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.

 

Week 4 - Slow in Slow out, Newtons Cradle

Above is my animation to explain how slow in and slow out works. As we can see, when the ball reaches its maximum velocity or its max height, the ball slows down to a halt before it falls back downwards and speeds up. From a physics perpsective, the kinectic energy of the ball that hits the rest transfers its kinectic energy from each of the balls towards the ball on the opposite end. When the energy reaches the ball on the opposite end, the ball swings up into the air and repeats the same process.

I did have some problems animating this as it was hard to determine what movement the balls in the middle would have so I went online to gather some research and found out that the ball in the middle has very little or no movement at all, whilst the balls on the opposing sides of the ball in the middle, swings towards the ball that is going upwards on its end.

Week 3 - Squash and Stretch Dino

This animation was to focus on the principles of squash and stretch. To demonstrate this, I used a dinosaur rig to explain how squash and stretch works. As the dino falls to the 1st platform, we can see its head curl outwards, its legs straighten out and its feet point upwards. As it hits the platform, its body falls and lowers itself, its head drops and curls inwards and its feet align with the platform. After this happens, the dino prepares to jump through the barrier using the actions it used to 'compensate' for its landing. After it jumps through the barrier, it does the same actions again. Preparing to land or hit the platform. This was slightly different as the dinos trajectory was angled and not a straight free fall. After landing on the 2nd platform, the dino again uses its 'landing actions' to prepare for its final jump onto the ground.

The landing for this was slightly different as I decided to let the dino 'skid' on its landing for a second. This overall wasent too difficult to animate as I had planned to give the dino a short walk as it walks to the first platform but decided to leave this out since the focus was to demonstrate squash and stretch and not a dinosaur walking.

Week 2 - Examples of Bad Timing in Animation

The animation above was found on youtube and is a perfect example of bad timing in animation. As we can see, the timing for each of the characters movement is very linear and has no smoothing interpolation intergrated into it, meaning the movements of the arms, legs and head are very robotic, which gives the entire piece a poor animation.

This short was most likely created by someone who doesnt have an idea of how timing works and any experiance of animating as the entire clip is very poorly made. 

Week 2 - Physics vs Cartoon Ball Bounce Animation (Maya)

This short clip was animated in Maya 2016. The purpose of this clip is to show the difference between how a ball would bounce under 2 different aspects. These aspects being a cartoon and physics.

The ball which has the physics aspect applied to it is the one on the left. As we can see the bounce has a rigid shape meaning the ball holds its structural integrity. Although this bounce looks more realistic to how a ball would bounce in real life, this is incorrect as if we were to watch this video, we can see that the gold ball does squash and stretch a bit.

The ball with the cartoon aspect was the ball on the right. As we can see, when the ball drops, the shape elongates as it reaches the ground, once it makes contact with the ground, the ball flattens on the y axis and spreads on the x and z. This is not accurate as well as it is greatly exaggerated. Lastly, the ball again elongates when it goes back up.

In conclusion, both of the animations are incorrect but a mix of two clips, meaning if I were to make another animation clip which has a mix of both of the aspects applied to the two balls, then that would be more accurate since it has the correct amount of each aspect applied to it.

Week 1 - Graph Editor Tutorial

Even though I've learnt how to use the graph editor using another 3D software, the principle of how to use the Graph Editor can still be applied to Maya.

Autodesk Knowledge Network: Maya 2016 Graph Editor

This was the first tutorial I found and that helped me with using the Graph Editor in Maya. This page had a fair bit of information about how to use the GE and what everything does but this would not be good enough for someone who had no idea on how to use the GE. For someone such as myself, this information was more than enough for me to get started on the GE.

Maya Animation Tutorial for Beginners - Graph Editor HD

However this tutorial had a lot more information on what the GE is, how to use it, what its buttons do and much more. It has information about setting keygrames, editing them, positioning, moving, copying keyframes, editing the animation curve paths and much more. Again, a beginner could really learn from this tutorial as it starts from basics on how to approach the GE.

Week 1 - Physics vs Cartoon Ball Bounce Animation

Above is a GIF of how a ball would bounce if it were a cartoon animation. I have applied 1 out of the 12 principles of animation. This principle was Squash and Stretch. As the ball falls towards the ground, its shape starts to elongate and thins out horizontally. As it hits the ground, it's shape becomes more flat and thins out vertically.

Here is the physics version. As you can see immediatly, as the ball hits the ground, it does not elongate nor does it thin out. There is a very slight deformation as the ball hits the ground as some of the force from the impact does change the balls shape but only very slightly. This is more realistic as if you were to drop a ball in real life as such, it would not do what the 1st GIF is showing but more rather this 2nd GIF


The animation is very basic and is only meant to show an example of the 2 types of animation. I used Animatron to animate the balls since it was very easy to use and to animate, rather than using Flipbook or other 2D animation softwares.

Week 1 - My 5 Learning statements

1) I will show up and attend to all my lectures/sessions on time.


2) I will not get distracted easily whilst revising or whilst doing independant study.

3) I will complete all of my work on time and not do a lastminute.com

4) I will do my work to the best of my ability.

5) I will not procrastinate.