This assignment saw me take an existing rig and attempt to animate it, and create two types of videos:
-An action involving the characters weight and movement, for example, walking or jumping
-An action conveying emotion
I already had a few ideas as to how I would go about research for this topic, and I had one particular video I would take the most inspiration.
The rig itself is a simple ball on two legs, we had the choice of two rigs, the Monty rig and the Ultimate walker rig, I choose the Monty rig as it had something the other rig didn’t..toes..whilst that might sound weird, during research for an earlier project, the original concept video for Monsters Inc. The video featured an earlier design for a character called Mike Wazowski, the character as seen now is similar to the Monty rig, however, features two additional arms for expression, however, the earlier designs of Mike had him as a two-legged ball, with a single eye and a mouth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL-u4aEyaCA
This would be my biggest inspiration for the animation, as I wanted to attempt the same leg movements as seen in these animations, especially with how he expresses the same emotions with his arms as seen in humans ( https://youtu.be/gGMkHzWXjI8 ) there are many different ways that humans express and gesture themselves even when they are just talking, so having the knowledge going into the animation is a big plus, which would allow me to plan out my animations beforehand and gain an idea of what kinds of animations I would need to do before I begin to storyboard or grease paper the scene.
Whilst the character isn’t talking to anyone, I do plan on using some Deictic gestures or even metaphoric, just to give the character a bit more motion, allowing the viewer to get inside the characters head.
Whilst doing some further research I found a website known as Monster Mash, it allows animators to create simple monsters to rig and animate, it has its own physics engine that, whilst somewhat primitive when it comes to the objects, decently simulates the walking of the monsters. With all this in mind, I first started off by recreating the monster I was going to use in the Maya animation.
This programme allowed me to experiment with how I was going to animate my final rig and experiment with the physics of the walker.
With a few tests of the programme, I wanted to start blocking out the animation, but first I’d need to find out what personality I was going to give the walker, as this would dictate the way in which it walked. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEoUhlesN9E ) doing some research, I felt like experimenting with several ways of expressing the character, as there’s a lot of ways to make the character move.
Before I started working, I wanted to capture some more real-life footage, so I took my camera outside and did a few of my own capture footage. This would help me get a feel for the movement that I could achieve with the rig, and how the upper torso would move.
https://we.tl/t-PnMdFt7EYv
With this part of the research done, the last thing I looked into was suggested by an outside source, I had told them what I was working on and they suggested a Monty Python sketch titled “The ministry of Silly Walking” Which in the end helped me with exaggeration, as each of the characters moves in unique and silly ways that show off balance and their centre of gravity. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCLp7zodUiI)
This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with this rig, as I’ve used both it and the ultimate walker rig to some degrees of success, with me being able to practice on both rigs allowing me to get a feel for how they animate.
First off I started with the walking animation, and whilst I knew I could do subtler animations, I wanted to do something more wild and bombastic as seen in the Ministry of Silly walking, and was a great inspiration for what I ended up with.
First, I started off with the main model and used Mayas in build grease paper tool to block out the animation and the rotation of the head to give me a distinction on how the character would look as they moved in the scene, this would also show how exaggerated the animation would be for the character as I would be able to show how vivid the head movements were.
I always kept the dope sheet at the bottom of the screen, something which helped me get back into the mindset of using programs such as Adobe Premiere and after-effects as they have similar layouts to what I have set up in Maya.
After I blocked out the animation, I went back and began fixing any of the odd joint issues, as seen in this picture here, the knees bent the opposite way when compared to basic human anatomy.
With the polished off animation, I quickly wanted to move onto the emotion animation as I felt as though it would be fun to experiment with the expression, especially considering the research I had done prior to the animation, I already had an emotion in mind, that being one of confusion/contemplation at an object, something as seen in my research, as in the monsters inc original renders, the character I researched talked with their feet, as a replacement for their hand, and I wanted to replicate the same kind of limitations that the designer’s hand, and came up with a creative way of showing off the characters’ emotions without fully redesigning the model, and leaving it as it is.
So again, I blocked out the animation using grease paper, but I decided that instead of having him just stay in the one place, I’d have him actually move forward to the edge of the mesh surface so the movement of the legs can be a bit more realistic looking.
Initially, in the first renders, I had him simply move forward and react by holding up his feet, but after showing it to family members they initially thought that he had stepped in something, which wasn’t the intention, I then decided to look over at my classmates work to see what they had accomplished and found their animations to be long and filled with more movement and expression, so I decided to make the animation a lot longer and attempt to make him more expressive.
I then began to move the body, with me being able to move the keyframes that I had already placed down and continuing to have the animation ends with the model putting both its feet down, with this in mind, I began by having him look off and then swoop down, as if the character had seen a flying object, such as a UFO or an asteroid, which he would then react with this confusion.
Whilst experimenting with the model, I noticed that the eyebrows could be moved, and wanted to include a raised eyebrow that added to the confused look and sell the fact that the character is confused by what he saw.
With both of the animations done, I wanted to go back to the original one and look over it again, seeing if there were any improvements that could be made, and the only large one I initially saw was the timing, as I felt as though his raising foot was a bit too quick when compared to the rest of the animation so set about changing it, and simply moved the keyframes out of the way and made the timings more realistic.
I later showed the emotion animation to my tutor, a little while later he came back with some feedback.
-left foot drift
-weight shift + anticipation
-chin scratch looks like kicking
So first I started with the anticipation of the character, bobbing his head down so he could use the other foot to balance the weight of himself, however, whilst I did this it opened up another problem.
I noticed that the weight of the character isn’t centred, so he was leaning in the opposite direction to where he should have been leaning, which didn’t look right and went against the centre of gravity, so I edited the keyframes in the graph editor and cut out most of them and made it so that he gradually shifts his weight back.
Finally, I wanted to fix the feet issue, editing the drift wasn’t too hard, just deleting some keyframes, same went with the kicking to scratching, as all I did was delete the keyframes where him moving his foot out didn’t make sense, and then added them to the translate X.
In conclusion to this project, I’m overall quite happy with how both animations turned out, being pleased with how well I was able to animate them based on the examples I had researched and made, and it helped me gain a better understanding of how animation is produced and made, It also taught me that blocking out animations helps when it comes to visualising the character and getting into the mindset of making it move.