Category: Advanced and Experimental 3DCA Techniques

This unit has been very important for my animation practice. The main part of the unit was a feedback that George gave us every week. It really helped to understand more all the principles of animation in practice and mainly prepare a few animations for our showreels.

An animation exercise on body mechanics was very beneficial for me as I could focus on a body movement and timing. In the beginning, it was important to think of an idea that would show interesting and challenging movement of the body. I tried to make a mannequin look as realistic as possible but the fact that it is made from wood means more limitation in movement. It was easy to work with the rig, although it took quite a lot of time to keep body parts in the same position, as an example – when a mannequin falls down on its knees, I had to add more keyframes to ‘hold’ the knees on the same spot.

A final animation of body mechanics:

A lipsync exercise was challenging not only in the lipsync itself but also in the body movement, as it had to help desired emotions of the audio. For the lip sync, I learned that it is better to start with opening a mouth with jaw rotation and then create mouth shapes according to the sound. We don’t have to add every single sound and articulate every letter and it is a very interesting process of identifying what is important in the lip synchronising and what is not.

A rig was very pleasant to work with, it had an appearance picker and all the main controls separately. The only main issue is the it was not possible to render a final version as we have to pay for it with this rig. However it is not a big problem as playblast shows everything needed.

A final playbast animation on lipsync:

In the nearest future I plan to polish these two animation even more to put them on my main showreel.

Artefact Animation

My artefact animation was my first full animation that I developed from the idea to a final version (however I plan to polish a few animation shots). It was a great experience and I learnt a lot of new tools and technics as a particle system and a bloom lens effect. I also exercised more on the animation itself from the walking cycles to the emotion expressions.

A final animation “Firefly”:

After processing a feedback from the last week, I put the animation in spline:

In spline are very visible imperfections in timing and arches. For example, the last part where the pointer hits the hand:

George advised to fix it by putting left hand in position “ready for a hit” much sooner and also imitate a hit by rotating a wrist down a bit and slightly changing a position of the arm to the back.

After these and other adjustments, I created another improved version:

Animated Artefact

The result of working on a moving and glowing particle system was also very necessary for the last two scenes of the animation. They show a character interacting with the swarm:

In terms of the animation itself, there was no much movement of the main character:

In order to make the particle system in the final render, I had to add a bloom lens effect. This effect is added in the render settings under the “Arnold Renderer” – “Imagers”:

After that in the Attribute editor is possible to adjust the values:

This effect adds bloom to all existed lights in the scene, but because in my animation apart from the fireflies the main source of light is Skydome which is far away from the camera, a bloom effect doesn’t effect it. And a final result will look like this:

In the end I decided to put another shot – a detail on the main character:

After a feedback on a blocking animation I had to work more on a nicer flow of the movements. The main notice was to pay attention and favour previous keys. I also had to work more on a head rotation and a wrist rotation for a better wimp.

An animation after a feedback:

I also decided to put more key frames to clear the movement a bit better:

Artefact Animation

This week I focused on scene 10 where I had to play with particle effect.

The previs:

Playbast animation:

Playlist after a few adjustments:

A final animation with a particle effect:

This week we had to start animating and put it in blocking first. The only parts I didn’t put in blocking is the mimics and lips movement.

My first attempt:

Artefact Animation

This week I worked on scene 7, previs of which looks like this:

I asked my classmate Gloria to help with a reference:

Playbast animation:

The second part of the week I spent on figuring out how to create a glowing effect for a firefly that is going to be visible in multiple shots, as well as how to create a fireflies swarm.

Our other tutor Michael was helping me to achieve a glowing effect. At first we tried putting a light in the body of a fly, but it didn’t give a desired effect. So then I tried adding emission to the body by adding a different texture first. It did help to illuminate light but the light was visible only when a fly was close to different surfaces. Michael suggested duplicating a body part and scale it but also didn’t do a wanted effect.

An example of the glowing I wanted to create was drawn over the rendered scene in procreate:

After hours or investigation I found the easiest solution to achieve a glow – I added a bloom effect under the “image” section in render settings. This effect blooms all the lights in the scene, but since my scene didn’t have any additional lights (I used Skydome for the light), the effect affected only a firefly.

A previous example also shows an example of the swarm.

