Nikki's Animation Spot

I’ve been working on getting an animation in for this month’s loopdeloop challenge. Here’s a quick showcase of my animatic.

A couple of my favourite drawings from last week’s life drawing session. It was a bit of an odd experience because the model was a musician who was getting photo’s taken for her album (from what I could gather). So here is I a picture I drew of a person while I had my picture taken by a person ;S 

Some of my favourite drawings from tonight’s life drawing session! Some really fun and difficult poses, the foreshortening on the last 20min picture killed me, I redrew the head at least 3 times :| 

For the last few weeks I have mainly been focusing on completing my Grandma’s house assets but I still had a few opportunities to help out with the Twin Beaks production.

While the story-boarding was happening I looked into the environment. I explored animating textures for the sky and water and looked into how to make the water look good with just a bit of transparency and displacement mapping. The textures should be much brighter and washed out but there is no lighting in the scene currently and this would be achieved by a strong directional light and some camera bloom.

After building the environment, I went looking for some good shots and it was quite hard trying to get both the seagulls in shot, while avoiding showing the island that the deck is attached to and avoiding showing the water too closely. (these restrictions were decided earlier on in the project to cut down on the scale of the project by reducing the amount of assets needing to be modeled and not having to simulate realistic water effects) So below are a couple of shots that I thought looked dramatic.

Using the size on screen to represent the power relationship between the 2 seagulls, the one in front would be Bill the bully. I was trying to get them both in shot with the deck and aligning the main aspects with the thirds of the screen.

In this shot I was using the pier posts to divide the screen and frame both Steve, the eager seagull and the chip. Steve is positioned just off center in both the screen and his frame, so that he is the center of attention while leaving some room for action space so it is not too static. The chip is in the center of its frame, framed by the horizon and the post.

In this shot has the chip as the immediate focus, with all the perspective lines drawing the eye to Steve in the center of the screen, while bill is off to the side not noticing the chip but still having a bit of power as he is positioned higher than Steve.

Exploring camera angles and framing

Input on storyboard - After making the 3d environment and looking at possible camera angles, I went through the current storyboard and wrote camera directions, re-framed some shots for more visual impact, and made some suggestions to change the story to make it flow better. I’m happy that a few of my changes made it into the final animatic! 

The Last 4 weeks of working on grandma’s house

Production Week 5

Rat Mum 11th - Rework face - add jaw, making eyes spheres and eye lids, while bringing the eyes facing foreward - Smoothed the mesh and bring shoulders and feet closer together - UV unwrapped

Rat Baby 11th First version - feet bigger, torso shorter and rounder, face shorter with bigger eyes and ears - UV unwrapped

Production Week 6

Rat Mum - Refined nose and brought toes together, reshaping them also - Re-Unwrapped to make the UV symmetrical - painted simple texture

Rat Baby - Recreated to include changes from the rat mum, made eyes and ears bigger and rounder, made brow ridge less prominent and rounded the skull on the forehead and cheeks. - Unwrapped and made symmetric also, tested simple texture

Production Week 7

Rat Mum -New Uv unwrap to make it easier to paint details on face and have the symmetry working properly

Rat Baby - Body rework to make more cute, shrinking body and legs, making feet a little bigger rounding the nose and skull more, making the ears bigger and thinner - Unwrapping in a similar style as the rat mum

Final Week!

Texturing assets and adding fur around the ears, legs, tail and nose

This semester I have been working on ‘Grandma’s House’, a short animated piece about a little girl combating her fear of the dark. Also I have just started working in a team on ‘Twin Beaks’ a quirky little animation about 2 seagulls fighting over food.

Twin beaks is quite a small project with only a few characters and assets so in the early stages before the story was settled, there are only a few tasks to divide between 6 people. So apart from helping discuss the script and story progression, my task on the team was to explore seagulls in action.

(Top left - exploring mouth movement and expression, Middle - a body shape for the fat seagull, Top right - aggressive stance, Bottom left - 2 seagulls fighting, Middle - Muscle groups and simplified wing shape - Right - Wing study and leg and joint detail)

I was really happy with this action shot so I developed it further and used it as an opportunity to digitally ink something for the first time. I also researched possible breeds for the birds with 2 distinct coloring so they can easily be identified. 

This semester I have been working with the Brass Monkey Studio as part of my Advanced Computer Animation subject and so far I have been part of the modelling team for an animated short called ‘Grandma’s House’.

This post will outline all the work I have done so far on the project and I will put the finished assets on my portfolio when they are done, but at the moment everyone’s models are still being reviewed.

So my first task was to create the Large Rat asset for the project. In the animatic we were given, the rat are featured 3 times, each time the perception of reality changes between horror and real. - The first is when the possums transform into rats in shot 23

- The second showed the rats running across the screen before changing back into possums looking confused

- And the last, shows them back in the tree

Production Week 1

The initial design brief stated that the rat should be scary, but should fit in the style of the main characters. The director was not happy with the design in the animatic, so i was given free reign over the design.

Before I could start modelling, I needed to look at references, understand and simplify the anatomy into bones and muscle groups so that when it is rigged it will deform correctly and create a working design. 

(Top left shows a simple run cycle, the taller of the two rat profile drawings in the top right is my concept design, then we have the t-pose profile showing the body segments, bones and muscle groups and we have a quick study of rat hands and feet at the bottom)

From here I was able to start modelling and I had just enough time to create the basic body shape while keeping an eye on the topology.

The director was happy with my design with just a few small changes and I was given the all clear to continue working until the next review.

