Category: Animation Strategies

Assessment 2 Development and Reflection

long-a8Leave a comment

Walk Cycle

I knew a fair amount about creating a walk cycle before starting this assessment from a Berkeley online course I was attending from the start of this semester, so I was able to use that knowledge when posing my walk cycle for this assessment. Halfway through the semester, we had lectures from 2D character animator Niall Doherty about 2D walk cycles. I knew I wanted to do a 3D walk cycle using the Jack rig, however, I was happy to have these lectures as they reiterated the principals of animation and taught me how to do the 5 key poses in a walk cycle. At this point I hadn’t animated arms in a walk cycle, so I found this useful.

Body mechanics was the first part of this assessment where I knew what direction I want to go. I wanted to attempt to do a spiderman swing, but I didn’t know what personality my walk or run cycle would have yet, so I decided to make all three of my animations inspired by spiderman. After deciding this, I knew there was one walk that stood out in the spiderman universe, so I used “Cool Peter Parker” as my reference.

I began by using animator’s survival kit as my reference for blocking out the key poses, which consist of both contact poses, the down pose, passing pose, and up pose. Using the dope sheet, I then spaced out the key frames and turned on post infinity cycle in the graph editor to see what changes I needed to make.  The post infinity cycle didn’t work until I copied and pasted the first contact pose to the end of the cycle. As well as using Tobey Maguire’s walk from Spiderman 3, I researched confident walk cycles as that was the theme of his walk. Researching these helped break down the poses as there wasn’t a full view of Peter in the movie.

Throughout all the videos, all walks seemed to present similar themes. The speed of their walks were a little slow with distance between the feet, there was no urgency to get anywhere. Their arms and shoulders were also very relaxed, their heads were turned a little upwards and chests were pushed out.

After making these changes, I noticed there was knee popping in both knees which distracted from the rest of the walk cycle. I found it difficult to fix at first, but I rotated the toe pivot instead of rotating the leg control when leaving the contact pose so the foot wouldn’t go through the ground. I also rotated the control above the thigh and swivelled the heal to stop the popping.

I turned the elbows outwards and made the upward and downward swings quicker to closer match Peter’s walk, rather than look like a more generic confident walk. To make him look more relaxed, I lowered the shoulders during each contact and down pose.

 

Run Cycle

For my run cycle, I used animators’ survival kit again to block out my key poses, then used run cycles from Into the Spiderverse and the Spiderman game to add more personality to my run. I quickly decided I wanted my run cycle to be inspired more by Miles Morales than Peter Parker as Peters was more of a generic run. I didn’t make my run as fast as Miles’s run as his was extremely quick and didn’t leave much room for working with spacing and in-betweens. I still made mine a fast run, but I took more inspiration from his poses rather than timing and spacing.

I went through the frames on the “Anyone can wear the mask” YouTube video to analyse his key poses as they were different from the generic run in the animator’s survival kit. His arms went higher and legs were spread out more and spent less time on the ground.

After figuring out his key poses, his arms and legs seemed jittery and stiff, so I used the graph editor to delete unnecessary keyframes and make the arcs smoother. I also made his strides even longer, so the run had more urgency, like Miles’s.

As the Jack rig had different proportions than Miles, I found it a little difficult to match the key poses. Miles is thinner and has longer legs, so my strides didn’t seem as long as his. After exaggerating his rotations on his chest and hips, I was happier with how he looked as he resembled Miles a little more.

https://youtu.be/T4xW0mSe7z8

Body Mechanics

It was harder than I thought to get reference videos for the body mechanics part of this assessment. Many of the videos from the movies only showed Peter or Miles swinging for a short period of time and the camera angles didn’t usually show a clear pose, so it was difficult to find a swing to work from.  I used Andrew Garfield’s Spiderman for the fall and landing of the swing, and Peter Parker from the game for everything in between. I first animated on 3s like the walk and run cycle so I could see where needed spaced out more. The first few poses needed spaced out much more than the other keyframes as the fall was far too fast compared to the rest of the swing.

For the fall into the swing, I changed the hands to make it look like they were shooting and grabbing onto a web. I added a long cylinder to the file and animated it rotating so I knew the direction Jack would be swinging and how far he would lift and fall from the ground going in and out of the swing. When grabbing the web, I tried to make it look as though there was a little stretch in the web whilst still having a bit of an abrupt finish to the fall, as in the movies, Peter was always able to stretch the web when fighting or swinging. I used the first YouTube video linked below to help me understand weight when it came to this part of the animation. I also had to add in-betweens to his feet when swinging as Maya automatically brought his feet through his torso to get to the next keyframe.

