For our performance piece, we were told to download and use the 'Morpheus' rig.
I was unsure at first of its stylistic looking appearance, however once I started playing around with the controls and experimenting with its limitations, my opinion soon changed. In fact, the huge advantage this rig has over others is its huge variety of appearance-changing attributes. You can differentiate characters based on skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, hair style, size, gender - the possibilities arealmost endless!
I experimented with the rig's capabilities by creating the three characters shown above: a large man, an elderly, spindly woman and a young girl. Pleased with the result, I then went on to posing each character respectively.
It was during this time I spent posing my characters that I was able to get a good grasp of the many Morpheus controls. The rig is extremely manageable and I'm sure I won't have many problems in getting it to do what I want it to do.
The next time I handled the rig was my first time animating the human face. I picked up some helpful tips from Keith Lango videos on lip sync animation, such as utilising the entire head for facial animation, not just the golden triangle (eyes & mouth). I also learned some terminology I hadn't come across before, such as 'saccadic eye movement' in which the eye stops a few times along its line of movement. After I'd read some more about lip sync, I was able to try it for myself with a sound clip given to me by my tutor.
As a first attempt, I'm pleased with the result. I like the eyebrow movement and the lips don't seem too forced or manipulated. There is a lot more to work on, however, so I'll need to get some practice in before I start animating my final performance piece.
For this unit, 'Character Animation', I will be studying performance; looking specifically at gestures, poses, expressions and lip synch. It will follow on from the last unit's work, 'Animation Techniques', as we will be applying the same principles but taking them further into what will hopefully be a realistic performance animation.
We've been asked to animate an audio clip with dialogue, lasting roughly 30 seconds. We have the choice to animate in either 2D or 3D - I have limited experience in both, but as I've devoted the last 4 months or so to Maya I will definitely be going down the 3D path.
The assessment criteria is as follows:
The first thing I need to do is find a piece of dialogue - I want to find something that will challenge me, for example, a clip that covers a range of emotions, as opposed to a flat performance with one, single tone. It needs to be expressive and go on a journey, with gradual build ups in the speech, perhaps emphasised by slight crescendos in the vocal tone. Importantly, I want to find a dialogue with one or two pauses in between speech, to allow time for thought in the character which in turn will hopefully make my animation more realistic. This is because screen space is essential for conveying emotion.
After mentally combining these factors, I went online and searched through some of my favourite performances from some fantastic films and television shows.
Here are a few examples:
Rory Breaker - Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
Although the speech itself is not too imaginative, the performance is well paced and covers around three different emotions - especially noting the last few seconds where the change in tone is quite dramatic. It also includes pauses and a build up.
Combo - This Is England
This is possibly one of the best on-screen performances I've seen to this day; just looking at the expressions on Stephen Graham's face, not to mention his movement and gestures, is an excellent resource for animation purposes. I think this clip is too profane to animate considering that I hope to potentially use this work for my showreel, and I wouldn't know which 30 seconds to pick as all of it could work quite well for performance dialogue. Really great emotion driven piece, lots of spacing, dynamics and a range of different tones.
Tyres - Spaced (0.25-0.58)
This is obviously a far more comedic performance, which could be a lot of fun to work on. Michael Smiley is great at conveying emotion and delivering speech in a truly expressive and unique way. However, his character is very prone to mood swings (as shown in the clip), which would be great in terms of practicing animating different emotions, but without any character background information I worry that the dialogue may be a little to obscure to animate.
Del - Planes, Trains and Automobiles
John Candy managed to create a very touching scene with this dialogue, his timing is well done and not overly 'cheesy', giving plenty of screen space. The nuances in his voice also help set the emotional tone, along with the slight stammering which I think could be interesting to animate. There isn't as much dynamic range as some of the other clips I've been considering, but the slight change in tone towards the end creates a definite climax following the gradual build up throughout the scene.
I should note that the above clips make up just a fraction of the number of scenes I've been considering for this unit! I've had to rule out some of my favourites due to their popularity or cult reputation - I don't want to animate something that's already been done many times before - which meant getting rid of performances such as 'Ezekiel 25:17' by Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, which starts out calm and ends in shouting. It also meant that I couldn't use the famous speech made by Charlie Chaplin at the end of The Great Dictator - an incredibly moving piece - which also had the drawback of having a poor-quality sound recording.
