Weight Lift:

Lip Sync:

For this assignment we were tasked to create two different animations. One focusing on the body mechanics of a character lifting a weight and the other was to choose a short voice clip and create a character in lip sync to this.

Lip Sync

This was my first time attempting to animate a lip sync and I struggled a lot more than I thought I would. The actual movement of the mouth wasn’t the issue, it was pairing the expressions alongside them that became a challenge. I still do not have access to a screen graphics tablet at home so instead of using ToonBoom I used a software on my iPad called Toonsquid which I found to operate very similar to ToonBoom.

I looked at several different voice clips and originally decided on an Ozzy Osbourne clip, but when sketching out the block out I decided I didn’t feel like I was enjoying it so I had a look at other options. It was actually when I was watching King of the Hill, there was a scene with Hank Hill and Penny and after hearing it, I decided this was what I wanted to do. I looked at several mock sketches for character design and unfortunately hit a massive art block during this time and really started to struggle. I decided to go with something cute and simple as to not overload myself with too much detail.

I went onto ToonSquid and loaded in the voice clip and began to look at the mouth first.

I went through the sound clip and wrote down phonetics I could hear and this then allowed me to draw the mouth around the sounds a lot easier.

Below are some of the references I looked at to help:

Once I had the rough mouth shapes I then proceeded to draw out the characters and place this into a rough position and then use it as a guide to draw their mouths.

When the mouths where done, it was a still of the character with a moving mouth, so I began looking into adding expression and movement to give the characters more personality.

First stage:

This was the rough sketch of the character with the original mouth movements placed on top. This gave me a base to work from and develop further.

Second Stage:

For this stage I looked at the cheek movements and I also looked at the perspective movement of the paper he is holding when it moves down.

Third Stage:

For the next stage I looked at the head movements as this would be my foundation for working with the facial expressions in the final part.

I did use a video reference of myself but would prefer not to attach it! This was really helpful in getting the eyebrow expression and head movements used for Hank. However, I ran out of time with Peggy and feel like I didn’t get to focus on her movements as much but got a basic rough movement done. If I had of had more time I would have liked to look more at her head movements and her body, as I roughed out the head but drew in the body last minute so it is just stationary and does look out of place.

Final Animation:

For the final stage I looked at adding in Hanks expressions and then adding in Peggy at the end. I also tried to look at the characters ears and how they would react to the movement of the head. Unfortunately once I was done with the first character and moving onto Peggy’s voice clip I was coming very close to the deadline and I feel like her character is a lot more rigid that Hanks. I did the best I could with the time I had but I am definitely not happy with the final outcome for her. I tried to get her to shake her head but I framed it too quickly and it looks very awkward and as if there is a sudden jolt, so if I had of had the time I definitely would have fixed this and made sure that it was a softer and better keyframed head turn.

Weight Lift:

I was slightly more confident with the weight lifting animation due to the more specific reference I was able to resource. I’ve put a few examples of references below:

I had a lot of fun experimenting with different weights and different styles. I initially had the idea of a robot trying to lift a box and it being so heavy his arms pop off, I did a rough block out to test this, however, I found it to be too boxy in style for me and I knew I would struggle to keep proportions accurate so therefore looked into other options.

I used some of the references I sourced and looked at a weight lifting bar and made a quick animation of that to see how well it worked.

While looking through reference videos on Youtube there was a partical one caught my eye and gave me an idea for an animation. It was Atlas stone competitions, and due to the cold weather and snow… I had the idea of making a snowman and lifting the head like an atlas stone onto the snowmans body.

I began by drawing a rough stick man to get the body poses done correctly. This gave me a really strong base to work off.

I had a bit of time to work on this so decided to add more to the end and thought it would work well to have the ball of snow roll off the body and become destroyed on the ground so I added this into my rough stick man sketch.

Once I was happy with the fluidity of movement on the stick figure I started to bulk out the limbs and body frame to give the character a smoother look within the animation. Due to the overlap of certain items, I decided to add a bit of white colour to the snowman so that the animation just looked better as a whole.

Final Animation:

I am happy with how this animation turned out however there are some small flawed issues I have noticed after reviewing the animation that if I had time I would go back and fix. I do think they are minor enough as to not overly effect the quality of it but the proportions of some limbs are off in certain frames and when he stands with his hands on hips the stance has a tilt rather than being in an upright position.

