Week 11 & 12 - Pixar Animation Project

 LINK

For my final assignment of the character animation module, I was to create a parody of the Pixar intro. For this I had to decide about something that would tell a short story with a comedic feel.

So to start, I modeled the same lamp from the Pixar intro (Luxo jr.) using blueprints, gave it basic materials and created the parent hierarchy since I had a lot of trouble getting the rig to work, but soon found out that using a rig was too difficult. So instead, it was a case of putting all the parts into hierarchies with their axis moved to the place of rotation.

I then modeled the UFO which was just one mesh and gave it materials. After, I created the text objects and gave that materials. I then animated it to the style of the official intro as that was my intro. The rest was part of the very short story and after rendered the animation. Then using a video editing program, I added the sounds which were extracts from the official intro and a few others videos.

The hardest part of the animation was the walk cycle. It took me a several attempts and when I found the best one, I copied the animation over a few times to create the walking cycle.

I modeled all the assets in Maya 2016 and animated everything in Cinema 4D R14.

References:

MODELING
Luxo JR lamp rigging tutorial
Luxo JR model sheet/reference
UFO modeling references 1     2     3

SOUNDS:
Official Pixar Intro Sounds
Light turn on sound effect
Light hum sound effect
Fly away sound effect

Week 10 - Exaggeration, Staging, Appeal, Solid drawing

Week 9 - Straight Ahead Action and Pose to Pose

For this animation, I had to create 2 versions. Both had to show the difference between a choppy animation and a smooth one. So in this case, it would be a pose to pose for the first one, which meant creating an animation that was choppy to show the different poses.

The second example was the smooth one which was the straight ahead action.

The animation in a whole is a bit inaccurate since the way this character should be animated is with its base part moving forward when it reaches it's mid jump, but instead has its top part in front the whole time. Aside from that, the 2 renders show the difference between straight ahead action and pose to pose.

Week 8 - Arcs

Click for video

For this animation, we had to animate a robot and demonstrate arc movements. For this, I decided to give this a bit of a storyline. Here the robot headers a ball twice and loses it on the final hit. Arcs are demonstrated here by the forward swinging motion of the robots body. The base of the robot I animated in a way that it shows weight and that as the robot jumps forward, its base swings with the jump. This in effect gives the entire robot a 'swinging' action which is similar to how a golf swing would be. First the hit would build up momentum and then the shot would be taken. For this I did the same. The robot gets ready to jump and them jumps and whilst doing so, it brings its whole body forward whilst creating the 'drag' effect on its base. The ball was added to give make it a bit different from other animations and is just for show even though it is part of the short storyline.

One thing to note was that at the end of the animation when the robot puts its head down, the neck breaks off and flips backwards. This was not to do with me as this was out of my control. If it was, then it may be because I rotated the head too far and caused the neck spring to flip out but otherwise, there were no other issues. I enjoyed animating this as I found it challenging to do and I am happy with the final production.

One element I could improve on was the render. My choice of colours for the scene wasent the best but still is suitable since the main aspect I am trying to show is the animation and not the scene quality or render, although it would have been nicer and more appealing, its something I can later work on to improve.

Week 7 - Secondary Action

VIDEO

For this task, we were given a model to animate. The short animation must show use of secondary action. this is different from follow through and overlapping since secondary actions are things that result from a primary action.

For my animation, I wanted to aim for something a bit more. I thought of a brief storyline in my head and followed that, making changes where appropiate. I used secondary action on my parts of the clip. For example, the dogs walking cycle was presented by the bobbing action it does. Its secondary actions were its ears, head and tail. Another example would be the ball. After the dog hits the ball, it bounces off the doghouse and comes backwards it. This is also a secondary action since my primary action was the dog hitting the ball and the secondary action was the ball moving/coming back.

I also wanted to give the animation a minor humourisitic feel to it as well. The main issue I had with animating this would be the ball. I had to chose to either use dynamics for the ball or to keyframe. I modelled the ball in Cinema 4D and imported it into Maya and gave it the appropiate textures. After testing the simulation, I saw a lot of issues. The ball was constantly jittering and woundnt stay in place or stay still at all. So I decided that I would have more control if I were to animate this.

Animating this takes away the realism aspect but gives me more control. The second difficult thing was probably the camera. I had to make sure that the camera movement was smooth and didnt have any sharp panning angles or dollys. But aside from those 2 difficulties, I still believe I could have done better with this animation.

Week 6 - Follow Through and Overlapping Action Hammer

For this animation, we were given the task to animate a hammer. The purpose of this was to sucessfully demonstrate overlapping actions/follow through.  Follow through actions are actions that come after the primary action. These are not secondary actions but instead follow through. The difference between the 2 is that follow through actions were not caused by a primary action but instead is caused by something that is not controlled. In this case, the hammer was swinging left and right and was causing the antenne to wiggle as the hammer hit the ground.

I was going to attempt the multi hammer animation but I couldnt get all the hammers into one scene. Copy and pasting them over wouldnt work and even though I had adjusted the timeline so there was a delay, the bend deformer on the antenne was weirding out and it was bending too far everytime I delayed the animation so I thought it'd be best if I just did 1 for now.

Week 5 - Anticipation - Small Large Ball

For this animation, we were given the task of comparing the anticipation between 2 balls. One with a large 'build up' of anticipation and one with a small 'build up'. Anticipation is very important as its name is what it does, it creates anticipation for the viewer. It also illustrates the idea that something is about to happen. For example, here is a clip of how anticipation works with characters:

As we can see from this video clip, for the man to jump he must build up that kinetic energy first and then leap. The stages of build up is anticipation as we can clearly see his actions to what will lead to his next action which would be the jump. Another example would be this:

 

In this clip, the anticipation builds up by him bringing his arms back and then leaping into the water. The anticipation here again would be his arms and the slight lean backwards to suggest that he is going to leap forward.