In the end, I settled for this clip:
Dr. Ben Sobel - Analyze This
Although the choice of film was not quite what I had in mind, this scene is almost perfect, in my opinion, for this unit. Billy Crystal is a great comedy actor who can jump from emotion to emotion with great ease, as demonstrated in the clip with the multiple different attitudes he gives to the screen - calm, serious, aggressive, sarcastic, and angry, to mention a few. This range of emotion will be great to practice different facial expressions, and it will be interesting to experiment with physical gestures and posing.
Over the Easter holidays, we were asked to design and model a simple character which we could then potentially rig and use for the next unit, Character Animation. This began as quite a creative process, something which I enjoyed thoroughly - I looked at online resources for images of character sheets as a reference, including tips and advice on character design. Life drawing also proved to be a valuable resource, helping with perspective, proportion and different angles.
Once I'd decided to stick with 'Paul', my kind-but-timid, obese man, I started drawing the front, back and side images in Photoshop, in order to use them for referencing in Maya. It took longer than expected to match the proportions up correctly...
It was after I'd finished all of this work when I realised I'd made a 'big' mistake (pun intended). One of the first things I read in the modelling tutorial that I was about to begin, was that you should strictly avoid modelling large/fat/obese characters until you're very confident with the modelling and rigging process. This does essentially make sense, due to the huge amount of restriction that can be caused by oversized limbs, especially with movement and making sure, for example, that the arms don't swing through the torso. I also discovered at this stage that the tutorial was for modelling with NURBS - something I'd never tried before - so I started a very basic, simple model to start experimenting.
Getting used to the laborious naming conventions... (click image to enlarge)
I actually found that modelling with NURBS gave me a lot of freedom and control over the body shapes, as it was almost entirely done with lattices. However I felt it was almost too easy, as it didn't provide the detail and intricacies that I'd want from a humanistic model.
Evidence of attempting some realistic anatomy, indicated by the sloping blue line in the forearm.
The eyes, although slightly more challenging, were great fun to make. I applied a Phong texture to the eyeball itself, giving it a glossy appearance, and made a Ramp shader to go with it to make the pupil and iris. I attempted to give the eyelids a realistic looking ridge around the edge of their surface, and gave them controls so that they could be animated (see 'Start sweep' and 'End sweep').
Although NURBS modelling was great in terms of practice, I decided to discard my character so that I could start modelling with polygons again; this time hopefully creating something looking a little more professional. The character I created next was a frail looking, old man with a bit of a tummy (in lieu of my original character that I never got to model)! The character was a mixture of imagination and references from online resources.
I started modelling from the arm, as opposed to the torso which I'd done with the NURBS tutorial.
In order to create the head, I began with a simple polygon plane, rotated on its Z axis to line up with the side view of the face. I then added subdivisions and edge loops according to proper facial topology, and began to extrude the faces out and around the shape of the head.
I was amazed by just how much detail I could give this character, all within Maya - such as the rolls of flab, the knobbly fingers, and the bone definition in the knees and shins. I did come across a few problems with my obsessive fiddling with vertices and adding edge loops, such as finding and trying to get rid of Ngons, but after some scrutinization and playing around it didn't affect the work at all. The model is not yet finished, there are a great number of adjustments I need to make (such as pushing out the rib cage to create a more rounded torso), but I'm proud of how far I've managed to take this character. The next real step I need to make is learning the process of UV mapping, so that I can texture him and then eventually rig him.
For the end of term brief, we were assigned to do a character walk. We could experiment with it however much we liked, although we were advised to try two different walks within the final clip - this is to maintain interest, and also just to show off talent. The other requirement was that we had to include the ball & tail rig, making it interact with our human rig, ‘Animo’.
(click images to enlarge)
I began by thinking about lots of different characterised walks, shown in part by my list in the top right-hand side of my notes, pictured above. As a class, we drew inspiration from the classic opening of ‘101 Dalmatians’ where Pongo watches a number of different women walking their dogs, demonstrating a wide breadth of walk cycles. At this stage, I wanted to start doing my own reference walks. Taking the list I’d made of different character walks, I took my tripod and camera and filmed myself performing the walks.
As I started concentrating on my own work, I tried writing down a few rough plans for story ideas, focusing on ‘who’ - the subject of the animation, ‘what’ - the actions of the subject, ‘where’, and a few notes on ‘how’ the subject would do this walk.
After I picked which story/situation was most engaging for me (and for anyone else watching), I began working on my storyboard - which turned out to be an extremely useful guide throughout the animation.
