This is going to be a longer post as it includes me completely finishing my model’s rig, adding shape keys, fixing issues in it and getting it completely ready to animate, and then the animation itself, which I just about managed to do most of.
Firstly, I watched the video provided on Blackboard about the post-production process. I wasn’t able to follow along as I don’t have access to Adobe After Effects however we weren’t really planning to use After Effects for our project anyway. However I did watch it and see what was being taught, and I learnt that there are a lot of different options when it comes to editing in After Effects, including colour editing and something that I found interesting, that you can add effects into your scene that keep in place even if your camera is moving around.
That being said, I’m going to move into the work I did for this week as other than preparing things for my other module, I was also focusing on finally getting my model done in time and getting it animated for next week.
One of the extra things I ended up adding were IK controls! They took a bit of figuring out, though.
I eventually got them working relatively well, though I did notice they twisted the arms a tiny bit, but thankfully it wasn’t to a noticeable degree.
Thankfully though they were working and I was able to move my character’s arms using them! I figured though that if I would move them up in my animation, I would also move the clavicle bone up to make it look a bit more natural.
Additionally, as you can see, I changed the look of many of the bones to custom shapes – I think it looks a little packed and hard to look at at times, however I feel that way about armatures either way so that might be a personal thing. But I did like having some things as custom shapes, for example the IK controls were easier to use that way.
I also changed the bones in the instrument case strap to thinner arrow shapes, as well as the bones in the tail. I also went through and added some limit rotation bone constraints, for example here in the tail, just to make my life a little easier later on when animating.
Actually, looking at the tail, I studied how the weights had automatically been assigned there, and how effectively it worked, and decided to apply the same amount of weight to the different ear bones – and it ended up working very well for me! The bones were no longer flying all over the place.
As well as I mentioned with the other bones, I added some limit rotation bone constraints, on the X and Z axis this time with the Y axis being totally locked.
The movement of the ears caused minor “creasing” on the mesh, however thankfully because of the hair and the hat this was well-hidden.
Despite my efforts the armature for the ascot wasn’t perfect. I didn’t worry too much about it though because the amount that the ascot would be moving in my animation would be minimal anyway, and mostly just for some secondary action.
I did a test animation for some eye movements and I noticed that the eyeball would sometimes rotate in odd or off-putting ways, sometimes clipping through the base mesh.
I tried moving them back a bit and although that caused less clipping, they still didn’t look quite right in the eye sockets.
After some experimenting, I figured the best thing to do with these eyes would be simply not to move them too much… however I figured that would be too limiting. Therefore, I set out to redo eyes, as I figured they could use some changes.
This time around, I made the eyes actually just round *spheres*, rather than the stretched shape I had for the previous ones. I decided it’s a better idea to just sculpt around the eyes and adjust the way the shape looks that way, because then no matter how they turn, the shape and positioning doesn’t change. (Although in hindsight, I think in the previous videos I was also just rotating the eyes incorrectly.)
However I wanted to replace the eyes anyway, and I way preferred the newer design that I gave them.
And so they were replaced! I was far happier with the appearance of the eyes this time around.
I also added some damped track controls to the eyes as well following along with the video provided on Blackboard on the topic.
My initial attempt at giving my character’s eyes damped track constraints, though, I created empties in object mode, rather than creating controls for them in pose mode, so with the help of someone from the university Discord, I replaced the damped track eye controls with one that could be used in pose mode.
I decided to remove the bone for the legs as I wouldn’t be using it anyway but it once again caused some problems with the base plate that took me a while to figure out. I again had to figure out some things in terms of weight painting, but also if I remember correctly some bones ended up parented to the wrong things.
I was having similar problems when trying to move the model on the master control as well, where parts of the face weren’t moving for some reason. Again I thought I was selecting all the vertices but if I zoomed in enough I was able to see that for some reason some weren’t selecting on either side of the face that was causing this to happen.
… And now for the aforementioned belt problems. I genuinely don’t know what it was about the topology that was making the belt act like this, but I did want my character to be able to bend forwards or backwards at least a little bit so it was a problem for me.
I went through a lot of different iterations of what weight painting I could put here. It was a little difficult to be exact as every time I wanted to make the weight painting consistent on the belt, especially the loop, I would have to select the vertices of the whole thing.
It was really difficult for me to figure out but eventually I kind of just had to accept that it’s not going to work perfectly for me, and just added some limit rotation constraints to help prevent this kind of stretching where possible.
I was also having some issues setting up the tilt control initially, as even though I had managed to do it in the practice exercise, I was struggling with how to set it up in this context. Thankfully again, thanks to my groupmates’ help I was able to get it sorted out eventually.
There were also weird issues such as these where my model was in a different position in pose mode than in edit mode as if that was the default, even when I tried to set it back to zero pose, but at this point it was such a minor thing among the plethora of other issues that I was having that I didn’t want to concern myself about it too much. It was a bit annoying to deal with, though.
With that, though, I set out to add some shape keys to my character’s face for some facial expressions that I could use in the animation.