I found animating the flip after the swing very difficult as I had to balance the up and right translations perfectly to make it look smooth and natural. I adjusted the arcs in the graph editor and deleted unnecessary keyframes so there were no sudden jumps and jack continued to move forward with the same momentum spiderman would have after exiting the swing. I also used a backflip tutorial to animate the arms correctly as it was difficult to see the exact placing of his arms from the back view in the game, so I needed to tuck them in more.

When landing, Maya automatically had Jack ease into the land which made it look unnatural. I broke the tangents in the graph editor so I could add sharper angles to the arcs affecting his land, meaning he wouldn’t ease into the land and the momentum was speeding up due to gravity instead of slowing down.

As for the landing, I analysed Andrew Garfield’s landing in No Way Home. Going frame by frame, I saw his body lowers first. he then leans forward and opens his arms for balance. When animating his landing, his feet seemed to slow down a little again before hitting the ground, so I made them hit the ground a frame sooner to fix this problem, then changed the timing of both feet hitting the ground, making his landing more natural. I used the same technique for his arms and shoulders as they wouldn’t be in sync either.

https://youtu.be/YuU-DHTIlkc

https://youtu.be/T4xW0mSe7z8

Reflection

As I was working on Assessment 1 before the Christmas holidays, I didn’t have time to receive feedback on my animations from my tutors. I did, however, use the knowledge from feedback I had received on previous walk cycles and body mechanics animations. I kept in mind weight and balance when animating, especially for the body mechanics landing, and how momentum builds before a landing, so an object will have an abrupt landing rather than slow down before hitting the ground. I also didn’t begin to add too many in-betweens before finalising the spacing of my cycles, as it would have made it much harder later on when there were many more keyframes to edit.

I feel my skills in areas where I needed more practice before have greatly improved since doing this assessment. I used to find weight and balance difficult, so being able to animate a landing from a tall height and add personalities to my walk and run cycles showed me where a body holds its weight when in different poses. I also needed to use many references during this assessment, whereas before I might have only used one video reference when animating. Since my inspiration was Spiderman, I was lucky that there was so many reference videos to use, which is one of the reasons my tutors were happy to let me animate a web swing.

The body mechanics element was definitely out of my comfort zone as it turned out to be the most difficult piece of animation I had done yet. However, as Spiderman is my one of my favourite games and some of my favourite movies, I knew it would motivate me to try something harder, rather than a jump I had done before.

If I were to do this assessment again, I would have liked to start earlier so I had time to receive specific feedback on my animations. As assessment one took up so much of my time, I found it difficult to make progress in this assessment before assessment one’s submission date. I did, however, find this assessment quite fun to do as I have always enjoyed 3D animation. Because of this, I feel I pushed myself even more to create a good outcome, and I am therefore very happy with the work I have produced this module.

Reference Images

Development Playblasts

Walk

https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/EixdaSH4snBEunvxBZNnd30B7_H6FIypy8Kj5Dypr_z2Pg?e=Uvf3VA

Run

https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/EgeMaIOVWV9LtksXPkJhLDoByFQnqaTSlP0sDI_15qjULQ?e=l3qpcW

Swing

https://ulster-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/long-a8_ulster_ac_uk/Eqra5f0SSXNCgFlMmGAy4toBtDf_fyJOV4294_qek8K38g?e=6btd03

Assessment 1 Reflection Post

long-a8Leave a comment

Overall, I am very proud of the work I have achieved this semester. I was able to use the 3D knowledge from last year and improve my skills in newer ways. I learned how to use MASH in Maya to create chain links and how to use cameras to film my shots in a level sequence in Unreal. I also used nodes to apply textures and create rain in Unreal, which was the most difficult part of this project in my opinion. I would like to practice using nodes more as the rain particles are one of my favourite things about my project.

If I were to start this assessment over again, I would give myself more time to film my shots as, even though I finished rendering earlier than I thought I would, if I had any trouble when rendering I feel as though I would have been very pushed for time. I would also make the whole ceiling planks into a tileable texture as it would have saved time when building my scene and written a short blog post weekly. Even though for this assessment there was a 2000-word limit, it would have been easier to go back and cut sentences out of my post than write the blog all at once.

Assessment 1 Development Post

long-a8Leave a comment

Ideas

For this group project, we were tasked with creating a Cinematic Short Film. Out of the 10 themes we were given, the Ancient Temple had the most votes within my group. We came up with our own original idea of a Church/Cathedral that was built in our present but was destroyed in the future due to a natural disaster.

We made a list of assets and thought about our favourite styles for the assignment. We all agreed on a comic book style inspired by Telltale games such as The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us and Spiderman into the Spiderverse. We later started creating our assets based completely on Telltale rather than into the Spiderverse. As The Walking Dead is one of my favourite games, I was very familiar with this style.

