The original brief outlined in a meeting of fellow Animators at work was to create a four second animation based on the theme "hunted". Okay, so I bent/broke the rules a little. My piece is eight seconds long however I felt it had to be eight seconds long. I've really enjoyed putting this one together. As always, I am learning much about many aspects of animation and rendering. Including a little more of how much I have yet to learn!
During the course of making the animation I found a series of jpeg backgrounds from Disneys "The Sorcerers Apprentice". These strongly inspired the backgrounds that you see in the final animation. I love the subtle noise, the texture from the paint, the minimalist shapes and volumes, the dramatic and moody lighting that suggests magic and mystery. I've tried to bring some of that into my final render. For comparison you can find a link to the Disney backgrounds at the bottom of this post.
Using vertex lighting I created a colour pass and rendered it using a Hardware renderer. I then split the scene into several layers, created an ambient occlusion render and combined it all together in post. Here is the final animation looped a few times:
and if you're interested, here is how it progressed through a series of quick videos of progress stitched together towards the final animation:
I'm quite pleased with how its turned out, the project has served it's purpose which was to improve my animation skills and teach me something about creating an appealing render. Looking to the future I feel I should develop finesse with colour temperature, composition, atmospheric perspective and texture in the timing of animation. I feel I also should look at further developing my skills with poses and weight. I've shown it to a few fellow animators and they've given me some constructive feedback to work on. Poor guys, they must be sick of me asking for feedback by now!
Thanks to everyone that gave me feedback and advice on it! Special thanks must go to Al Barber, Darren Watford, Richard Blackley, Stephen Sloper and Aron Durkin.
It's time for a new project now. I've found a picture by Eyvind Earle that I want to model and bring to life in a short animation. Its not going to be anything fancy, i've just got a real itch to have a go at it. Here's the pic:
Since my last post ive been working away on my rendering skills. Ok, im trying to Animate better not Render better however I'm learning a lot and having fun, so sue me. Please open up the images in separate tabs to flick through them, the differences are subtle and yet they are there and they are important to the final render.
The image below is an update on the concept from the last post. I showed the concept in my last post to TheDaz* and he said "you've for the principles but you've gone a bit batshit with them". So below is an update, a more conservative, balanced take. I've focused on using atmospheric perspective to create depth, strong highlights to define form and mood and colour temperature to create believable colour. As TheDaz* says, I think I've got the principles. Now I need to practice with them so I can develop finesse and convincing subtlety.
Below is my first render from of the scene based on the concept above. Initially I started trying to texture everything but it was taking so long and it wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to based on the concept above. So I turned to vertex painting and hardware rendering, I will compile and treat the image in post with added noise, bloom and a shadow pass. This way is a LOT faster, easier to tweak and frankly, more fun.
In a paint program I’ve added a slight noise. I’ve also duplicated the image, blurred it, laid over the top and set it to lighten mode to give it a softer atmosphere.
I’ve still got to do an ambient occlusion pass so that the stairs have proper shadows which I will place over the top in multiply mode, again, in post. Then I’ve got to change the character textures so that they complement the mood and lighting of the scene, create a light rig for them and render separately with an alpha channel. I will also create an ambient occlusion pass for the characters so that they have convincing self shadowing.
I showed the render above to TheDaz* and he came back with the image below. He's implemented colour temperature more effectively around the main wall light. He's also added more atmospheric perspective and a bounce light that fills in the area around the stairs, column and opposite wall slightly.
Hopefully by next post I will have a new playblast of the animation in the lit environment with characters also lit. I may even have the colour pass of the render ready.
*What are you looking here for? TheDaz* always has a star next to his name. At my company he's like TheStig of art and his time and advice is very much appreciated.
this is a quick post to say I've uploaded a new pass to youTube which can be seen here. In this pass I've implemented feedback from colleagues and friends. There are many small changes however the main changes are the foot sliding as he recovers from the roll. Plus a new final pose for the henchman at the end of the scene which is meant to make the hero look trap in the corner of the screen.
I've also performed another pass on the background concept to give it more depth and to draw the eye to the area where the hero will emerge into the scene.
I will now be focusing on getting the background ready to be modelled and lit. till next post!
I've been pretty busy on the short Hunted animation I've been working on in my spare time.
I've got to the point where im looking at what the background environment should look like, below is how it currently looks. It's just a rough mock-up made of a few planes.
I took the image above and painted over it in Photoshop. My composition, texture and colour is nowhere near as strong as those images above however I do love to try. Hopefully with a few iterations I can get a bit nearer the quality shown in Disney's backgrounds. As it is I like the idea of using moody midnight blues to convey the mood. I think the overall composition could do with some work to make it more interesting. I should also look at using colour to help describe the volumes in the scene. I'm going to look at a few books of old castles to see if I can find items to punctuate the scene with. Maybe those books will point towards the colour scheme I should use too.
Animation Passes
Following on from last weeks post with the first blockout of the overall movement. Here is the next pass which gives some idea of how I want the character to move during the animation:
Here's an update, I had an idea that there should be an antagonist right at the end to end the scene with a question. What happens to the main character when confronted by a chap with a sword.
And here is the latest pass with all the animation blocked out. The next phase is to ask as many people as possible for critical feedback before moving onto polishing the animation. Hopefully there arent too many fundamental errors that require fixing. The further I go into an animation the more time it takes to change it fundamentally.
That's it for now, my next tasks are to set up a basic face rig for the main character and carry on working out what the background should look like.
It's time to start a new animation. My last animation clocked in at 30 seconds long which, as I learnt, was far too long. To enable me to create, make mistakes and learn faster this animation project will be much shorter. Hopefully I can move onto another project more rapidly and speed up the learning experience.