But of course I ran into problems there as well. Despite having assigned separate vertex groups for each side of the face, the mouth wouldn’t move on one of the sides.
It was honestly incredibly frustrating constantly running into issues that seemed to show up despite me doing everything right, or at the very least not being able to see any possible reason for things going wrong like they were. However, at this point I just had to compromise.
Initially, I attempted to set up controls on either side of the mouth and eyes etc. however after realising I couldn’t really make it work, I added new controls – one control for the mouth, one for blinks and one for eyebrow expressions – and through the power of math I added drivers to connect these controllers up to the shape keys.
Speaking of the blinks…
Trying to figure that out was an absolute nightmare. I think it may have just been because I didn’t have the best topology in the eyelids, but trying to get them to close was SO incredibly difficult. I could accept a bit of texture stretching but I at LEAST wanted the eyes to be able to properly close. I had to do a bunch of experimenting in terms of loops cuts and trying to move things the right way but it was so difficult for me to try to figure out.
And to add insult to injury, oftentimes if I tried to use the poly modelling tool in edit mode, sometimes the mirror just simply would not work! So I would have to redo everything again.
Only eventually did I figure out that the mirror tool is more effective in sculpt mode, at least.
Some other times I tried to do it on just one side and then mirror it over but it really did not work.
And as a final complaint about this process, sometimes I felt that I had it right but then I turned on subdivision and realised that it still looked like his eyes were finally open.
It took me a LONG time to finally get this right and get a blink that I was satisfied with.
Moving on though, the expressions themselves were a lot easier to do and I was actually really happy with his facial rig in the end.
The way I set up his eyebrow facial expressions was simply with one circle that changed the expression based on which way I moved it – up, down, left or right – and this was really cool because it also allowed for a bit of nuance or in-between expressions.
And then, after all of that, I was FINALLY done and I could move onto the animation part of this project.
However, importing my model into the animation, I did notice a few things I would maybe have to fix.
It was a minor problem realistically, as it looked fine in texture mode, however as you can see, part of my character’s hair wasn’t visible in edit mode for some reason. I think this might have happened a while back in the process of making my model but I just didn’t realise because I worked in texture mode a lot. However the solution was thankfully simple, and Chloë helped me out with it again – I just had to go and flip the normals around, because at the current moment, on that part of the hair Blender was reading it as if that was the inside of the hair instead of the outside. It would also explain why my hair mesh was being a bit weird in substance painter when I was texturing it.
Another weird thing I noticed when importing my model was that for some reason the pose defaulted to my character having his back bent backwards a bit for some reason. It wasn’t a major issue but it was just a bit weird.
However, it was super cool being able to finally see my character in this environment with the rest! I scaled him on the master control and kept this screenshot as a reference for the other files – as that’s how my group worked on the animation.
We split the shots into different files – 1-2, 3-4-5, 6-7-8, 9-10-11-12, and 13-14-15. Splitting the shots into different files allowed us to work simultaneously on different parts of the animation, rather than it being so that one person working on the animation meant that no one could work on the file. Me being last to work on the file (one of our group members had left the group), it thankfully allowed me some flexibility in terms of animating my character here.
To start off, I had a look at the movement of the temporary block that my groupmates had temporarily placed in to work around, and added some basic location and rotation keyframes for the master control. I rotated the master control as my character climbed up, rather than the tilt control, because I would be adding movement to the tilt controls later anyway, as my character was like a board piece and would move by tilting forwards and backwards anyway.
We all gave our characters unique ways of moving around and I felt like that was the movement that fit my character. Additionally, a cool thing was the the IK controls automatically made his arms swing backwards and forwards as he tilted, which was very helpful (despite how tricky the IK controls could be other times throughout the process).
I found the animation process so incredibly refreshing. I actually quite enjoy 3D animation, I think it’s just that in order to animate your own thing in 3D, you have to go through the entire process of creating your own model. I think I might just be a slow worker because I wish my model hadn’t taken so long. But I was incredibly glad when I was finally able to get to animating.
Realistically, even though I started off in the 1-2 file, instead of doing all the work in between, at first I just worked on finishing the scene for 13-14-15, as I felt it was most important and realistically I didn’t really think I’d be able to get everything done at this point as it was two days before our final class presentation.
That being said, I’m going to show the scenes in order anyway to make things a bit less confusing. I did a part of the 1-2 animation and most of the 13-14-15 two days before the presentation… and I did almost the ENTIRE rest literally the day before somehow.
Moving on with the 1-2 process though:
It was a bit unfortunate but I found that a lot of secondary actions that I ended up adding, such as minor movements for the instrument case, hat and hair, didn’t really end up being super noticeable in the final animation. You will see when I submit the files though that I did do them!
I think the most fun secondary action for me to work on was the feather. The way that it floats about due to my character tilting in my animation in incredibly satisfying to me. I also REALLY enjoyed adding the animation for his ears (all of our characters had long ears like that, funnily enough!), and for the tail. I guess I just find rotating things on individual origins very fun and satisfying to work with.