Possibly the most useful reference, however, is pictured above. After I knew exactly what I wanted for my walk cycles, I filmed myself acting them out and took many screenshots of the clips as I watched them back later on my laptop. I then picked out the main positions of the walk and put them into Adobe Photoshop, where I annotated each still, writing what different parts of the body were doing during different stages of the walk. For this specific walk, I drew the lines of action for each position, which made animating the scene in Maya far easier as I knew exactly what to look for. Without this guide, I’m positive that my animation would have little to no realism to it.
I did the same process for different sections of my animation - for example, the swivel transition (pictured above), and the side-step walk cycle (pictured below).
My next mission was making sure my timing (and spacing) was as realistic and as life-like as possible. I already knew that a tip-toe walk was decidedly slower than an average walk, meaning that the cycle would require a lot more frames than usual, but by putting my reference clip into an image plane in Maya I was able to assess exactly how many frames each position of the walk would use.
This turned out to be slightly harder than I imagined because in a realistic walk, the timing is never exactly the same. As a result of this, I had to scribble out lots of notes and pick an average number from three different examples for each position of both walks.
A couple of examples of my note taking (pictured above).
I thought that my first completed walk cycle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OQlK_jBKs0) was quite effective, however there are, of course, mistakes that I would like to clean up. For example, although it isn’t clear on a white background, both feet are sliding. I was able to sort this out later for the back foot position, by making many subtle changes in the graph editor for translating the global control. The front foot still obviously slides though, which is disappointing. Regardless, I feel that with more time and a more detailed foot model, I would have been able to make the tip-toe walk even better.
This screenshot was taken during animating my tip-toe walk cycle - the graph editor demonstrates ‘follow through’ in the torso, which alludes to realistic weight during motion.
The next step was creating the ‘where’ - in other words, the environment for my animation. Although we were told that we’d only be marked on our walk cycles, I felt it necessary to incorporate an environment, not only for appeal, but to add a sense of realism to the walks and the situation. It is for this precise reason that I wanted to include audio in my final animation as well. In order to create my environment, I used simple polygon planes as the floor and walls, and took an image of a carpet texture from mayang.com/textures, using it as a material for the ground plane. The assets I used were downloaded directly from turbosquid.com. Creating the finished bookcase was a feat - as I’d only downloaded seven different books, I had to copy and paste them all multiple times, arranging each one individually on each shelf of the bookcase, then shading each one differently.
At this point in the animation, I felt I was halfway there - the animation for Animo was almost complete, I just had to finish animating one of the arms that would be interacting with the Ball & Tail, amongst other tweaks and adjustments I needed to make in the graph editor.
I was then able to begin animating the Ball & Tail. As shown in the graph editor above, this involved some subtle squash & stretch at the beginning to indicate breathing - making sure that the intake of breath was faster than the exhale, which indicates the creature being asleep - and towards the end, lots of jumping up and down with added rotation.
I animated the Ball & Tail by blocking in the position of the ball first, then adjusting the curves in the graph editor afterwards - I animated overlap in the tail once I knew that the main body was correct and to my liking, as I knew from previous experience how temperamental the tail rig could be. Specifically for the jumping parts, I turned on ‘ghost selected’ to see my arcs more clearly, and adjusted them accordingly.
The graph editor above illustrates something close to an ‘ease out’ in each Ball & Tail jump - as gravity increases on the ball, it travels less distance. Because I was adjusting the ‘translate’ curve, I changed the tangents to ‘linear’, as I didn’t want the ball to go back in on itself (which would have happened if I’d left a smooth curve at the end of each jump.
Although my animation wasn’t as finished as I’d have liked it to be, I had to begin rendering my different shots due to time constraints. This also meant that I wasn’t able to animate Animo going through the door, but with post-editing I felt that I could avoid the viewer seeing this by using different, effective shots.
Above is the final animation, using just one shot so that the viewer can ascertain exactly what’s going on without focusing on specific elements of the animation. At this point, I’d say that one of main criticisms is with the lighting. I made the mistake of rendering 710 high quality frames before testing and rendering one frame in case I’d made mistakes. In hindsight, I should have adjusted the lighting and done another render, however at the time I let myself get too frustrated about it, especially considering that the render took over three hours and I was worried about the amount of time I had left to finish the project. So, unfortunately I carried on rendering different camera angles, having to put up with bad, low lighting. What I do like about this shot however, is that you can see more detail in Animo’s movement, and I hope, subtle changes that make Animo’s walks more life-like. For example, I had adjusted the width between Animo’s legs a number of different times during the side-step walk, because as previously mentioned, no human walk is perfectly symmetrical. It is also easy to notice that the pace of the side-step walk quickens towards the end, which I feel demonstrates realism as well. With this wide-angle shot, you can also notice the arcs I’ve included in Animo’s movement, which is, again, realistic to a human being as much of our movement is based on a circular path. This is shown most clearly in the hips and torso as Animo rises from stepping on the Ball & Tail, and again as she slides against the wall.
After lots of editing, the piece was complete! On the whole, I’d say I was pleased with the finished result, although this is slightly undermined by the criticism I have for it. During editing I tried to stay as close to the storyboard as possible in terms of including interesting, appealing camera angles and shots. However, given that the animation is just over 30 seconds long, I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with my Ball & Tail stairs animation by cutting it up too much. In using one particular shot showing the Ball’s point of view, I realised I’d made a big mistake by not including a ceiling into my scene! I only came to realise this well after I’d uploaded the animation to youtube, therefore as with my lighting error, I felt I didn’t have enough time to go back and change this. As previously mentioned, the front feet of the tip-toe walk cycle slide forward too much, and the door is yet to be animated. Also, towards the end, I feel that animation becomes less realistic - the weight of the Ball is ever so slightly off, and the overlap in the tail is not fluid enough for my liking. In trying to demonstrate good arcs, I feel that it perhaps took away from the realistic motion of the ball, and that I maybe should have created a longer rise that travels the majority of the distance and a shorter fall that doesn’t travel very far. I also feel that Animo is too rigid in her last walk cycle, and although she had follow through in her spine and head on impact with the wall, there is decidedly less follow through during the side steps. As well as this, I am not satisfied with the ending, as again, I was pushed for time so I had to shorten animation of the Ball & Tail. There are editing mistakes as well, which I didn’t have time to go back and adjust. For example, there is a very slight delay in the audio of the dog yapping and squeaking, which could be subtle to other viewers, but is glaringly obvious to me! As mentioned before, audio wasn’t required for our animations whatsoever, but I personally feel that it’s an essential element that adds to the suspended disbelief of the work - it’s far easier for a viewer to ascertain what’s going on in a piece of film, animation or otherwise, with the help of sound. I created my sound by downloading free audio samples from different online locations, cutting and editing them within Premiere Pro, and changing the dB levels for each sample. One particularly tricky sample to work with was the yapping Yorkshire Terrier - this audio clip had lots of background noise, which was obvious when watching it back as it would drop to silence between each cut. To minimise this, I added in some 'atmos'; I took a small section of the sample where the dog wasn’t making a noise, then copied and pasted it over and over to create the background noise. If you listen closely, you can hear each time the sample repeats itself - a mistake I could have avoided if I’d found a better sample or if I’d been editing in a more audio-focused piece of software, such as Adobe Audition. Despite my slight displeasure with my final film, I am incredibly pleased with the progress I have made this term. I feel I’ve learned more in these past 10 weeks than I’ve ever done before, which, I hope, shows in my work. I’ve now gained many new skills in Autodesk Maya and I hope to continue using them and expanding them as I continue with the course. This does not mean to say, however, that this term has been without its many challenges and difficulties, but that all comes in part with the learning process; a hurdle which I’m proud to say that I’ve jumped over. Most importantly though, I feel that I have truly grasped the principles of animation, and that each one is incorporated in my final piece.
During the Digital Tutors walk cycle tutorial, I made sure to keep a note of each stage as I went along animating the rig, taking screenshots of my progress. I eventually compiled my notes into a step by step pdf guide. This was to make sure that if I ever forgot how to do a walk cycle, or if I forgot one of the many different commands, I'd always be able to quickly look back at my guide and understand what to do without unnecessarily losing any time.
Some close up examples...
I used this guide whilst trying out my own practice walk cycles. For example, trying a tired/sad walk.
This walk cycle is unfinished, but the essence of the walk remains. I like the dragging of the feet, however it is clear that I haven't used a reference - the walk is unrealistic, despite the fact that 'exaggeration' is one of the principles of animation!
One element I do like about it, however, is the appearance of weight. This was done mainly through giving the rig a very slow 'up' and a much faster 'down'.
