WALKER RIG
RESEARCH
After we had been shown some basic rigging techniques, we were introduced to the task of making a simple walk cycle with a pretty basic rig that we downloaded from the internet. It is essentially a ball with legs. To the onlooker, this may seem like a fairly basic item to animate, but realistically it was quite a challenge. However, even though you are working with some sort of strange alien orb, you can actually get quite a range of emotions across if you work at it hard enough.
We had been tasked to demonstrate 4 of the 12 principles of animation using the walker rig.
I decided to focus in on:
Arcs
Secondary Action
Timing and Motion
Anticipation
When researching this, I looked at animation from The Theif and the Cobler, some test walk cycles from Monsters Inc. and some animation tests from The Secret of NIMH.
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Mike Walk Cycle (Cameron Miyasaki) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqioXfXV1is
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Sully Walk Cycle (Cameron Miyasaki) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvS_xSIpBzc
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When I stumbled across the Monsters Inc. walk cycles I found some other tests the animator Cameron Miyasaki had done which was pretty impressive at showing off some of the key principles of animation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT2cUY1Y2SU
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RISING BLOCKS
I wanted to do something a bit more challenging so decided to have him climb up of blocks coming from the ground.
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The Principles of Animation
The 12 Pillars of the Subject.
I have surprised myself at how far I have got within this course yet without doing any actual animation. I had only really worked with and explored more of the modelling aspects of the program. Making things move, is still mostly a mystery.
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In their 1981 Magnum Opus The Illusion of Life Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas lay out 12 devices in which animators can use to express more emotion and value in their work.
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1.) SQUASH AND STRETCH
The first and foremost principle of animation. Gives a form a sense of weight and motion as it moves. However, it is important to remember that for this style to be effective, the actual volume of the shape which is moving must stay the same.
2.) ANTICIPATION
Used to prep the audience for an action which is meant to take place. As leaving a space or a comma in a literary sense, or taking a pause when speaking in public to emphasis what you are about to say, the tenement of anticipation can be used the same way within animation.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX_dm39fkfw
3.) STAGING
Derived from the practices' roots in actual theatre, is all about understanding your work from the audience's perspective. Transitions and interactions need to be smooth, and should be positioned so that every part of the character is relating to the audience. In with this, animators need to consider things like colour pallets, and backgrounds to enhance what they are going to be getting across in their scene.
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4.) STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE
Refers to the actual way something should be drawn or animated. There are benefits and draw backs to implementing both.
Straight ahead animation would be what we know as animation as it is. Drawing each position after another. With pose to pose animation, we identify where the character is going to start on the scene, where the character is in the middle and then where they will finish. It allows for more complicated movements, and makes drawings more accurate. When looking into the pose to pose method, there are some terms you must come to understand if you are going to successfully. Richard Williams, in his book The Animators Survival Kit , sums this up very well. Every action will have two Extremes, and an in between. To find the in between, we key frame the Extremes and we work backwards to find the movement you are looking for.
Both are essential to make your character look like its actually following the laws of gravity.
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4.) FOLLOW THROUGH AND
OVERLAPPING ACTION
Addressees the principles inertia and requires understanding the balance of your character and what a centre of mass is. For example, if a character has long arms, they are going to sway as he or she walks, or they have feathers on their head that bobs up and down. Makes an animation appear more realistic, and can build to a character.
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5.) SLOW IN AND SLOW OUT
Applies to the timing within an animation. Not all movements have one speed. Most movements, start slowly, get quicker, and end slowly. Without it, movements seem mechanical. To utilise this method correctly, it requires again identifying the two Extremes in a movement, finding the Inbetween, then after that, finding the inbetweens from either end of the spectrum to make a smooth movement. This is less of a problem within 3D animation, as it requires you just to play around with the graph editor.
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7.) ARCS
Most movement on a living creature can be simplified into an arc. Can be used in correspondence with the previous 3 to add a more of a natural feel to the movement of a character.
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8.) SECONDARY ACTION
Little side actions which add and emphasis a major action. For example, a character with long hair, the hair will fall behind them as they move.
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9.) TIMING
Referes to the number of keyframes used whenever drawing an aniamtion. The more keyframes it has, the quicker it is going to appear, the less, the slower. Different emotions will have different timings. For example, a shocked expression will be a fast reaction, while someone pondering something, the keyframes will be slower.
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10.) EXAGGERATION
As most animations will not be a realistic representation of what real life is, it is a good idea to add more emphasis on what the character is doing. For example, if a character is sad, make him really sad. It should not be thought as to distort the animation, but to make it more convincing to the audience.
