Run and Jump Cycle

weng-c1 / / Animation Strategies

For the previous three cycles, I did 3D, but for the last one for the run and jump, I decided to do 2D because I want to try completing a cycle in 2D alongside seeing what my skills and capabilities are when it comes to creating 2D movement cycles. I begin the run and jump cycle using Richard William’s example as a guide, sketching out each contact, down, passing, and up pose.

 

I received feedback from Aodhan; he suggested that for the run and jump, he wants us to attempt to create our own run and jump rather than imitating Richard William’s reference. I had an idea to use a volleyball spike to create an anime called ‘Haikyu,’ which I like. Before I began, I asked Aodhan if I could run and jump, reaching for an object rather than jumping over an obstacle, as he had said before. So, I tried at the run-and-jump spike.

 

During the process, I was unable to find a reference video or image that included the run, jump, spike of the ball in the air, and return to the run, so I had to use bits and pieces from several reference pictures and videos and combine them to create my run and jump spike.

 

 

 

Reference videos:

 

 

First draft of run and jump spike:

Aodhan gave me some comments on the first draft of the spike, which included extra in-between movements to enhance the anticipation rather than having the second pose hold for three frames. Also, at frame 15, the right arm that is in the air should bounce back after the spike to add a sense of realism.

After arranging the first section of feedback and tidying up the lines, I began working on adding additional distinguishing characteristics to the stickman to evoke more depth to the run and jump spike.

While experimenting with the expression and adding some secondary components, I received some further feedback from Aodhan, who advised that I include more in-between poses from frames 18 to 19, 23 to 24, and 24 to 25. He also advised that the design doesn’t have to be super detailed.

 

 

Final

 

Blocking

weng-c1 / / Character Creation

We were given the option to either block the character out in Blender or Zbrush when we started modeling the bear, so I kind of challenged myself and chose Zbrush. Zbrush’s shortcuts and navigation differ from Blender’s, so it took me more time to get used to the controls. I had a lot of trouble with it because it’s new software that I’ve only been using this year. Henry demonstrated several methods for blocking our characters in Zbrush. I decided to use the Zsphere tool, which simply required an extruded sphere to block the bear’s body characteristics. This was my first time working on a major project with Zbrush, and I did find it easier by using Zsphere. Activating symmetry on the x-axis, where each side was operating equally at the same time, was another tool that let me make this progress much more quickly and easily. According to Henry, both sides of the body must be asymmetrical at the blocking stage.

After extruding the Zsphere to block the character, I had to apply adaptive skin, which automatically converted the Zsphere into polygon faces. This was possibly my first issue, where the adaptive skin didn’t perform as effectively as it should have, turning the block out into a refined, chubby poly bear. Even though I attempted to solve the issue by making the adaptive skin denser, it still appeared a little strange.

I approached Henry for help, and we spent quite a bit of time figuring out that the arms and legs were too close to the torso, which was one of the reasons the adaptive skin wasn’t functioning properly. It slightly resolved the issue, but not completely, so Henry recommended that I apply adaptive skin at a higher density after subdividing and smoothing down sharp edges. Filling in the gaps with the clay brush until the bear looks the way I want it to. Furthermore, I made little sculptures of the ear, nose, nail, ass shape, eye holes, etc.

After I thought I had finished the block bear, I was a little concerned about how to open its mouth because, according to my design, I wanted the bear’s mouth to be open. Henry said was block it out in the beginning, but he still helped me by using brush tools to sculpt a mouth. He also showed how to use an extract tool and mask to make a basic gum and tong in the mouth. He shows me a quicker method for making the teeth, which saves me a lot of time by creating the mesh I want the teeth to be in and turning it into a new brush. I looked for a reference photograph to continue working because I had no idea what the structure of a bear’s mouth looked like.

I had to construct the tooth brush a few times because there was a problem with it; it kept disappearing every time I left and opened Zbrush. Looking at the block out of the nails I didn’t like them as much, so I decided to smooth them down and apply them using the teeth brush as well.

