Evaluation

Evaluation

Overall in terms of my animations I think looking from the start of the unit when I had no experience to the end now then I’ve made very good progress over the unit, I still have a long way to go before I can really start animating with the best of them but I’m going to keep practicing to keep my skill base up in this aspect since it’s a very useful skill to have.

 I think I thrived more on the character animations than anything else since my beginning ones were basic but weren’t good and by the end my harder ones were better executed showing my improvement over the unit. Looking into the future now I will be probably trying to use the graph editor more since I didn’t touch it in this unit since I wanted to hand key everything, but using this tool should help me take my animations to the next level and hopefully help me produce some really cool stuff for our upcoming game demo at the end of the year.

Animated Assets

Animated Asset 1 Campfire Spit

My first of the animated assets was the one I will be using for my game demo and that is the camp fire spit, I initially already had this thing modeled from my assets to go into my game so that was already doe the next things was just to rig it which was easy since it was a simple bone running the length of the spit pipe and from there it was a simple rotation for the animation.

Here is how it came out

As you can see I got the exact desired effect from my animation and no further review of it is needed in my eyes since I got the required result.

Animated Asset 2 Cogs

I decided to do a second animated asset since my first one even though it was exactly what I wanted; it was very simple so I made a second which was a bunch of cogs moving in unison. I started by modelling a simple cog and then duplicated it 2 times so there was three connected I place and then I rigged each individual cog with a singular bone running down the center. Once rigged I simply rotated these both the outside going the same direction and the center one rotating in the opposite direction.

Here is how it looks

As you can see it looks exactly how cogs would function I thought I did a really good job of this and I think if I was to do it again I would improve on adding more cogs to make a more complicated piece of machinery. 

Weight Painting

Weight Painting

When looking into animations and rigging I also had to cover painting of weights, which is simple in theory but long and more difficult than it makes out to be. Essentially painting weights is when you manipulate the weight of certain geometry so that it beds more easily or is more resilient, for example if I was to animate a knee bend and the weights were to low, the knee would bend and collapse with the back of the knee as well but if the weights were increased and painted on the back of the knee they wouldn’t bend and collapse as easy giving you more natural look to your animation without the weird deformations.

This is a good skill to have when rigging and creating your own animations it didn’t really play much of a role in my animations so I did not delve too deep in to its mechanics but it’s something I will defiantly look at I the future

Here is the video I used to help me develop my understanding

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzI5PC2iB2s

Character Animations and Critique (Part 2)

Animation 4 Walking

For my fourth animation I decided upon a walk cycle animation which is considered the bread and butter of an animator’s tool set. When I was looking at this I knew this would be the best test of what I’d learned since its considered a very difficult task to do especially by hand, to make this animation I first researched into a walk cycle and found an image of 3D walk cycle in 5 steps and so I tried to use this as an base when creating mine and then I slowly started to add extra touches to it like hip swaying and head bobbing to try make it look more believable.

And here is the result

I was relatively happy with this result since its very obvious what he’s doing and it doesn’t look bad but there’s still something that doesn’t quite cut it on this animation and I believe it to be the distance he moves with the steps so I improve o this by shortening the distance he moves in the animation to get a better level of realism I found out once this was completed that there is considered a better way to animate it too in which I would animate the legs moving together and then change the timings on one leg getting an alternating look to the walk, this is something I would like to revisit.

Animation 5 Superman Launch

For my fifth and final animation I decided on a superman launch, which is fun one to make a change from the standard animations I’ve been doing and choosing this was also to challenge myself a bit after the walk cycle because this is the arguably harder project, I first started by looking at as much reference as I could for it which meant looking at still of the old superman films and even watching the new ones, also I discovered it was also used in the matrix to here’s an image before the take-off into the sky.

After seeing this I decided to mix this pose with the classic superman one, this took the character into a crouch pose as if building power to a leap and soar into the sky.

And here is the result

I was extremely happy with this one I thought I capture all the right movements in the body and he took off fast but not too fast so you couldn’t see what was going on, the criticism for this would be that it’s a little robotic and could be a lot smoother I the initial crouch but other than that I was happy and maybe some improvements on the expressions on the face.