Reflection:

I enjoyed this assignment and don’t feel I struggled as much as I thought I would with it. Unfortunately with the other module hand in just before Christmas and then having the busy Christmas period, I didn’t get to put as much time into this as I would have liked to. I do feel I had to rush it a lot and it shows, especially in my lip sync where I didn’t get the time to put into Peggy’s expressions and movements the same way I did with Hanks. Researching for the weight lift was definitely a lot easier and there was a tonne more resources that I found useful than the lip sync. The lip sync references are all very similar and hard to put into practice which is why I used my own video referencing to look at and that helped me a lot more than anything else did! I recorded a couple of different videos with slight changes to each in body movement and expression and ended up using a mix of two and stitched them together to get Hanks finished movements.

The weight lifting was a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable and having the free reign to decide HOW the character interacted with the weight added some fun into the research! I love watching the Strong men competitions and that’s how I ended up finding the movement I wanted but adding the twist to it with the character building a snowman. Again though, I didn’t get the time to polish it as it was the first animation I looked at and completed and due to the lip sync taking up so much of my time… I didn’t get to go back and refine it down. I would have liked to look at adding a stylised character design into the animation – and have a rough concept drawn out on a frame – but I knew it would be time consuming to repeatedly draw this out and I just wouldn’t get it finished!

I have learnt a lot during this module but still have so much to learn too! I’ve enjoyed my first attempt at lip sync but feel like I did it kind of arse-about-face so will have to look at a lot more tutorial videos and make my life a little easier with any future lip sync projects. In hindsight, I tried to make my life easier.. but it ended up making it more complex and complicated!  I got Toonsquid to complete this project and as it is so similar to ToonBoom it actually made it a smoother process as I was able to navigate the software quite easily. I do wish I was able to use ToonBoom more (I dabble in it but due to the lack of screen graphics tablet at home it makes it very difficult for accuracy and neatness). It will be my next investment to get one so I will thankfully be able to use ToonBoom properly! My weight lift was just completed in Procreate as its the software I used most. I know that the animation feature is basic but it is enough to allow the basic movement animations. Although, after using Toonsquid I may start using it more for any of my animations as it is a really lovely software to use and its handy on the iPad for when I’m out and about.

In conclusion – I am happy-ish with the final animations. Another week and I would have definitely been a lot happier but it is what it is! I know were the weaknesses are in the animations and I can now progress into future projects knowing I need to schedule my time better so that I can finish everything to a higher standard.

Walk:

Walk with Personality:

Run:

Run and Jump:

Reflection:

Overall I don’t think I struggled too much with this submission! Due to home issues in the first few weeks I missed a lot of classes but tried my best to follow along at home. I am very rusty on body mechanics and I look forward to progressing with this as I enjoyed doing it in both 2D and 3D! With not having a screened graphics tablet I struggled far too much to try and draw cleanly in Toon boom and I am upset that I couldn’t have completed my work for my submission in it. I have been testing the water with the software (quite messily) but I understand the basic functions and how to use it so I’m not too annoyed and hope to upgrade my home graphics set up so in future I will be able to use Toon Boom without any issues.

Using Blender to animate is always filled with issues but this time around I surprisingly didn’t come across too many! I didn’t enjoy working with the Rain rig as I felt very restricted in the movements I could make her do, which is why I chose to source a Woody rig and have a go at animating a more cartoon-like movement. I really enjoyed playing around with his model and will most certainly be keeping this for future projects whether that be personal or for university!

When completing the run and jump cycle I used my run cycle I had animated in 2D (but not submitted) for the lead up and that allowed me to focus on the take off and landing of the jump. I looked at just getting the character to jump on a flat surface and then later decided to exaggerate that by adding a gap and height drop in the landing.

First render test:

(landing not complete – wanting to look at the character landing into a tumble)

Feedback from Aodhan:

• Focus on exaggerating the anticipation of the jump
• Exaggerate the landing

I used Procreate to animate as I didn’t have a screened graphics tablet at home and was really struggling to draw cleanly on Toon boom. I have been using Toon boom for rougher animations to try and get used to using a new software and I haven’t really found that I’ve struggled with it. It reminded me of Aftereffects and after having used AF in college it was easier to pick up Toon Boom. I would have had no issues animating in Toon Boom had I of had a screen tablet at home to allow me to make cleaner lines.

I wanted to have the character tumble when landing so I looked at a lot of parkour videos to look at how to animate this. I did struggle a little with it and if I had more time I would definitely add a lot more focus and detail to this but overall I’m fairly happy with how it turned out.

I also looked at the anticipation of the jump after Aodhan’s advice and decided to hold the frame longer and add an in-between to help with the smoothness.

References:

This was a good reference to see a big gapped jump between objects.