Run Cycle

weng-c1 / / The World of Animation

I think it was because this is my first time of experiencing of doing a walk cycles, I did get really confused of how each of the step was happening and not too sure the purpose of each staps. During the progress of doing the walk cycle wasn’t too challenging because I followed the tutorial steps. The difficult part was to understand the reason of why many keyframes, and drawings was there for and how would the placement of the body affect the nature and smoothness of the walk to make it look dramatic at the same realistic. Also understanding the pull and drag were sometimes the arm is moving because it’s dragged by the shoulder and along it pulls the wrist. When the pull and drag tend to happen the one that’s following the drag tend always be a move slower the part which is doing the drag.

Reference image:

After completing the walk and sneak cycle, I improved a better understanding of how to perform different cycles. I wanted to try have an attempt on doing the run cycle myself which I begin it looking at the reference image that was provided. I spaced out the keyframes in twos, following from contact pose, down, passing one, two and up then back to contact pose.

Rachel’s first set of feedback on Sync Sketch was that the head was rotated too low, facing the ground; I needed to lift it up more, and the front foot was going through the ground. The same thing happened to the right-side foot in frame 6, as well as the left-side feet in frames 12, and 16. To fix this, I placed some more keyframes in between. In frame 4, I required more overlapping movement between the back and the chest. Frame 9, the back should be straighter and raised to its maximum height. Frames 12 and 16, needing the elbow to pull upwards to overlapped further. Finally, the overall feedback of this first draft was that the back and chest were still stiff, so I experimented with the rotation to make it move smoother and more natural. She also stated that the arm needed better fluidity, so I increase the rotations amount of elbow and wrist to evoke pull and drag overlapping movements.

Sync Sketch Link that Rachel used to give feedback: Rain Rig – Run Cycle Sideview -> Run Cycle Side

After I fixed those mistakes, I experimented with rotations and keyframes. Rachel looked at my run cycle in the Blender file. She noticed an obvious problem, which was that the upper body, neck, and head were moving jerkily and dramatically. We spent some time trying to figure out what was causing the jerkiness, which was that I was having too many similar rotations in spine and hip control, and the same thing happened with the head and neck. To address this, Rachel suggested that I use the graph editor to smooth out X-axis rotation curves instead of massive mountain curves, as well as that I could scale the curves to reduce the extreme performance of the nodding.

 

 

At the end of the run cycle, I discovered a mistake: the rain rig’s head had shifted to the side, and her neck was stretched longer while its location coordinate was 0cm. I attempted to solve it by moving the neck back to the centre of the body, meaning that the location coordinate had moved, but I wasn’t sure if this was the correct method to do it, so I asked Rachel for advice. She believed that there should be no movement in the location other than rotation, so she looked through my Blender file and discovered that I was moving the head and neck locations. To solve this, I’ll must clear both head and neck’s location coordinate.

Final

 

 

Had an attempt on the 2D run cycle following Richard William’s reference:

 

First draft:

Speed version:

Clean up version:

 

 

Character Design

weng-c1 / / Character Creation

To prepare to start with this assignment, we are creating a character that will fit the theme that we will choose from the environment options that the course lecturer has provided. There are roughly twenty environments available for us to choose from, and few of them have caught my interest and given me an overview of what I imagine my character would look like. The character “Tuan Zi” from the Chinese cartoon “Boonie bears: A Mystical Winter,” which I had previously viewed, gave me the inspiration for my initial concept, which was a bear and deer-like creature. When I first saw Tuan Zi, I believed it was a chubby deer, but it’s a bear. Using Tuan Zi as a template, I drew a very rough sketch of my initial concept, incorporating features from a few settings that grabbed my attention, including Watermills, Dreamscape: Stylized Environment Tower – Stylized Nature Open World Fantasy, and the abandoned hospital. The abandoned hospital gave me the idea of sick, ill, and zombie diseases, then combined with the forest element that all three of them have. I thought of a bear character that was affected by the plant disease and gradually transformed into a tree, or more accurately, trees and plants are growing out of its body to replace some part of its body.