Production Week 2

Continuing modelling my main focus for this week was to get the feet and hands looking like actual rat hands and keeping it scary looking. I was also able to begin on the face, I was told to strictly avoid using triangles in my topology and my main struggle was to keep the edge flow working while adding the detail. I didn’t do the best job around the shoulders and hips but by the time I reached the end of this week i was getting the hang of it on the face.

In the review there were quite a few changes that needed to be made;

- The feet and hands were too realistic and scary and I needed to round them out and make them more stubby. - The shoulders and hips were too well defined and to soften up the body as well.

Production Week 3

I started by working on reforming the body, deleting unnecessary edge loops and giving the rat a more realistic profile. I was really unhappy with how the topology on the hips and legs were working so I spent a lot of time completely reworking it and this helped with the process of making them less defined.

It was a little sad messing up the claws that I spent so much time on last week but now that it is done it does read better from a distance and feel less spindly. The face went fairly smoothly except for having a little trouble trying to not have any triangles in the topology around the eyes. I was fairly happy with the modelling so far so I tried adding some spiky fur clumps on the cheeks and on the back, as per my original design, the cheeks turned out well but the back didn’t look that great.

For the coming week I need to refine the face, particularly the eyes and the mouth, and work out the kinks in the fur.

Production Week 4

This week was all about reforming the face, adding detail and refining edge loops, there is still a little work to go but we are finally almost there!

We were given a 15 second excerpt from the 1993 Movie ‘Groundhog Day’ and were tasked to create a unique scene from the dialogue. Overall I’m fairly happy with how the scene turned out, I tried to avoid the character sitting stock still by giving them at least one moving part at all times. Because I am running low on time I could have done better avoiding over-tweening (having a key pose slowly slide into the next pose while nothing else is going on) but I think the final scene is realistic and interesting. I particularly like how Phil turns to Rita in the middle to talk to her directly, it feels really effective in conveying the dialogue.

If I had more time I would try to bring the character’s closer to my video reference particularly in relation to their eyes and subtle face movements. Though as it stands, the work is fine because of subdued mood of the dialogue doesn’t necessitate dramatic facial expressions.

I have really enjoyed this subject because it put me up to challenges that are really intimidating, and pushing through them, although stressful, is well worth the reward. I’m happy to say at the end I feel much more confident with Maya and the animation production process than before.

Then I refined the Boy movement further and used head movement to accentuate the main sounds.

Lastly, I added finger animation (adjusting hand positions) and animated the eyes. Because the character is stationary, I changed the parenting of the hands, head and eyes to world so moving the shoulders/head wouldn't move anything else, making it much easier to keep the movement steady.

I put some make-up on so you could see my eyes behind my glasses and set up the camera with similar framing to my scene. I’m extremely camera shy so it took several takes (and shooing my housemate away) before I was able to not look really awkward.

(best to view in full screen and increase the quality to max so you can see what is happening)

I really happy with how well it turned out, and it would have saved hours of struggling to get realistic movement from the top of my head. I’m a little embarrassed about copying Rita’s accent but its only for visual reference (you don't need to have the sound on)

While doing another assignment in Maya I had come across a tutorial about using the TRAX editor to copy animations between characters. During my previous assignment I had a lot of trouble trying to copy/import animations into a scene, onto Morphy. So I decided to try making all the Lip movements and using this to import them into my scene. My computer at home can’t handle too many animated controls at a single time, (playback is really slow, scrubbing through the timeline is really laggy and every time you save there is a risk of the program freezing and crashing) So separating all the mouth animations from the body actions would make things a lot less stressful. I made all of Phil’s mouth animation without trouble and I tried setting Morphy up as a character_set (needed for TRAX clips). Selected Morphy -> Make character set -> 30 mins later the set is created. Hoping this huge wait was only a one time thing, I continued on Selected the desired controls, lag, lag, lag -> make Animation Clip ->CRASH Grrrr... I tried again again, this time only selecting Morphy’s keyable control’s to make a character set, it still took 10 mins but it was an improvement. Unfortunately doing this removed all the animation data but I was prepaired to repeat it to make it work. I made a tester animation and the whole program lagged horribly and again just moving the controls, I was successful making an animation clip but trying to load it into the TRAX editor crashed Maya again. I tried one more time, making the character set, before animating anything, with the same results. I think the problem is Morphy has so many controls and they are scripted together with blend-shapes to change the mesh and making a character set tries to capture all this data and makes all animation clips a child of this. So It seems I’ll just have to make everything in the scene file and grit my teeth when ever I need to save.

In the new scene I was disappointed to find that my old shelf buttons didn't work with the referenced character, so I need to create new buttons for every character, unless it has exactly the same name. The above video is Phil’s dialogue, this was the second time I had done this so it turned out with little trouble.

It wasn’t until Rita’s dialogue at the end did things start looking strange, Rita speaks really fast and just using the shelf buttons for the mouth was too much, the lips move at hyper speed and I looks really awkward.

To fix this I created a relaxed-open mouth position and blended each mouth shape with it to create a more subtle shape, I also deleted a few sounds where it was too fast, and blended them to make it look natural.

Phil Mood - depressed and numb Motivations - wants Rita to understand what he is going through and hopes for advice but on the other hand he has given up and almost doesn't care.

Rita Mood - Exasperated and bored Motivations - She is defensive and snarky, jaded from Phil character’s attitude 

The following Is the dialogue and how both characters are reacting to what is being said. Dialogue is purple, Phil’s actions are in blue and Rita’s are in pink. Parts of the dialogue that is underlined will be accentuated with body language + symbol, marks the key poses to communicate the action