For this assignment I really wanted to improve my technical skills and acting skills the most. Last assignment I didn’t take full opportunity of the rig controls like IK or FK, and I think the general movement of the characters were rigid or stiff. For this assignment I wanted to go a bit more dramatic with my animation, I find I struggle a lot with having rigs make big movements! I do try and I kept the principles in mind, but I second guess myself and reel it back in. Chris Carter in his classes said you can tell from the animation if the animator is indecisive. I know I very much am in general, and I think it has effected my animation progress, including with this assignment. Looking back I really see where I could of blocked out larger shapes with the rig, and I’m do feel a bit disappointed in myself that it’s not something I caught earlier. It’s definitely something I want to work on. I think I’ve made ok progress on my animation development, but I don’t expect too much difference as I don’t really use my spare time to practice animation. My eye can critically find some of the faults in my work, but currently I don’t fully understand how to fix them yet. Again that comes down to practice, which I have neglected in comparison to my other 3D work.
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It took me a long while to find an audio clip that gave me ideas about a clear story and would be fun to animate to. I had looked onto the site that Alec recommended, there was many options but nothing really stood out to me at the time. https://www.11secondclub.com/competitions
For a while I wanted to do some sort of anime inspired fight scene/monologue scene with this audio. But I would have had to push the 11 second animation I felt to fit in what I wanted to do. There’s a lot of emotion, the dialogue is bizarre and I think it would make for a great audio to work with another time! This audio clip is from the TV show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.
I spent a little more time looking through Instagram mainly, because they have a lot of short and fun audios to work with that can give entertaining context. I rediscovered this audio and decided to continue with it, I enjoyed the humour, the voices and the context could be played with a lot.
A portion taken from this Youtube video:
After I decided on the audio, I filmed myself going through the audio to use as reference later. I went through a couple of iterations of videos, tweaking them as time went on to suit the audio better and what I had felt change while animating.
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For the style of animation I wanted to reference was Disney’s Tangled, with focus on specific characters Mother Gothel and Rapunzel. Mother Gothel’s grand gestures and theatrical movement’s felt perfect for my knife character while Rapunzel would fit the other character in my scene. The specific scene I had wanted to take style influence over is the “Mother knows Best” segments of the film. Alongside these video of the animation breakdown of Tangled, I looked at educational videos about theatre acting, animation acting and how it differs from other types of acting. Learning a lot about individuality within character movement choices and exploring various ways a character can act out a motion, deciding which is best for the current moment. I think these videos helped me understand more the mindful intent of an animator, and any development I gained was from taking in this information.
After doing some reference videos I worked on a couple of rough animatics to figure out some timing, and to give a quick visual of how it would look.
One of the notes I was given last semester I believe was the hand on my characters hip slipping. I needed to have my character in this animation hold and swing around a knife, so I modelled, added a nurb and parented the wrist to the knife rig. I followed a video on blackboard that Alec had created during last semester which was very helpful for this type of prop!
Making sure the knife prop moved well with the hand animation:
After my animation prep, references rigs sorted, I started on the 3D animation. I did environment/prop layout, character positioning, and blocked out my animation before starting on finer details and lip syncing.
After a few days of animating, my file began to freeze and would force me close the maya file, the more time I spent animating the more frequent the crashes became. I lost some progress because of this, and decided to stop animating for now and find the issue. One solution that I found was the files within the scene not being referenced, I found Alec’s recommended video on blackboard that directs you how to reference and why it is beneficial to your animation workflow and file density. I managed to successfully create a new scene and transfer all the keyframes that my old file had onto the new rigs.
The new scene was working ok, until the freezes started to happen again. I researched further and found out that some rigs can be incompatible with the version of Maya and to go to windows > settings/preferences > preferences > Animation> untick GPU Override. I also got advice from Alec that the waitress rig reacts strangely with Maya 2023 and if the issues keep happening then to move to Maya 2022, but after unticking the GPU override I haven’t gotten any freezes or crashes!
I initially had some trouble with the lip sync, mainly with finding the right phonetics for the audio. Along with the videos on blackboard, Alec gave some advice on leaving a couple frames in between each mouth movement and and exaggerating some keyframes for it. I had also tried to write down the most prominent phonetic and see where some h=could be merged. I’m not really sure if this helped or hindered me, but it felt like a helpful exercise to do before lip-syncing. I also found some videos online that helped a lot too:
My lip sync refs:
The last feedback I had gotten was to keep mindful of floating limbs, some variation in lip-syncing, making sure hands aren’t stiff and eyebrows shouldn’t float around aimlessly. So I did my best to fix those issues by creating more keyframes between larger gaps in the timeline, redid some of the lip sync animation and added more interesting shapes to the hand through out the animation.
After finishing some fixes, I lit the scene and rendered with Hardware 2.0 with aid from Alec’s video. Complied and exported from After Effects (with a cartoon filter added, and colour graph edited) and Media Encoder.
Final outcome:
Myself, Jasmin and Amy had given mocap a go to learn how to use the suit and program. Although sadly I didn’t get to use the animation, but it was a fun process and I’d like to try it again.