In addition to that I really enjoyed working on the facial expressions. I think because of my character’s more cartoony style, the facial expressions I gave him ended up being really noticeable which I was super happy with.
(As a note, I still adjusted some things to my animations during Week 12, so I’m going to include the final animations and final renders in that blog!)
Now for the 3-4-5 scenes:
One thing that helped me a lot when working on these scenes was hiding the dungeon walls to help me see what I was working on better. I again roughly followed the blockout that my team members had set for my character’s movement.
Again I had a lot of fun with the secondary actions, but working with the IK controls proved to be a bit tricky sometimes and things would move in kind of odd ways. However, I was kind of speedrunning this animation the night before we were supposed to present so I decided to leave the details for after.
Although I didn’t work with them on all the time as that would make my computer work rather slowly, sometimes I would turn textures on when looking at my animation and this helped a lot with seeing how it was actually going to look, and it was straight up necessary for me when working on the facial expressions.
I must say it was incredibly cool finally seeing this model that I had worked on for weeks and weeks, in this environment moving around with everyone else’s characters.
I adjusted the camera slightly for this scene because it made a bit more sense to move it especially with Clarence now in the scene as well. (Also I was working on this quite late at night and trying to do it as fast as possible so I couldn’t really ask for feedback on everything anymore, and had to make some judgements on my own on whether to change things and where and why.)
I also added some blur to this scene so that the focus would be on Eoin’s character. At first I forgot how to make it work but then I re-watched that video that was provided a while back about camera work and got it fixed and working.
Scene 6-7-8:
Another instance of the poses on my model behaving weirdly when I tried to import it.
I really liked working on this scene as I got to work a bit more on Clarence’s expressions!
Once again the secondary actions were added even if some of them weren’t as noticeable as the others…
^ A work in progress showing the expression change of my character as he realises the ball is coming for them – I really enjoyed animating this.
It wasn’t shown in the previous video but I added some shape keys that I had forgotten to add earlier, for his pupils to become smaller as his expression changed. It ended up working very effectively.
In my sleep-deprived state I for some reason thought that it was a good idea to change the camera here? I think I wanted it to be a bit more centred on my character but I’m not sure why I made it move back like that.
I also added some minor animation to the fingers here. It wasn’t usually needed in the animation but I felt like it made sense here as my character was feeling more scared and tense.
Because the ball ended up covering the camera, I ended my character’s animation a bit early, not realising that the other characters were still moving in this scene even after the ball covered the camera. I didn’t realise that there were going to be two versions of this scene rendered – one with the ball in the camera and one without. I ended up fixing this during the next week.
Scenes 9-10-11-12:
When the “escape” part of this project properly kicks in!
I had to adjust the animation of the ball a bit. The way that it was set up previously left very little room for my character to move around in, and he was supposed to be at the back of the group.
So I adjusted the animation a tad, making it so that the ball almost hesitates for a bit, almost as if realising that it’s going the wrong way.
I also gave my character a little hop because of the sudden change in direction and the change in momentum.
Since I had worked on the final scene before this, I had the idea of importing the model from THAT file instead, as it would give me a point of reference for where my character should be when he falls. Unfortunately, this didn’t really end up working, as in this scene the characters move way past the part where he ends up falling over. Therefore, I just decided to leave it and keep them moving the way they were – and then the place where he falls, we could just imagine that’s a different part of the dungeon.
And the final file, scenes 13-14-15:
As this was actually one of the first scenes I worked on, after I was done with most of it I tested out how well the fading worked so that I knew that it was gonna be fine for editing later.
The movement of the hat was a little bit awkward to do, as it was parented to the master head, and so when the head tilted, so did the hat. However, I’m still really proud of the animation I managed to do here of it falling off his head.
^ A work in progress (the greyness at the start is intentional), it’s just the timing for a scene of the dice rolling).
My tilt control was being a bit weird so I had to go back and fix it up a bit.
Some more works in progress:
^ An attempt at camera movement that I ended up changing.
^ Second attempt at camera movement that I kept.
Now, I mentioned that I got most of the animation done before the presentation the next day. However what I did not mention was that… it didn’t manage to make it in.
I foolishly stayed up trying to get everything rendered out but in the end, it took so long that we wouldn’t have the time to edit everything together and upload it to YouTube so that we could embed the link of the updated thing in our final presentation.
So, here are the renders that I *did* end up getting done.
Scenes 1-2:
Scenes 3-4-5:
Scenes 6-7-8:
^ I accidentally rendered a scene with Eoin’s character being switched off from being rendering, and then wanted to re-render it with his character being there, but I didn’t finish rendering that. This is a combined version of the two renders.
That being said, that was all my work for this week. It’s frankly a miracle that I managed to get most of this animation in one day, and it was a big shame that I wasn’t even able to show it off in the presentation. However, regardless I am really proud of the work I did, and happy that I was able to get the animation done in time for the deadline, at least.