To chive a swarm effect I knew I had to work with particle effect. Michael showed me a YouTube example that really helped to achieve a nearly desirable effect:

After testing a particle and a bloom effect:

This week we started working on an animation that concentrates more on the lip-sync part.

For the animation, I had to go through lots of audios and find a one that resonates with me. I ended up with a sound from the Mean Girls tv show.

We had to write down the text and underscore words that we have to put the emphasis on and add pauses. In the white I wrote the text in a way how I hear it. This is necessary for the animation as the character doesn’t need to articulate all the sounds and lots of them are either skipped, changed or emerged with others.

For the reference at first I came up with one idea, but after the discussion with George I changed it. A final reference idea has two versions:

For the character I picked a Malcolm rig:

Artefact Animation

This week I started to develop scene 5 and 6. The second scene I would consider and the hardest one as it has the most character movement.

Previs:

For the scene 6 I filmed references to help understand the movement:

An animated playbast:

In the second version of the scene 6 I decided to shorten the scene and add a camera movement for more dynamics:

After the feedback George advised to change one particular movement and instead of the right hand going down, it has to ‘help’ the left arm to ‘get out’:

He also suggested to break the clip that holds the left arm and work a bit more on the last part of the scene – the crawling:

The final (almost) animation:

Artefact Animation:

This week I worked on the next two scenes:

To understand a movement I filmed a few references:

Final animations:

This week I got more feedback on my blocking plus animation. George suggested to make a more interesting finger movement in the first part and make the mannequin collect fingers in a fist. It would also fill a small pause. I also had to work more on the paper body flexibility in order to make it look more natural.

After applying all the notes to the blocking animation, I have put it in spline and adjusted timing:

Animated Artefact

This week I decided to animated scenes in order of the story. I concentrated on animating first two scenes.

The first scene is an opening scene, where we see a part of the environment – that we are in a some kind of forest, and a whole character.

A previs for consecrating more on a body position within the shot and a firefly’s movement:

As a previs for this shot wasn’t really showing a pose of the character, decided to make a reference of myself lying on the ground to make it look more natural in the animation:

In the reference I added all the necessary movements including the breathing so the character doesn’t seem that static:

The second scene was a continuing of the first one, but with a focus on mimics.

In the previs there was not much happening as the rig didn’t have a face, but we can see a movement of a firefly and the ending of the scene – “waking up” and moving off the shot:

Playbast version 1:

In the version 2 I cleaned a bit the mimics:

Blocking plus is even more extending the blocking by adding more poses in between the key ones. These poses are breakdown poses and their purpose is to better show the movement.

To simplify, the concept has to look like KEY – BREAKDOWN – KEY.

Last week we also received a feedback on our first blocking attempt. After the feedback I had to work more on the poses for falling:

This feedback helped me to develop my blocking:

Animated Artefact

I decided to start by animating scene 9 first, as I could try out animating a fly that will be present in more scenes as well as I will not need to focus on the lower part of the body of the character.

Previs:

First version of animation:

I did a render to see how well the character works with the world and how fast will render a render farm located in the university. The answers: the character works perfectly with the environment and rendering is very fast, comparing to my computer. The only thing is that the eyebrows were rendered wrong in a few frames.

As for the other character in this animation and the scene specifically – a firefly, I have found a rigged model of a regular fly online and have changed it a bit so it looks a bit less as a regular fly. In the future I will need to add a glow affect on the body.

Blocking is essentially the skeleton of the body!

 © George Toombes

Blocking is a very important second step of the animation (right after creating the reference). It helps to see what are the key poses, how the story is going to be told and to better understand timing between the main poses. In general, it helps to see how the animation is going to develop further.

George also shared with us a very useful video on how to approach blocking:

Here is my first attempt on blocking:

Animated Artefact

For my artefact I decided to develop an idea I had last term – a story about a firefly. I have already created a previs:

The next step is to put a character into the scenes and animate it.

The character that Im going to use is a model ‘Artemis’ by Ramon Arango:

This week we had to come up with an idea for the body mechanics shot.

I got an idea to animate a mannequin falling and getting scared of its own reflection.

Before planning the shot in Maya I made a few references that would help me to understand the movement:

After a few attempts, we came up with a good reference: