Author: helou-s

Reflection:

Posted on by helou-s

This assignment felt very rushed. A lot of information to learn and remember in a short amount of time before our break and before the deadline. I though 3D would help me in this case, and I could have a change from the previous assignments given that now I had the time to test out 3D animation. Though the previous assignment with the class exercises felt like good warmups for the animations of this assignment and it helped me keep in mind the principles of animation, especially secondary actions, some overlap and arcs.

For both I did switch between FK and IK mostly with the lip sync, it was alright the only thing I still find difficult is blending the switch between IK and FK. I blended them when the arm was moving off and on the table, but I sometimes used IK even when It was mid-air specially when I found It made animating easier. although I did use it as it should be used, for example IK when the hand was on the table to make my work easier and FK when the arm was up in the air. There were on both animations a few spots where the blending wasn’t so seamless, but I tried if I couldn’t blend them well, at least hide them in the animation.

For my weightlift I feel like I struggled a lot less then my lip sync, other than a few hiccups with limbs spinning around and adjusting the properties control it was mostly animating rather than problem solving. In contrast to  my lip sync, I feel because is much more different then everything we’ve been animating so far so it was a little harder to get a hold of.

Feedback from lecturers and my family and friends is something I value in all my assignments specially when the advice and help is from someone who is an expert in the field. It helped me step back from my animations and reveal mistakes I couldn’t otherwise have found on my own specially for these assignments: with wanting to meet the deadline and struggling with animating the mouth to the audio right. Getting different perspectives really helped with problem solving.

Which is why I would definitely want to redo both my animations, because I feel like I could better. Especially after the mistakes I did I could cut time on figuring things out and focus more on making it more organic and less floaty and robotic which I think is the one flaw I still have for both of my animations. Although it may seem straight forward moving limbs around, making something on a computer look organic is quite difficult.

Final stage:

Posted on by helou-s

I got my final feedback. I still had too much mouth movement in a short amount of time, though it was a quick fix thankfully.

detailed block out:

This is my final animation before the feedback:

 

 

I made sure I had interesting secondary animations, like the cup and chair, other than the hair and scarf. I had fun with the cup making sure it accompanied the two smacks on the table the character did, which helped show how much strength she used when hitting the table.

  • Audio was also a way to add to the existing audio of the lip-sync. They were all found online.
  • The props were all made by myself.

After fixing the issues I mentioned previously it was mostly about taking time and breaks from the animation to avoid overwhelming myself and asking for feedback from friends and family so it would help me get a different perspective.

 

Middle stage:

Posted on by helou-s

Block out and Rough animation:

The start of my lip sync looked promising I received feedback on actions I could add in the background and some adjustments I could do to my character to sell the idea of an angry speech.

this is some of the early feedback I received:

This is the block out before I had too many keys for the lip sync:

 

Though the more I continued the more I struggled with the lip sync:

  • the audio and the lips not being in sync, the mouth moving too much and too fast. It was a lot of trial and error, using a mirror and recording myself reading the lines and looking at how my own lips would move.
  • I think the mistake I was doing which only made things harder for myself was instead of speaking like my audio did which the character was skipping some letters I articulated every letter in each word, which left me with too many mouth shapes in a short time frame.

I eventually got it especially when I filmed my body movement and got a glimpse of myself saying the lines and trying to speak like the character did. Pausing my work on it also helped me clear my mind to realise the mistake I did.

  • For the facial expressions I used a blend of the video the audio is from and my own face, more of mine because the video the movements and expressions are quite subtle, and the lecturers recommended exaggerating.

I did a close up recording to really see how the lips should move:

I tried to act out the facial expressions to have a starting guide to what I wanted to do in 3D: this is one example.

  • My second major struggle was with the switch from constant to Bezier. Now that I’ve finished I feel like I spent too much time in the constant mode and added too many in-betweens I ended up with limbs twisting around, which took me a minute to understand what was going on.

A lot of my keys were going from negative values to higher negative values that on a circular shape would be located where the positive value would be, instead of going from -1 to 0 to 1 it was more of -1 to -100.

Here is an example to make it clear:

I ended up redoing a lot of the keys to allow the Bezier mode to flow properly. In constant mode the issue didn’t appear only when I changed did it become apparent a lot of my limbs were that way.

Other than these issues it was mostly trials and error figuring out what was best for my animation, removing some movements I didn’t like or didn’t seem natural to do, and adding others.

(+) class exercise:

The 2d and 3d class exercises were very helpful, although my 3d lipsync is unfinished, it was a good start and warm up for the final animation. had I not started somewhere in the classroom I feel like I would have been lost in the assignment.

2D:

3D:

 

Early stage:

Posted on by helou-s

References and block out sketch:

I immediately knew what audio I wanted to work on, a cut scene of Arthur Morgan from an early stage of the game red dead redemption 2, but I tried to have a look at other things I could do, but I was happy with that initial audio I chose. My references mainly consisted of looking at the reference sheet for the letters and their mouth shapes, the animation the audio is from and mostly my own video of myself acting out what I wanted my character to do in theory, but I made a few changes accordingly to how I naturally would have behaved in an angry scenario my character was supposedly in.

This is a screenshot of the video I filmed of myself acting out the characters action.

This is the video my audio is from:

I picked out the 8 seconds I wanted to work on, I then planned the actions roughly, I added some details like the hand movements I wanted the character to do or if there were pointing or had their hand in a fist. From that point I took advice from the class exercises we did and wrote down the audio so I could see where all my vowels were and the letter of the word where pressure was put on for example the word friends in the first sentence.