11.) SOLID DRAWING
Every form contrived must ad hear to volume, weight and balance. This is less of a problem or an issue when working within 3D, however, if one learns how to draw with perspective and work by the design of 3D shapes and volumes, it will benefit them more than what meets the eye. Another key tip to work with when considering this principle, is symmetry. While can be a virtue in some areas, a symmetrical character could appear to lifeless. The more you look at real life, nothing really is perfectly symmetrical anyways.
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12.) APPEAL
The final law which was transcribed by the "old masters" is appeal - the one thing every animator must keep in mind when doing everything. It needs to look good on screen. There should be a charisma to your character, which doesn't necessarily mean cute, but interesting.
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WEEK 5
Organisation within Maya.
This week, we looked into file organisation for projects. One of the many tedium's of Maya I have found so far is the difficulty of file transfer. When opening projects on different machines, you need to have your projects set up and organised correctly, i.e. all the textures are stored and sorted correctly within the source images folder.
However, soon I found out that learning to be organised is key to having a successful project. As there is nothing more annoying to receive a scene where the files are a mess, and there is nothing more embarrassing as being the guy who sent the scene off.
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WEEK 4
RENDERING AND LIGHTING
Rendering, textures and lighting are concepts I have only touched on in Maya. At most I've just used basic lighting set ups, and as far as rendering I have only ever used the render view option to check on my work as I was going through it. This class was pretty cool. At first we loaded up a buoy model, properly textured with lighting on it. We were introduced to different render engines. The first thing we touched on is lighting, discussing the importance of having different set ups when working to have a realistic feel to things. We then looked into creating different textures and looking at something called subsurface scattering, which is useful for creating textures of which do not look like they are solid, or to introduce different tones into textures. I also played around with the aistandardmix shader, which allows digital artists to combine two different shaders to create even more interesting textures. I made one that looks similar to jade. It also got me to look into and understand the hyper shade a bit more and getting used to inputs and outputs. For someone who isn't that technically minded yet, the hyper shade can be an intimidating area.
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TOPOLOGY AND PHD LECTURE
WEEK 3
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This week, we had a PHD student come in to give us a talk about some more in detail aspects of modeling, particular topology.
Topology can be defined as the "study of geometrical properties and spatial relations unaffected by the continuous change of shape or size of figures." When we were presented with this, the concept was pretty intimidating at first. We were to make the layout for a human head, using the quad draw tool in Maya. I found it quite tedious, and hard to wrap my head round at first, however once I got into it things started moving quickly.
A general concept to keep in mind when modeling out objects within Maya is the idea of Quadrilateral Topology - meaning that every face on your incredibly complex shape needs to have 4 sides. If you have any more or less, then you are going to run into problems later on down the line. Implementing this is easier said than done, as it requires attention to how the face moves and folds. The class was a good introduction to the concept. However, somewhere on every 3D model, you are going to have these less than or larger than 4 sided shapes, or ngons. It was hard to find where to place these, as there are particular parts on the human head from an animation perspective that will not move at all, mostly located on places such as the forehead and the back of the head.
WEEK 2
BOUY MODELING PRACTICE
As the Penrose triangle idea from last week was hard to get my head round, I decided to make something a bit more simple for class - a ball in a half pipe rolling up and down. I still wanted something that I could make into a loop and turn into a GIF.
In the actual class, we looked into how to get up a reference to make geometry in Maya.
At this stage, we were also told about our main project we are going to be working through in this class - a Floating City.
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WEEK 1
INTRODUCTION CLASS - HAVING AÂ BALL
Maya is hard. Ive had virtually no experience of the programme, apart from attempting to learn something from online tutorials and books. After having the basic concepts of how to save and manage a project, we went onto animating a ball bouncing. Here we were introduced to some concepts such as the timeline and keyframe placement which I know from working with photoshop and after effects. We began to look into some basic modelling and geometry alteration, where we built one of the tables that we have in class. We got some insights into the methodology of constructing geometry.
For our homework, we were told to take our ball bouncing animation we had done in class and play around with it for a bit.
Being interested in impossible shapes, I think that it would be a cool excercise to have a ball bouncing around a Penrose Triangle. I went about looking up tutorials on Youtube for some research:
While I was doing this I also came across some videos showing off some 3D printed shapes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DActj__h3SI
For most of the tutorials mentioned, the Triangle is made up by looking at the geometry from a certain angle, but in the final video mentioned it seems that the creator had actually made a solid object within the 3D software he was using - seems a lot more challenging than the other tutorials.
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