For this part of the assignment I had to learn how to animate in a 3D space. This included things like learning the workflow of animation while also using the knowledge of animation to create something that looks very wonderful. So, I got started creating the plan for the animations.
Researching references
Before beginning to create the animation, I had to look at things at things like real life references and inspirations for the animation I am about to create. These are the videos that I used.
IRL Reference:
This one was for the part of my Mechanical one where the Monty Rig tries to do a roll. So I looked up online and used this video as a reference to make him roll.
I know that it isn’t the same size and look of the box as in the animation, but I somewhat based it on this video that I took when I was messing around with a rubix cube that I had laying around.
Animations that inspired me:
I also looked at other 3D Animator and the one that I liked the most was Dillongoo. A Self Employed 3D Animator on YouTube that very much like his style of animation as it tries to mimic a 2D style. Looking at a lot of his work his animations have a lot of weight and velocity and expression to them which I tried to replicate using the Monty Rig for my animation.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-B06UJxJ20HYv15lzrm9mA
For the animation I had to use lessons from The Animator’s Survival Kit which taught me about things like giving weight to the character when I am animating them along side exaggeration and squash and stretch to give emotions to a character.
Storyboard
Once the references were gathered, I began to create the storyboard for the animation. Firstly I opened, Clip Studio Paint and created a canvas for where I will be drawing my storyboard. To do that, I will first have to create the borders where I will be drawing the thumbnail sketches and then start filling. I firstly began working on the mechanical one. For it I wanted to do something that was more than just a walking cycle. I decided that I would make the Monty Rig roll and jump for a better way to understand body mechanics.
For the second one, I had to do something simple but yet interesting that used the techniques of squash and stretch. So I stood for a bit and looked around on the internet to get some inspiration for what can do. Then I ended up creating in my one animation sequence . This is how it looks like.
Process
So the first thing that I did was to open the Maya file that has the character rig in it and start to work on the animation. But first, I had to make sure that the playback of the animation played on on every frame of it. Plus I also had to make sure that I enabled the ability to only see the key frames that I animate to be able to block out the animation. Now I was ready, it was time to create the plane of the character by spawning a simple plane and resizing with the resize tool to have the monty rig be able to walk on it when he is in full motion.
Then I began creating the main Keyframes for how the character will move and be posed in 3D Space. A Keyframe is an important frame that will tell the audience what is the action that the character is doing at the moment and what action will he do in the future. To add a Keyframe to the animation, using the timeline for the animation, I can select in which frame I will be animating, once the position is done, I press S to confirm the spot. To pose the character, the character rig came with a with a rig controller. This allows me to pose the character however I want it to look like. These controls include such as for the knee joins, the head and the foot. When doing the keyframe for the animations, I first laid each keyframe one after the other to make it easier to see what action should I do next.
I also had to use another program called PureRef. This program allows me put images and allow me to overlay them over the program without it burring it under a new window. This helped me referencing my animations using the storyboards. I also used a program called tweenMachine. This plug in for Maya Allows me to add inbetweens to an animation which also meant that it sped up my progress of animation quite significantly. Also with the inbetweens I can make an action be a lot slower if there are a lot of keyframes placed inbetween the first and last frame or make it a fast action by including less frames between the first and last frame. Another thing I had to consider when creating the animation was timing. This would allow the animation to be told in a clear way and be believable to the audience. If I didn’t have timing, then things like weight and velocity of the character wouldn’t feel real and it would ruin the animation.
Once I got the animations done, I went onto Windows, Animation and on Dope Sheet. This brought up a new window which allowed to change the placement of the keyframe to match the tempo for the animation. While for some of the other actions I increased the space between frames to add more frames to the character animation.
During the creation of the animations I did run into some problems with the rig. One of the problems would be that the Rig would sometimes have its knees broken and going backwards. The way I would fix it was by dragging the knee controller in front of the knees to be able to bring them back to looking normal. Another issue was that if I lowered the foot lower than the grid floor of Maya it would stretch to an extreme length. So the solution was to never go past the grid plane.
Getting Feedback and Fixing the Mistakes
Once the animation was complete I submitted it to Alec to see what I needed to do to fix the animation. After a while, I got two videos for the two different animations explaining what I did right and wrong which were very valuable for me. As I was about to begin animating and correcting my mistakes, I quickly realized that keyframe were around and about in different places and made it difficult to arrange into something tidy. So, my solution to fixing this problem was to delete the entire animation as I started not like the old one. So i used a similar process to the beginning.
Getting Feedback 2
After the animations were redone, I send them once again to Alec to see if the animations are better. After a while he send me another feedback. The video ended up very positive with a few minor changes that needed to be made. Once that was one, I uploaded the videos to Syncsketch. Here is the link to both of them alongside the animation videos here.
Videos (you have to have Quicktime installed on your computer to see them):
Review Links:
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/79d30dd4a602/
https://syncsketch.com/sketch/e944f6bed673/
Conclusion
In conclusion I am very happy with the results that I got on the animation. The things that made me happy about this project was that I managed to get the timing of the animation alongside the weight and velocity of it to feel real using the keyframes of the animations. What I didn’t like about the project was since I was new to animating in 3D I had to follow a few extra and different rules such as adding smaller details to movement and that the animation was using interpolation which basically means the computer tries to predict from the first to last frame. So I didn’t have full control when creating it. However, I still enjoyed it as it teached me how to animate in 3D