28/10/2015 - Animatics

Week 08

Animatics

These are my animatics for each of my four required actions for this module. A general theme here is that I prefer to work loosely with my animatics because my 3D animation skills are much better than my drawing animation skills so I find it difficult to convey the correct posture/camera shot in my storyboards, therefore I prefer to have a less strict approach with them allowing me to do the more creative side of things in the 3D package. I see storyboards more as a guide where as my previous knowledge of storyboards was that they need to be exact and you can't really deviate from them. This may be the case in a team project but since I am on my own I think my method is justified. After all, they are called storyboards, so the quality of drawing isn't scrutinized as much.

Heavy Sword Animatic

Below is my character lifting heavy sword and swinging it 360 degrees animatic:

https://youtu.be/5n_365APSV4 

The basic story is that the character is trying to pick up a very heavy sword and swing it around their back. There will be opportunities for a good amount o exaggeration with them picking up the sword and also when they are swinging it around their back, I could just imagine the great strain on the characters back when the sword is pulling his arms down behind it.

Running Into Object Animatic

Below is my character running into an object and being knocked back:

https://youtu.be/dFgYQX9htzM

The basic story of this animatic is that the character is running and runs into wall, getting knocked back in the process. I don't see much opportunities for exaggeration in actions here but there is the possibilities of exaggeration in performance, for example, when he hits the wall he might slide down it unrealistically.

Jumping Small Stream Animatic

Below is my character jumping across a small stream:

https://youtu.be/HXo47b5RkK0

The story for this animatic is that the character is simply jumping across a small stream. The possibilities of exaggeration here, are again good.There will be a lot of anticipation in the build up to the jump and there will also be a lot of follow through on the landing. 

Magic Spell Animatic

Below is my character casting an epic spell:

https://youtu.be/mkl9v03KYhs

The story for this animatic is that the character is casting an epic spell. There is a great deal of exaggeration I can deploy for this animation with the arm flailing the most obvious place. The performance of the character is something that could also be exaggerated. 

Feedback:

After feedback from the lecturer on my animatics, I am to do a 3D animatic. We established that I had some strong key poses in my animatics but some fell away towards the end and that my drawing wasn't strong all the way through. That is why its been recommended that I do a reiteration of my animatics but in 3D using the rig I plan to use for the final animations. This way i will be able to get the key poses the way I want them to look without having to worry about the perspective of the character. 

23/10/2015 - Media Test/Art Test 03

Week 07

Media/Art Test 03

Run Cycle 03

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXuj7s2NnOk

This is the run cycle that i submitted for the art test, the reason I submitted this one is because the other one where the character is holding an axe, the frame range is wrong and he looks like he is sprinting like an athlete. So, I decided to take the first walk cycle I created (the one where I didn't give him secondary movement) and edit it so it was more plausible as a run cycle. This was my best result as a run cycle, even though I could have made it better given enough time, I still feel that my process improved greatly and I managed to keep things clean inside of Maya.

22/10/2015 - Media Test/Art Test 02

Week 07

Media/Art Test 02

Heavy Attack

This is my heavy attack animation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2Caa9tTxqM

My earliest attempts at this went far from smoothly, I had a particular problem with my characters arm where the interpolation between two key frames was well off and the arm did no react the way I was expecting. I tried solving this using the graph editor but to no avail, in the end I just deleted the two arm controller key frames and re-keyed them and that sorted it out. This makes me believe that the problem was the way I had key framed my controllers, it may have been the way I highlighted everything and key framed it...or it could have been something else. After all this...the rest of my key framing went smoother as I was more efficient with them and I kept things organised. This problem with interpolation has been a problem for me in the past and I finally feel like its something that I can identify early on and fix.

I feel that I have achieved a good sense of anticipation before the character slams down his axe although I would strictly keep this comment related the upper body. I didn't manage to do much animating on the legs although I did try, but anything I did looked off and made my animation look worse so I did away with the key frames on the legs. Given more time I would have liked to add a sort of step forward as the character is lunging with his axe.

21/10/2015 - Media Test/Art Test

Week 07

Media Test/Art Test 01

Run Cycle

The task I am undertaking is to animate the character, Axe, from Dota 2. 

The two animations I need to do is a run cycle and a heavy attack animation with him.

The link below is my first test at a run cycle with this character.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0d6yn_xk0k 

I decided not to complete this (no secondary animation) because I worked on this in my usual fashion and I faced several problems where the graph editor was not able to help me. So I decided to go away and watch some tutorials on the graph editor in Maya and also run cycle tutorials and the link below this paragraph is of my second attempt after watching several tutorials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DfSfgx8hKo&feature=youtu.be 

This is a more fleshed out run cycle although the characters hips are limited so I was not able to animate the way I wanted to. I have managed to gain something of a better workflow with my animating which has been extremely useful. 

14/10/2015 - Run Animatic Tests

Week 06

Animatic Tests

The link below is to my "run test animatic". This is the first run cycle I have done in 2D and 3D.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3EE49CijxY&feature=youtu.be

I have done storyboards for a lot of projects in my last three years of college and University and I have loathed them for as long. For this project I decided to try something different for my storyboards. My process doing storyboards before this year has always been to use a physical template to draw 4 16 x 9 rectangles on an A3 sketchbook and repeat that for however many storyboards I required. After that i would painstakingly draw my storyboards which I have never enjoyed in the past. After that I would scan the pages in and crop them and place them in Premiere Pro to then be exported as a video file. After knowing though that I would need to be doing storyboards for this module (and another!) I decided to have a think about another approach I can take for them, that's when I decided to try out doing them straight in Photoshop and exporting them from there. That is how I created the animatic test above. I really enjoyed doing them this way because undoing a bad brush stroke is a whole lot easier than having to rub it out (which just makes you work hard to get rid of your mistakes). That is one of the main reasons I found this way superior, in the past I would get annoyed easily at doing storyboards, but, in Photoshop I just undo the action and i'm back where I was with great ease. The 'onion skinning' feature in Photoshop is also extremely helpful and takes out the guess work of trying to match up the compositions of traditional storyboards. 