We used a miro board for our shared ideas and references.

Ancient Temple, Online Whiteboard for Visual Collaboration (miro.com)

 

Block out

For my block out, I took inspiration from my churches in Greyabbey and St Anne’s Cathedral in Belfast. I added assets which we previously discussed such as an altar, first aid kits, bibles, and phones.

 

Modelling and Texturing Assets

Creating our block outs gave us a better idea of what assets we would need. We split them up so each person would have 4-6 assets, depending on the difficulty of the model. I chose to model the ceiling, a chandelier, a cross and a skull.

When modelling my assets, I kept in mind how I wanted my scene to look. I had originally thought about a tsunami destroying my temple; however, The Walking Dead, which was my main inspiration for my scene, doesn’t have any underwater scenes. I decided an earthquake would be the natural disaster that destroys my temple.

I created my crosses with cracks throughout the wooden planks so they could be displayed in a scene as if they were unharmed or destroyed in an earthquake. By using the multi-cut tool and bevelling the edges, I created one inspired by these references and added a gold ring for those who wanted a grander cathedral. To keep to the walking dead theme, I added a slight purple hue to the wood and used a blur scope filter to keep the textures quite flat. Previously, I did use a height map for more detailed wood and anchored green fill layer to them to give the illusion of moss growing in the cracks, however, it didn’t fit the theme or the other assets, so I chose to use a blur scope instead when adding the moss.

Learning Substance: Professional Tips and Tricks (80.lv)

The chandelier was quite time consuming as there were many angles involved to keep the circular shape of the tiers even. The most challenging part was using MASH to create the chain links used to hang the chandelier from the ceiling. I created a single chain link then used MASH to duplicate the link to my desired length and rotate every second link, so they look connected. I then created a smaller link to connect each tier to the one above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIqZKh0lWkw

As for texturing, I wanted to make the chandelier gold as the gold in the chandelier would go well with the ring in the cross. I felt the pure gold texture was too bright in substance painter, so I turned down the opacity of the layer and added a steel layer below the gold to make the gold look worn down. I added an emissive layer during texturing to get an idea of how the chandelier would look turned on if anyone wanted to add lights in their scene, but later hid they layer for exporting textures. I also made the material around the lights resemble glass. As glass looks different throughout The Walking Dead, sometimes being white and other times transparent, I added glass so I could later change my mind when applying my textures in Unreal Engine. For the broken chandelier, I used the same textures as the hanging chandelier, but added cracks to the glass to make it look like some of them hit the ground when they fell.

I had a little trouble with the ceiling in the beginning. I originally planned to bake the texture of the planks onto a plane in substance painter. However, I couldn’t achieve the level of detail I was looking for by doing this. I then decided to make single planks so I could extrude the tops of the broken planks as far as I wanted. If I could go back and do it again, I would bake the whole planks onto a plane and make a tilable texture as I feel it would have been a little easier to build in unreal engine.

I made the metal of these planks less reflective than the chandelier as there weren’t any shiny metallic materials in The Walking Dead. I kept to a blue shade for the metal too keep with the purple/blue colour palette many of us liked in The Walking Dead.

Original Planks

Final Planks

When texturing the structure of the ceiling, I found a MatFX Comic Book filter in substance which gave the Telltale black ink edges to my asset. I went back and applied it to my previous assets, but I ended up not using the filter on the ceiling planks or chandelier as they weren’t very noticeable fur to the thin mesh of the chandelier and dark hue of the planks.

I was familiar with the process of modelling a skull from semester 2 of last year as 2 of my assessments involved skulls. Because of this, I wanted to sculpt another one as I felt that since my first skull, my skills have improved a great deal. I used my first skull model as the base for this model and sculpted using blender. I also have a physical skull model that I used as a reference and research the different types of teeth as the teeth on my skull model wasn’t very accurate. I retopologized the skull and baked the high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh in substance painter to keep the grooves around the mouth.

I used my knowledge from last year when texturing by using the wax candle smart material for the base of the skull. I changed the base colour of the smart material to make it less saturated like the zombies in The Walking Dead. I originally added my own black ink lines as, after I imported my skull into unreal engine and used Cloe’s shader, I felt my skull needed more outlines around the eyes and teeth. However, after finding the MatFX Comic Book filter, I decided to use it instead.