Character Animations and Critique (Part 1)

Character animations and critique

For my Animations on my character I decided to base it on realism and do it just as a test to how well I can animate since I’ve never done it before, my main focus was to create animations that would be difficult but accessible by someone who hadn’t done it like me. As well as this they were not made with the idea to go into my final demo game at the end of the year which looking back I think was a good idea since it means I had more creative freedom with them.

Animation 1 Clapping

For my first one i decided to do simple stand and clap but I wanted to do it slow to try and indicate sarcasm, my inspiration for this was from the taunts used In the game destiny.

And here is the result

As you can see I did get the slow clap working but I was not happy since I didn’t really capture much emotion in the movement like I wanted to this was down to the rest of the body looking a little stiff for future development I will try to add more secondary movements to try and create a more realistic animation.

Animation 2 Waiting Idle

My Second Animation is an idle but I didn’t want a simple stood still idle pose which is common so I made use of a prop in the form of a wall that the character leas against and after a while he will check his watch signalling impatience, I did this because I thought the use of a prop would make it harder to make look realistic, since people can spot when physics are not right with an animation so this means the animation would have to be spot on to look like it fit.

And here is the result

As you can see from the video the animation worked out quite nice I thought but still I think it would of benefited from my animating more sections so it looked more natural.to do this I would simply go back into my file and add some simple rotations to the chest to simulate breathing and also add in some changes to the facial expression.

Animation 3 Waving

My third animation is a wave, when I was first think of doing this animation my first idea was for a simple wave as I to greet someone so not much in the way of movement so I scrapped hat idea since I thought it was too easy so I kept the same idea but made it more complicated by adding I a double handed wave and a hop as if to try to get someone’s attention from far away while keeping the initial wave.

And here is the result

As you can see from the video the animation turned out really well I’m especially happy about this one because it has a lot of movement in it and it doesn’t feel fake it looks as though a person would move like that. The only way I’d improve this would be to go into set frames and smooth out the result and then add some movement to the face so he doesn’t have the same expression.

Body Rigging

Body Rigging

When learning about animation we also had to learn some basic rigging of body’s because without rigging the animation would not be possible, for the very basic rig we simply looked at a normal joint with an Ik solver which I’ll get into shortly, this would give us everything we would need to make rigs of our own for virtually anything. To begin with we started with a cylinder which need segments running don its length because without this then the rig wouldn’t have geometry to manipulate. Once this was done I simply made the mesh untouchable in the layer tab so I wouldn’t accidentally move it.

Once this was done I simply went to the joint tool in the animation tab and then selected one end of the cylinder right in the middle and then placed a second directly in the middle of the cylinder and the final point on the opposite side from the original joint these are basically used as our bones for the make shift arm.

From here we simply selected both the bones and the cylinder and hit the button bind skin. This will make the movement of the bones affect the cylinder now like a regular arm, now to make this fully like a regular we need to make it so it unable to stretch and will maintain the same distance from wrist to shoulder with an elbow bend this is simply done with an ik solver which is essentially like ligament joining two bones together to do this press the ik solver tool again in animation and the press one the first bone we created and the second bone we created to and this will add the ligament.

This should complete a very basic arm rig but this can be used to rig almost everything

Here is the video on how to do it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghuD5Po6BS4

I thought this was a good way to rig even though I had never done it before simply because it was accessible and easy to understand for first time users and it makes life easier when you think of all these tools as bones and ligaments.

Lip Sync

Lip Sync

For my lip-sync I had already decided on my target video while I was doing research into animations and so after this before I started my lip-sync I thought I would look at some simple sheet for mouth placements when pronouncing certain letters to help with the animation since it will mainly be focused on the mouth. That’s when I found this which helped with my animation a lot.

Even though the image is used for drawing animations I found that the same rules applied and it helped out a lot.

And here is the result of my lip sync

As you can see from this my lip sync is very close to the original and I am very happy with it, the things that I would improve given more time would be the smoothness of the animation transitions and to do this it would simply mean using the graph editor in Maya with the sound from the video imported and that means I could get the lip movements exact but I think for not using this method I still did a good job and as an extra bit of improvement I would add in some shoulder and arm movements ad arm movements to match up perfectly with my lip sync.