I looked up more bear reference photos and worked on drawing the bear’s structure and some of the expressions I wanted for my bear character.

As I worked on creating the bear character, I explored the Stylized-Nanite Dungeon as an alternative setting. I came up with another character idea, which was inspired by the character “Gollum” from the film “Lord of the Rings.” Observing him also made me think of hairless cats, so I combined the two and created a second design as a choice for my final creature design. Using the reference photos I discovered, I drew a few rough sketches of them both. When attempting to create this character, I began by choosing elements from Gollum and the hairless cats, that both have the least amount of hair. Gollum was a skin-covered skeleton, and his eyes were so large that they were on the verge of expanding that they formed the basis for my second creature concept.

After finishing both designs, I went to Henry to get his opinion because I wasn’t sure which one would be better to create as my final creature. He said it’s up to me to decide which of the two characters I want to build more. I ended up picking the bear because it has an adequate number of details, which I believe will help me learn how to use various tools and software while also improving my ability to create a challenging character. Henry’s suggestion of my bear creature was that the plant and trunk, which link to the bear body, should be more effectively blended so that the design doesn’t appear to be separate entities. He gave me a description of what I could do and recommended that I look at dryad creatures for references.

Walk In Personality Cycle

weng-c1 / / Animation Strategies

Following the walk cycle, I began my walk in the personality cycle, which I at first thought was a thief walk. I did a couple of research images on it and tried to recreate the poses in the image while walking sneakily.

This is an example from Richard William’s Animation Survival Kit book:

Other image examples:

 

 

Allowing myself to properly understand how various body characteristics were placed and positioned. Also, the weight of our body that’s given the pressures when we walked gently in certain poses with weight on our feet—it was as if we were thieves trying to sneak in and escape.

I was delighted that, out of several personalities’ walk examples, Rachel was able to contribute a set of tutorials on how she completed a sneak walk cycle, which significantly helped me in getting the walk started. Instead of following the tutorial exactly frame by frame, I tried to do some bits and sections myself, skipping through the videos and focusing on Rachel’s walk outcome. Trying to keyframe the Rain rig just by looking at the rough position of the contact, up passing, and down poses in Rachel’s sneak walk cycle.

Reference image used as a guide:

For this task, I concentrated more on the 3D side because it took longer to complete than a normal walk cycle. I received some feedback after completing the sneak walk cycle, and the points made started with correcting the mistake of having a nice slight arch movement of the waist and hips but not having the same type of movement happening in the second half of the cycle, so to solve this problem, I copied and pasted the keyframe of the hips from the first half to the second half. Another couple of issues were that in some keyframes, the feet were too straight, pointing down, which stretched the legs little, so I rotated the ankle upward and raised the feet a bit as well. She also remarked that the hips were very static and that to reduce the stiffness, I needed to incorporate more up and down movements into the hips. Finally, Rachel suggested that I add some expressions to finish up, so I experimented with facial controllers. I adjusted the brows and mouth downwards to indicate that the character is feeling nervous.

Sync Sketch Link that Rachel used to give feedback: Rain Rig – Sneak Cycle Sideview -> Sneak Cycle Side

After I updated the first section of the feedback, Rachel reviewed my sneak walk in my Blender file, in which she noticed some unnecessary movements were the feet sliding side to side and some of them sliding forward as well. We discovered that I had keyframes on the Z and X axes that should not have been moving. To resolve this issue, I went through all the foot’s keyframes and set most of the Z-axis and X-axis locations to the same distance, preventing the feet from sliding.

 

 

Rachel also advised me that when you are walking light on your feet, you won’t want to make any loud sounds, so you will tend to land and walk on the tips of your toes. So, I went to some of the keyframes that I’ve made where the feet landed flat on the ground and rotated the ankles, lifting them more off the ground. I think this advice has added more personality to my sneak walk.

 

Final

 

 

Walk Cycle

weng-c1 / / Animation Strategies

In week one of our second year, we began with a lecture that briefly explained our objectives and assignments, specifically what would happen and what was required to be completed. Getting ready to begin work involves downloading files and software. During the morning session, our lecturer Alec demonstrated several controls in the Rain rig by adjusting the body and adding weights to the legs while carrying out the walk cycle. In the afternoon session, Aodhan introduced us to new software called Toon Boom, which I tried out. It did not differ too much compared to Krita, but there were some little differences that I just needed to get used to using. We will continue to work on both 2D and 3D together during the first semester. We had to finish a walk cycle, a run cycle, a run and jump, and a walking-in-personality cycle for the first assignment.

In week two, the lecturer continued to demonstrate and lead us through the walk cycle, and I began attempting the 3D walk cycle by following Rachel’s tutorials and the 2D walk cycle by following Aodhan’s Krita tutorials. Following the 2D and 3D videos, I compared my knowledge of how I comprehend doing each walk cycle, and I discovered that doing the 2D is much more straightforward for me than doing the 3D, but I believe this could be since I am still developing my skills of using 3D software. I was also more interested in 3D, even though I found doing 3D more difficult than 2D; therefore, I decided to challenge myself to start with a 3D walk cycle for my assignment.

The references images:

 

Here’s my attempt at the 2D walk cycle:

The draft version, which still needs a lot of tidying up on the lines, further drag and pull movements for the hands, arms, and feet must be done.

We were given instructions to create a secondary part and rotate it to the character’s head. I also completed this section by following Aodhan’s tutorials. After tidying up the lines and adding the secondary element and rotation, Aodhan suggested that I experiment with changing the speeds in between frames.

The 3D walk cycle process with the keyframes spaced out in fives:

 

Since I followed the tutorial step by step, I still got stuck on the pull and drag of the hair and had to reset its keyframe a couple of times, and Rachel helped me in smoothing out the hair movement.

 

 

 

After I finished the walk cycle, Rachel gave me some input on how I might extend the front foot in the contact pose of frames 15 and 30 a little more to straighten the legs slightly more, as well as play around with bringing the hips up a little more.

 

 

Final

 

 

Reflection

weng-c1 / / Animated Narrative

This year has been very busy for me; time management between family, job, and university work was very challenging. As a beginner in animation, I’ve learned a lot of new skills in using Blender to model and animate. During this learning progress had to face a lot of difficulties, but at the same time really enjoyed completing the work. I feel proud of myself every time I learn new techniques, fix problems, and complete tasks. Working in a team was something that I really didn’t like to do and was afraid of doing because I always felt insecure that not everything was in my control. Which this year I’ve experienced a lot of teamwork; they had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were that I got to know new people and make new friends. Getting to know them more by working with them. Experiencing working with different types of people helped me with my problem-solving skills, preparing me for my future. The disadvantages were having to be worried and stressed about other people’s speed of completing work because everyone works in different ways. One of the biggest problems that had occurred multiple times during many of the team works this year was lack of communication. I noticed it and it will be something I’ll focus on improving.  Before I started learning 3D animation, I thought it was something I’d never know how to do, so I liked doing more 2D art, but after this whole production and knowledge intake, I think now I like to do more 3D works than 2D.

Many thanks to my classmates and the lecturers for helping and supporting me when I needed help. Within the experience of year 1 hope I’ll do better in year 2. Looking forward to next year.

Postproduction

weng-c1 / / Animated Narrative

Before reaching the final stage of “WhoDonut” animation, I had to render my opening scenes of the animation a few times, but I think this is the best version that I have. When I was watch it the coffee cup was moving quicker than I had anticipated in the render of which I wasn’t sure if it looked adequate or natural enough. So, I presented it to Mike; he thought it looked good but provided me some more feedback on the baguette’s walking action, saying he was walking slightly too floaty. To fix it maybe I could make the baguette hops instead of walking flat on the ground. So, I made the baguette hop and increase side-to-side hand movement by I adding more in between key frames.

 

Mike also noticed that we were using too many lighting resources, which resulted in several shadows of the coffee cup and baguette being on the ground. This looked chaotic and out of place. Then he showed me how to use the HDRI environment light to enhance the overall visual without using a lot of light resources. He then demonstrated for me how to use shader notes to adjust the HDRI environment light’s intensity.

Final beginning scene of “WhoDonut”:

Jamayne is in the position of the main editing for “WhoDonut,” which includes putting together all our scenes and adding sound effects and music. I offered to help her in researching soundtracks and effects, as well as to record a few quick sound effects and perform voice acting.

Sound inspiration – Larva

Here some websites that I used to find soundtracks and effects:

“WhoDonut”

Production

weng-c1 / / Animated Narrative

I started modeling my donut character by following a quick online tutorial that showed me how to make a donut in Blender. I also used mesh shapes to manually create the donut. In the end, I decided to go with the hand modelled version since I could make the donut look more adorable with a simple cartoon appearance, however following the tutorial, the donut appeared a little too realistic, more like food than a cartoon character. I asked Mike for advice as well, and he suggested that I should model the donut by hand so it will be easier to correct if I make any mistakes later. 

Donut Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=gO6IHeo4Xg9OM8mQ&v=ZKhfKFcL7tg&feature=youtu.be

Manually made Donut:

I also created two different version of the hands. The hand was one with fingers and one without, I stayed with the one had fingers. I made the hands following Mike’s tutorial the only difference was that I only had three fingers. 

 

   

I did change the arms from using a Bezier which it was a curve but I realize it was hard to control so changed to use cylinders.

In the process of modeling my donut, I tried various methods when it came for creating the appearance of her face. The first method involved creating the eyeballs using two extra sphere meshes after sculpting the face features out of the donut’s body mesh.

  

Using a tutorial that my classmate Hannah recommended was the second method. Following the tutorial, I had to UV map the donut, draw some expressions, and then use image textures to apply the face features to the donut. I believe this method didn’t work as well as the first one because the donut was round, and the UV map’s image texture was pointing in the direction of the vertex faces, which also appeared to be round. The face on the donut looked a little too flat, even though it was still adorable.

2D face feature tutorial: Animating Faces with a 2D Texture in Blender

After trying these two approaches, I went to Rachel to ask for advice on which one I should go with. According to her feedback, the first method made the 3D face appear a little weird because the eyes seemed to be pulled out from the body. To improve the eyes, she recommended that I make separate meshes for the top and bottom eyelids. This would allow me to experiment more with the expressions when I’m rigging the donut. For the mouth, she suggested that I could continue employing the UV mapping method and keeping it 2D, then create a control for the image texture so I would be able to move smoothly between various mouth expressions. I’ve recommended this method of having the eyes 3D and mouth 2D to Jamayne as well because she wasn’t how would she structure the baguette’s face features.

First draft of the mouth expression:

When completed the donut model, I need to rig her. Since I wasn’t sure how to arrange the armature bones on the donut, I had to ask Mike for help. He demonstrated to me the way to make a straight armature for the body in the centre and two separate armatures for the arms at the sides and then joined them together. Other than this problem that I struggled to start, for the rest of rigging I didn’t have too many difficulties by following Mike’s tutorials.

Mike’s demonstration on how to apply armature bones for the donut:

Had to scale the eyelids bigger so it’ll close properly covering the eyeballs.

Final version of the mouth expression:

Had to use this 2D face feature tutorial: Animating Faces with a 2D Texture in Blender  for creating the mouth driver.

