classic deadlift - particularly, a sumo deadlift. As a gym goer, this requires a very rigid pose and a lot of core strength, so that will be the basis of how I’ll approach this animation. I’ll use the Morpheus rig here to make it easier for me.

Exercise 2: This is going to take the most time simply because of the extent of planning that it involves. It would need to be a post of its own, but I’ll be looking at doing some expression sheets, investigate on oculesics and lip syncing, scene camera settings, reading off the provided script and a plethora of other things.

Exercise 3: I’ve planned to at least make an attempt on the previous two exercises, as this assignment will have to be less of a priority in order to bolster my grades on other units. At this point I’ll spend this exercise on troubleshooting and refining whatever I have.

Exercise 4: If you ask me, given that the rendering aggregate that we’re to use with Maya has been experiencing some troubles, I am doubtful I’ll be able to complete this. I’ll have a play around with it and see if the whole scene still needs to be colour graded in the final render, just to enhance the mood. My assumption at this point is that the Maya scene will have a kind of flat colour profile.

All right, now that that’s all said and done, it’s time to get to work,

The final animation using Maya playblast in a textured view. MentalRay seems to require a license to render the entire sequence and batch rendering is taking a long time to run so this will do in terms of this assessment. The playblast shows the required animation while also being very clear and readable to the viewer.

Below are sample renders of the first and second shot from MentalRay however the lighting was not modified so the scene is quite dark around the characters faces. Due to the above limitations the playblast will suffice for this submission.

Lift:

Filming my own reference, I wanted to add a little flair and character to the movement. I had the possible idea of my character throwing the box up in the air and catching it again, and implemented that into my first blocking pass.

(link to lift reference)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF-YwZ6XeUk&feature=youtu.be

Blocking pass:

However, I did have quite a bit of trouble with parenting components and the use of locators, which began to show as I started smoothing out my motions.

Pass 1:

I was later informed that I had to have the character place the box on a pillar, which thankfully allowed me to remove the off-looking ‘tossing/catching’ detail. Getting a proper ‘weighted walk’ was difficult, but I discovered through acting it out to give the front leg most of the weight, slowing down on the contact, as well as keeping both feet on the ground a little longer than with a regular walk.

Pass 2:

I finalised the animation through spacing the walk out, as well as giving the arms a ‘tired’ dropping motion as they let go of the box. Placing the box on its side allowed me to get passed the parenting issues I couldn’t work out.

Final Pass:

 I love the look of the initial picking up of the box, as well as of the walk itself, however the walk coming to a stop still looks somewhat awkward (perhaps a little too close to the pillar). I also can’t decide if the arms dropping feel too quick or too slow, but otherwise I’m very proud of how this turned out.

Grandma’s House:

I filmed my initial references using the audio only. I decided to play Lucy as very engaged, yet also inquisitive of Grandma’s story, racing through a thousand emotions a minute. Grandma herself very much plays into the story, expressive with her gestures, but also a subtle sense of tiredness due to her age, masked best she can but shown through the drop in energy between her two lines.

(link to Lucy reference)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ztf8B6Cn7Po&t=223s

(link to Grandma reference)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgCwTJQVXrY&t=34s

(link to Lucy blocking v1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y964uRzVDc

(link to Lucy blocking v2)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ2Qkn7_bJo

(link to Grandma blocking v1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbhW28GgvEw

(link to Grandma blocking v2)

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

I blocked out the initial animation for both characters, however I was informed that the gestures and energy had to better match the provided animatic.

Animatic:

I was told that Lucy’s sitting pose was acceptable, which I was very happy to keep. However, this required me to redo most of Grandma’s animation from scratch.

(progress of overall animation may not necessarily be in this order)

  Lucy pass 1 (SH3):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tws4V1b4jfs

Lucy pass 2 (SH3):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2lJgPxL_Jo

Lucy pass 3 (SH3):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MzHM4gvegs

Lucy pass 4 (SH3):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9FMi0bMsKI

Lucy pass 5 (SH3):

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

Grandma pass 1 (SH4):

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

Grandma pass 2 (SH4):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPRCjRyNvs4

I found out (mainly though troubles with smoothing Lucy’s animation) an effective technique when beginning the smoothing process was to first include a ‘holding keyframe” (as I put it) between my existing keyframes. Not in the exact same position, but enough to avoid any troubling floating effects with certain movements.

Parenting Lucy’s right hand to her knee was a good way of keeping both components in sync, but because of my issues with parenting, I couldn’t figure out how to rotate the wrist properly. Thankfully this is not too noticeable in the final product.

Animating the faces, I mainly used the short cut controls, working from the provided phonemes chart, as well as using a mirror on myself. 

Phonemes Chart:

Keeping proper eye contact proved to be one of my biggest challenges, and fortunately I was able to figure out how to parent the eye controls to a locator in order into keep focus in the same position, even as the head moves.

  Grandma pass 3 (SH4):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G7Oi7HUshQ

Grandma pass 4 (SH4):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Qc8MzHgWJA

  Finalising the animation, I paid attention to the use of arched motion (particularly with Lucy’s head and Grandma’s arms), while also trying to add subtle finger and breathing movements to Grandma. I also gave Grandma slower, more frequent blinks during her low energy period.

  Lucy pass 6 (SH4):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vamlSm6kiMo

Grandma pass 5 (SH4):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyDM0TRsrrk

  In order to fix the ‘white eyes’ issue, I had to cheat the both the eyeline focus and the face direction quite a bit, which worked out seamlessly.

Bringing in the set proved a lot of technical difficulties, mainly due to mistakes made when setting up the project. I was unsuccessful at bringing the textures in and exported the animation using the highest quality playblast I could, but I still feel the quality works for the animation.

Final pass:

I definitely notice I put a lot more work into Lucy than Grandma, which I find appropriate as Lucy is definitely the higher energy character, though Grandma’s breathing does perhaps come off a little robotic. I’m also worried the lip movement is perhaps a little stiff (it might be a bit out of sync), and I definitely could have added a little more detail,