 

Importing assets and Building scene in Unreal Engine 5

I had trouble with sizing when importing our assets to unreal engine. To make sure our assets were imported their true size, I had to tick convert scene unit before importing so my scene wasn’t too small for lighting later. I felt the height of the walls were a little short for my temple, so I scaled them to 1.5 rather than 2 and used two walls to make the total height 3. I also used one of the walls as a ceiling for my alcove section so I would have a place for the statues and pillars rather than have them in the main body of the temple.

I had to do a little bit of adjusting when everything was imported and textured as some assets were out of proportion, such as the doors. I imported a human model from Maya to help with making sure everything was to scale.

Texturing

I found that a few of the assets, including a couple of my own, were quite shiny due to the metallic map. By not connecting the blue port to the metallic port on the result node of the material, the assets look much flatter, like the textures in The Walking Dead. I also had to turn up the saturation on a couple of the textures as without the metallic map the colours were very desaturated. I also added decals such as moss on the walls to go with the rain I added later on in my scene, and dried blood with a bullet next to the skull lying beside a gun.

 

Shader

I used Cloe’s shader to outline our assets in case there were inconsistencies with the graphic lines in our textures. To apply it, downloaded Cloe’s post process file and imported it into my unreal content folder. I created a post process volume and under Array in the Post Process Materials drop down, added the shader material. To alter the look of the shader, I clicked on the PPI_OutlineShader and changed the thickness and threshold of the instance.

(107) [Unreal Engine] – How To Add Post Process Material – YouTube

 

Sky sphere and rain

For my sky sphere, I downloaded BP_GoodSky from the Unreal Engine marketplace, which allowed me to change the lighting and weather conditions to fit my scene. I wanted the mood of my scene to feel sad and lonely. I achieved this by using the midnight storm Sky Preset which has a blue sky with lightning, and I created my own rain my following a YouTube tutorial. I used the Niagara system UE4 to create the rain particles, increased their spawn rate, added velocity and downloaded a water splash png to create the illusion the rain was hitting the ground.

Lighting

For my lighting, I researched sad scenes in famous movie and found that low lighting with cool tones is the most popular way to convey a sad and distressing scene. The first lights I added were flickering lights in my chandelier. As the temple was destroyed, I knew it couldn’t be completely lit, however, as it was still connected to the ceiling, I wanted slight flickers to make the chandelier a focal point.

I found it difficult to light my scene as there was very little light streaming in from the direct light source. I added a PostProcessVolume and increased the exposure, so my shadows weren’t as intense. Cloe taught me how to also use a PostProcessVolume to add a blue hue to my scene to keep with the sad mood I was trying to convey. I wanted to show light streaming through the windows, however, having the light pointing away from the windows wasn’t noticeable. I then used 2 rectangular lights for each window and placed them facing towards the windows, so they looked like the source of light.

The corners where I had placed the skulls were still very dark after increasing the exposure. To give them a more natural light source, I added a point light over a white cone and placed them both on top of a candle. I originally tried to make the cones emissive by Connecting RGB to emissive colour, however, there wasn’t enough light coming from the candles that way. This was, I was able to have full control over how bright the candle was.

 

Cameras

I knew a little about cameras before this assignment as I did photography throughout Art a level. As an unreal camera has the same settings as a physical camera, I found them a little easier to navigate. I use a 30mm Prime f/1.4 lens on nearly all my cameras but reduced the max focal length for my 3rd shot so I could capture more of my surroundings along the ground. I enjoyed experimenting with cameras as photography is still something I enjoy doing in my spare time.

 

Shots

I found using level sequences enjoyable as they were similar to adding keyframes in maya. As the ground was the busiest place in my scene, I enjoyed experimenting with low level shots to emphasise the rubble and destruction of the temple. The ground is where the broken chandelier, rubble and cross lies due to the earthquake, but there are also skulls that tell their own story, so it is up to the interpretation of the viewer as to what the story is here.

 

Rendering

When doing my render tests, I had an issue with the rendered images. The first few pngs were completely black, then every image after was blank. This happened to a few more people in the course, including Cloe. She told me how to resolve the problem by first going to window, then levels, then changing the default streaming method from blueprint to always loaded. Then I had to make sure my shot was being filmed from my main level. None of these seemed to affect the pngs as when I did another render test, the images looked the same. After I changed to rendering as jpegs, the shot rendered as normal. For all my tests after this I used jpegs so I wouldn’t fall behind with my rendering.

After I did 5 render tests, I began rendering my shots as exr files. I turned on Anti-Aliasing to smooth jagged edges and increased the temporal sample count to 32, creating an even smoother image. I then added console variables and began rendering. Once the files were imported to After effects, I added a black solid layer to fade in and out of my scene. I also recorded 1 minute of rainfall audio from YouTube rather than importing music as I felt it kept to the mood of my film.

References throughout project