I was undecided whether to do my run cycle in 2D or 3D. I completed a run cycle in both, and decided to submit my 3D run cycle for my submission. Whilst having also done the run cycle in 2D I found this beneficial for applying the process when animating the 3D model. I did get feedback on my 2D run cycle from Aodhan before I decided to go with the 3D animation. I got great advice from him about mirroring the sides can make the animation have a blurred motion and to try to have slight differences when doing this. As to not waste time I didn’t get to apply this to the 2D animation but for future it is valuable knowledge that I can apply to my projects!

Feedback from Aodhan:

• Look at shadowing of arm and leg position (Duplicated poses make it harder to read)
• Everything else was good

3D run Cycle:

I decided to not use the rain model and sourced a Woody from Toy Story model that was fully rigged and animated this. I wanted to use this model instead as I always focus on very anatomically correct and realistic movements when animating and wanted to push myself to try something a bit more exaggerated and cartoon-like. I really enjoyed using this model and it was fun to be presented with a model and rig created by someone else and figure out the controls and how to move it properly. I did have a few issues with the rig initially but after having a chat with Rachel in class, she showed me how to simplify it down and use it properly and it made the animation process a lot easier and quicker!

Test Render:

Feedback from Rachel:

• Re-do the run and look at the effect of gravity more on the leg movements
• Now that the IK is off and I have access to the controllers for the individual parts of the arms it should be easier to move them without them distorting

Quaternion was turned on – Rachel advised that I check this in future and change it to XYZ Euler.

IK controllers were hidden so Rachel helped me look for them and get them turned on – this made re-doing the animation was SO much easier! I had struggled with the arms and movement quite badly in my first test run of animating Woody.

I rendered out the 32 frame animation at 24fps and added it into  to loop and lengthen it.

I had to render this out quite a few times as there was always a slight glanky movement that I wanted to correct. Even with the final render there’s a part when his hand moves down and it flaps a bit. I looked over the blender file so many times and it looked fine in Blender but when rendered out it was noticeable.

A bad test render:

Final render:

References:

Woody Blender Model sourced from – https://app.gumroad.com/d/354283c2d8ca409a9a2cc7b5e8fd14fd

Run reference:

ToyStory 3 game for PS3 – looked at gameplay on YouTube to see reference of movements:

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I used videos like this for referencing a more exaggerated run and looked into the positioning of the arms.

I found this video very helpful with looking at a fast paced leg movement and was able to use this as a great reference towards animating the legs on Woody.

For reference for this I looked a lot at the reference videos posted on Blackboard and also watched gameplay/film clips of Toy Story to see how Woody moves. I wanted to focus on a swaying walk like a cowboy so also watched videos of cowboys walking to refer back to.

• Animated the Contact, down, pass and up poses every 4 frames to keep the tempo lower.
• Focused on the body swaying and side to side motion

I used a software called Movavi Video Editor to stitch the render together. (Couldn’t get Adobe suite to work at home). This software was easy to use and because the render was cycled, it was easy to duplicate the video and create a longer walk cycle sequence.

This was my final video. I noticed that I had lost the texture of the hat (this flagged when saving in blender as it is likely an older blender version model) but I don’t think this is too noticeable thankfully!

Sources:

I looked at references to his movements from movie clips. I wanted to see how his body swayed and his arms would react to that.

I used this Youtube video as main reference to my walk.

I also used this reference to see how walking with a hand on the hip would work and looked at the placement of the stationary hand and how it moved with the body.

When in college we had to do a walk cycle animation as one of our first projects so I had prior experience in completing this. I have become slightly rusty and lacked the fundamentals of a basic walk cycle and after having a chat with Aodhan decided to re-draw it.

Feedback from Aodhan:

• It lacks the bounce fluidity when contact is made with the ground
• Advised it is probably easier to re-do the walk cycle to add this in (Definitely agree to this)

I decided to redraw my walk cycle as I lacked the up and down motion in my initial animation. I have a copy of Richard Williams: “The Animator’s Survival Kit” and it was refreshing to go back to this book and read through it for some valuable forgotten knowledge and tips! I didn’t want to focus too much on creating a character animation and drew it in a mannikin format to make sure I followed through with form and pose.  I also used YouTube videos for references. A channel on YouTube called “Moderndayjames” also has a video up that I found so useful and full of helpful tips!

I read through this and made sure I had it open beside me when drawing out my animation.

Rough sketched animation – more cartoony to look at leg form and the up/down motion.

I animated on 8 frames and and then rendered it out at 12fps on 2s!

After going back and re-doing this animation I focused a lot on references to make sure I got the up/down motion.

I also had a quick sketch through of adding a bag to a character just to focus on the movement of a prop.

References:

Richard Williams: “The Animator’s Survival Kit”

I looked at a lot of hiking videos to reference the movement of a backpack while walking.