I did struggle with the lip sync, though the class exercise with the rain rig was a good warm up to the upcoming animation I planned for myself.

 

Final stage:

Posted on by helou-s

I continued working on my animation, I obviously struggled with making it look organic and not robotic or floaty. Stepping back helped a lot, and getting feedback from friends and family who pointed out when something looked off was a huge help, especially when getting feedback from lecturers wasn’t available. I didn’t struggle too much with the weightlift, except for blending the IK and FK switching, it was more of a matter of time and patience and separating the task between several days to allow myself to see the mistakes with fresh eyes the next day.

Here is my animation before the changes I made after getting my final feedback:

  • I needed to fix the hands to avoid having it go through the carrot leaves too much and because they were going inside one another.
  • The lecturer also suggested I stretch the carrot down a little so it wouldn’t look like it was already out of the dirt.

Which led me to realize the cartoon look  I was going for : the carrot being pulled out of the dirt with a comical pause mid-air and finally the fall, didn’t translate well. I instead took the lecturers feedback of making the carrot longer but made it work in my cartoon ideas favour. I stretched the carrot so it would look like it was stretching out if the ground and then bounce out which causes her to fall back. It makes her big fall back logical as opposed to how the animation was before.

Middle stage:

Posted on by helou-s

Block out and Rough animation:

I noticed that throughout the animation process with the feedback I received my animation changed for the better specially when I initially didn’t have the arms of the model breaking at all, those small stretches to her limbs sold the struggle of pulling such a big carrot out of the ground, similarly to the references I showed previously.

Here are some notes I took while adjusting my block out after some feedback:

 

Such as the balance of the characters weight, my lecturer suggested to make sure I had a balanced amount of weight to the centre line. So I looked through each key poses I did and if I felt she was off balance to the centre line I took some notes to adjust it later.

After that initial block out, I added more frames and details, which is where I also filmed myself to get the poses right. Though throughout the animating process I did changes like instead of having her prop the carrot on her shoulder, with the suggestion of my lecturer I made her fall back and have the carrot fly back.

I didn’t shy away from getting feedback because an outside opinion is always helpful in making the animation better, here is some of the feedback I got from my lecturers and the changes I planned to do:

Other than that my block out and in-betweens were relatively simple to work on it was mostly a lot of adjusting and playing around to figure out what looked best.

(+) class exercise:

For both my animations in general the chair exercises helped me warm up and a quick reminder for the FK and IK switching which I took advantage of for both animations in this assignment.

Early stage:

Posted on by helou-s

References and block out sketch:

Warm up:

I started of my research with looking at weightlifting competitions specially the ones where they use boulders. Although I didn’t end up doing it that style of weightlifting due to it being too simple and straightforward for what the lecturers were asking of us to do, it did help me with understanding the basics of weightlifting, and how to go about blocking out the rain character pulling a carrot out of the dirt, which is what I ended up going for after some feedback from my lecturers.

I focused mainly on one of the many references I found and took these notes on sync sketch to study the animation which still helped me when making my final animation.

These are some videos that helped me while researching, this animation, to better understand in different angles how they lifted the boulder. Which still was a helpful analysis to have in mind while working on the carrot pulling animation:

A reference I also used from our previous animations was the run and jump guide from Richard Williams, because many of the key poses I saw on the weightlifting videos reminded me of these key poses:

Eventually I made the block out on paper, using the analysis I did on Syncsketch as a guide:

Carrot pulling animation:

Other then starting off with what I had found previously I need more animation specific to the movements I wanted to achieve in the block out I had done to plan out what I wanted to go for:

I used this for the arches of the back and the fall back.

 

this was a good reference for the struggle on pulling something heavy off the ground, and create an breaking the arms and the arching of the back in action in 3D.

 

The block out I had done previously was a good for starting point for the carrot pulling animation I also ended up blocking out on paper as well.

I also used the idea of the squash and stretch we did in the run and jump animation here as well when the character was pulling on the carrot, to exaggerate the action and emphasise on how hard it is to pull it out of the ground, make it obvious she is struggling and it’s not something easy to pull out of the ground.

In cases where the internet wouldn’t offer all the references I needed, I filmed myself to see how I would naturally go about doing what my character is doing, to achieve a somewhat realistic look. And I really needed a reference for a specific pose:

Because I was having a hard time understanding how she would pull her body back and how her back would bend and her legs would be.

 

 

 

 

Reflection: on the learning and final outcome:

Posted on by helou-s

In general, there are a lot of things I would do differently now that I’ve gotten slightly used to Zbrush for example, I know I can go about it faster this time and be less afraid of the steps that come next. I am still unhappy with the way the cloth looks and I wish I had done the arms and hands slightly better on the character, without having to turn them awkwardly so they would face the right way. Although there are still a lot of things such as unreal engine and the nodes on there that I still feel clumsy, especially remember the shortcuts for the nodes or generally which is for what and it was confusing after memorising how some things are done in blender and wanting to get the similar results I knew how to achieve on there. Although, with a clearer mind I feel like I should detach myself from it and instead of wanting the same result, try and achieve better with the new software. I should continue practicing it and playing around to better understand it at least at the level I understand zbrush now.

But overall, I did get the idea that I had in my head into a picture, of a sluggish minotaur who really enjoys his midday naps and I’m happy I achieved that, I’m also glad he looks like his concept and the minor alterations were just translating 2d into 3d. I’m unsure if in the end result was right but it worked for me.