I had created the alleyway for the animation. I was able to construct the brick walls more quickly by following a tutorial that I discovered online. Using some reference images, I found online, I also made a garbage bin where the femme lollipop is hiding and the police car that’s going to appear in the beginning scenes. I also followed a tutorial to create the lights on the police car.

Alleyway wall tutorial: http://xhslink.com/a/rvAISVmvCTZbb，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！

Garbage bin:

Police car lights tutorial: http://xhslink.com/a/5nh343Wgti0bb，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！

With the 3D pre-vis, characters, and props set up, we began working on the completed animation. The pre-vis was roughly one minute and five seconds long. We separated it into four sections. I chose to do the opening sequences, for 1-18 seconds, which included city panning shots until the police officers arrived at the murder scene. Jamayne is doing the next part, about 19-31 seconds of the police officers tasting the donut jam and confirming it is either strawberry jam or raspberry jam, starting the argument. Followed by Jack, 32-44 seconds of the two police officers growing angrier and closer to each other, then suddenly the donut wakes up alive. Last, Aster is doing ending scenes of about 45-65 seconds of the donut, and the officers frighten one another by fainting and eventually collapsing to the ground. After the femme lollipop, the murderer comes out of the garbage bin and runs away. 

Jamayne’s final 3Dpre-vis: 

We had some character issues while developing the animation, and we had to go back and correct the mistake after everything was key-framed. This was frustrating and stressful for me and my teammates. I eventually discovered at the very end that I had a couple extra IK controllers that I didn’t need, which was the reason my donut couldn’t move naturally and smoothly with the arms. Jamayne experienced the same issue but was able to resolve it earlier when rigging her character, so she knew how to fix it and helped me in fixing it. Another problem was that I was unable to move the femme lollipop properly and had to ask Aster for help fixing it. However, I ended up removing the character from my scene because the scene only required the tiny rapper of her clothing, not the whole femme lollipop character, so I had to create a new, basic shape to perform as the hint. After our third presentation, Jamayne and I received feedback on how to improve the first draft of our animation section. Feedback for my section included making the donut fall to the ground rather than already lying there and giving the coffee cup and baguette more movement as they walk to the donut in the alleyway to enhance their performance more engaging.

The hint rapper of Femme lollipop: 

First draft of the beginning scene: 

In addition dealing with these problems, I also needed to complete the city environments for the beginning scene of the animation. Which I duplicated Jamayne’s store and applied the windows and doors to plain cuboids to mimic simple buildings. To add more atmosphere, I also decorated the city with streetlamp poles and trees that Aster had created. Aster also helped me in creating more buildings, but I decided not to use them since I felt they were too realistic in comparison to my own buildings, which seemed a little strange to put together. 

Rendered beginning scenes after completing the environment:

I used Bezier to create the “WhoDonut” title in the second shot of my sequence, and then I converted them to mesh. Before making it, I sketched a design which I want to make it look like donut experimenting using some of the technique in the tutorial of how to make donuts which it didn’t work so just kept plain letters with the fade-in effect. To do this, I also followed a tutorial that used notes on the colour textures to show me how to add a fade-in effect.

Donut Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=gO6IHeo4Xg9OM8mQ&v=ZKhfKFcL7tg&feature=youtu.be

Fade-in tutorial for the title: http://xhslink.com/a/GUuQNPrJtTZbb，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！

To make the jam of the donut, I employed the same technique again in the making donut tutorial, for this technique I’ve experimented couple of times find the best shape of jam that I want. Then I followed another tutorial of apply colour textures to make it look more like a realistic jam.

Donut Tutorial : https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=gO6IHeo4Xg9OM8mQ&v=ZKhfKFcL7tg&feature=youtu.be The same the method was employed to make the jam blood.

Colour texture for the jam blood tutorial: http://xhslink.com/a/yndVJM1BzTZbb，复制本条信息，打开【小红书】App查看精彩内容！