14/10/2015 - Moodboards

Week 06

Moodboards

These are my moodboards for this project so far. I have just done one for each of my actions as a bases for my animation and to also give me reference for my animatic.

1 - Picking up a heavy sword and swing it 360 degree's

This moodboard is showing characters lifting/swinging heavy swords. I can see when characters are lifting up a heavy sword that the shoulders seem to take a lot the weight while there is also (of course) a lot of weight being spread out by the legs and the stance the character assumes. Another obvious observation is that a realistic heavy sword will require two hands to lift up. 

2 - Running into a stationary object and getting knocked back/unconscious

I strangely struggled to find images of people running into objects, so this was the best I could find (without actually running into objects myself). I think this could be the toughest to draw and might actually require me to watch boxing clips of knockouts as reference for my character falling down. One thing I need to make a decision on is whether or not the character knows he is going to hit the wall...my original thought was that he didn't and I think that would give me the best results. 

3 - Casting an epic spell that needs a lot of arm flailing

This moodboard is for magic spells, because these images are static it is difficult to see the true action that the characters are making, so, while animating I will need to find some reference footage of some characters actually waving a spell which shouldn't be too difficult. Magic seems to be (in film) a sort of magic that is inside the character and when they do a certain movement, the magic is released in the way they intended. So I will approach this animation as if the character is in a dance and is channeling the magic up through his body and out through his hands.

4 - Jumping across a small stream

This is my last moodboard and is for jumping across a small stream. To get over a small stream you will almost always go over with one foot leading...I know this from experience as there is a small burn I have to cross to get to University and I almost always jump over with one foot. Jumping across this burn could prove vital research for this animation. 

Overall, these moodboards, even though perhaps they are lacking, will provide me with the reference I need for my own animations. 

07/10/2015 - Visual Research 3

Week 05

Visual Research:

"Dum Spiro" (Cailly, Guenole, Hardion, Lemoine, Wackowiez, 2012)

Can be seen here: https://vimeo.com/51478122 

This is the animation I am going to analyse for my own project research, "Dum Spiro". I acknowledge that I have taken quite a few screenshots so I will refrain from writing too much on each one but group them together for relevance. 

1:

2:

This is from the first scene in the short animation. Both of the screenshots show a great amount of exaggeration as the main character is taking the message and leaving the scene. This short is 3D so if I found the right rig then this is something I could experiment with. I love the way his arms and even his body go all wavy and in the animation itself there is an extra sense of movement added with it. Its worth pointing out that this animation makes use of the "rubber hosing" technique used early on in animation. You can see what the term "rubber hosing" means just by looking at the second image.

3:

4:

5:

6:

In all of the screenshots above there is even more examples of exaggeration with the character. Most of these screenshots show frames that are gone really quickly but they still manage to add an extra sense of movement like the first two screenshots. There are some really nice arcs added to the exaggeration which  combine two key animation principles, arcs and exaggeration. This combination works great in this animation and it has definitely given me something to test out when I start animating or even when I do my storyboards. 

7:

This is another screenshot for exaggeration, The character himself does not exaggerate but I believe that the way they have added a couple more limbs is a form of exaggeration as the character himself doesn't originally have that many limbs. This technique seems to be used to indicate that the character is frantically moving his arms and legs in a panicked fashion because he is falling. This is something I could replicate in my own animations by possibly rendering out the character with a couple of different animations for the legs and arms. 

8:

This is the last screenshot for exaggeration, I have put this last because I feel this one the most can be analysed for exaggeration and performance the most. Nobody in their right mind would run away like that with their arms flailing behind them like a scarf would, so in this screenshot I would argue that their is definitely exaggeration in the character but there is also an element of exaggeration in the characters performance. If you tried to run like that in real life you would fall on your back, that's why I consider his performance to be exaggerated since its almost impossible for someone to run like that in real life.

9:

10:

The two screenshots above relate to my analyses of exaggerated performance. In the first screenshot the character is preparing to run off with the letter he has been tasked with delivering to someone. This is clearly an exaggerated pose for someone about to run off, for one, it would actually waste time wrapping your body up in that pose before actually beginning to run but that is coming from a common sense/reality perspective. In an animation perspective the pose allows the viewer to clearly see that he is about to run off the left of the screen. This is more of what I have analysed before in previous visual research, but I find it helpful analysing exaggerated poses being used effectively in 3D animation because that is the medium I will be using for this project and different pre-rigs will bend differently which is important for me to remember when selecting my pre-rig. The second screenshot briefly is the character returning because he left the letter the first time, I consider this also to be an exaggerated pose because not many people in real life situations would contort their body like that, we can see his shoulders are raised an his head is lower while his knees are closer together, all this helps to convey that the character feels silly and foolish for leaving the letter in the first place.

11: 

This last image shows the character running from the cover of one tree in the distance to another tree closer to the viewer. As you can see, exaggeration has been employed again to help emphasise that he is running. Especially in this seen, it happen so fast that if he was not exaggerated then it would be difficult for most of the viewers to clearly see that he is running.

Overall, this is a superb 3D animation that both exaggerates the performance and also the limbs/movement of the character. This has been a good eye opener to what I can really do with the right rig on my side and has provided me with invaluable research of which to influence how I work.