My primary aim is to create a short four second action animation around the theme "Hunted". The animation should be to a very high quality, ideally Gobelins quality. My secondary aim is to improve my ability to put texture in the timing of my animations. My third aim is to create an animation in the style of Gobelins. If you've never seen a gobelins animation, here's a link: http://www.gobelins.fr/galerie/animation/
So far I have some rough pose sketches (read very rough), see below, im trying to capture the feeling of legging it from something with some extreme posing.
I tried creating a few sketches for some backgrounds, frankly, they were a bit rubbish. But that's not to say they were a waste. They showed me what I didnt want to see and gave me an idea of what I did want see. I sat down with Maya and played with basic geometry until I saw what I wanted to see. The bonus is that when I come to do paintovers of the geometry I wont have to work out the perspective and can get on with being creative.
With regards to animating the piece, I'm taking a different approach to blocking out this time by using stepped keys in Maya. It creates the feeling of stepping between the frames and shows no inbetweens. I've avoided it in the past as I felt it was difficult to get a sense of timing. However I've been practising with the technique and found it to be a quick way of feeling how an animation will turn out in terms of timing.
I've started a public wave to keep track of feedback, click the link below to take you straight to it. HUNTED ANIMATION WAVE
To go off topic for a moment. Im sad that Google have decided not to continue with Wave. I certainly find it useful, I hope the features of Wave make their way into other internet applications.
Below is the first block out of the timing that I'm almost happy with. Next post I will update with a more broken down animation using some of the poses above.
Below is my evaluation of how the animation I recently created went. Also, here is a link to my YouTube channel if you want to see the videos that show the progress including the final piece: www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland
Here's the video embedded again:
Overall this evaluation comes across as negative however this is deliberate. I've learned the most from what went wrong. It doesnt mean i hate myself or anything...I do apologise for the lack of pictures in this post. I'll try and get more pics for the next post...
So lets get started!
The Short Version The short version of the evaluation is this: I should have created a shorter piece of animation to enable me to focus my time on quality. I should have done even more planning and created an even tighter structure for the animation in terms of workflow and idea creation.
My big take away is that there should have been much more texture in the timing to make the animation more appealing and interesting.
Biting Off More Than I Could Chew My first classic mistake was simply being too ambitious with what I wanted to achieve. A thirty second dialogue between too characters was far too long to allow me to focus on creating a very high quality piece of character animation.
Im all for running before you can walk as I believe in doing so I will learn a lot more quickly. However the piece I decided to undertake took far too long to teach me valuable lessons because it was simply too big. I could have learnt the same lessons by working on a ten second clip, saved myself a lot of time and probably ended up with a better result.
Research, Reference and Planning As always, this part of creating the animation should have had much more time put into it. I should also have submitted the planning to colleagues much earlier for feedback. This would have provided the animation with much more structure and have identified the structural weak points in the animation, of which there are many in the final render. With more structure it may have stifled some of the creativity however it would have dramatically sped up the creation, iteration and feedback process and in the long run created a better animation. Research wise, as well as filming myself, I should have referred to a film, animated or otherwise, for a similar scene. With that I could have identified the strengths and weaknesses of the scene more and focused on maximising the impact.
Texture in Timing Near the end of creating the animation I had the clip below forwarded to me:
Part three of the video above is particulary relevant and useful. Two animators at Pixar explain their take on Timing and Spacing in animation.
In particular the section on "Texture in timing" was particularly useful. Texture in the timing means that the animation plays out like a piece of music. There are quiet parts and loud parts, crescendos and lulls. By applying this to animation it helps to create interesting moments and life in the animation. From watching the third clip that I realised all my animation was too flat and even in the timing, this killed the life in the animation. From then on I went through and tried to speed some movements, slow down others and add interesting inbetweens in terms of timing to fix the issue. However it was already too late to fix. I should have planned with texture in the timing in my mind from the beginning.
note: I think the habit of creating even pacing comes from working the games industry. In a game cycle animations have to progress with an even timing otherwise they glitch and grate on the eye as you watch the same cycle multiple times. Character animation however is radically different in respect to timing.
Texture in the timing is an area I really want to practice and improve on in my next animation.
Arcs I remember seeing Brad Bird banging on about arcs, arcs this, arcs that. I also remember Keith Lango describing all animation as 2D shapes on the screen, how to make them interesting and how to transition effectively between them. Arcs are critical to fluid appealing movement that appeals to audience. With the arcs in place overlapping movements, overshooting movements and variation in the timing can be applied making interesting appealing animation. I spent a lot of time trying to get the arcs right not just on the arms but on the tip of the nose and (admittedly) on the sides of the mouth.
To create arcs on the tip of the nose I used a trajectory script called: cMotionTrailUI.mel
I believe it was originally created by the legendary Cameron Fielding for Maya 7. The script is a real godsend when it comes to implementing arcs into an animation properly.
I applied a trajectory curve to a simple polygon sphere that was constrained by the rigs head controller. With that I could see what trajactorys the nose was following and add arcs. Overall it dramatically helped improve the flow of the heads of the characters in the animation. Once again, with better planning in the animation i could have made better use of arcs to make the movement more appealing. A colleague made an interesting observation, to paraphrase them [the hands move perfectly, the heads feel floaty]. When I they pointed that out I agreed and slapped my forehead thinking "how could I have missed that!" After thinking about it I believe that the heads feel floaty for the following reasons:
The shape of the head is large and rectangular meaning the overall movement becomes exagerated and hard to counter act on the body. The counter action of the body agains the head movement should have been better. The overshooting of the head movement should have been more polished.
I did try to scale the heads down around the jaw area but by that point I would have had to do some serious re-engineering of the rig and blend shapes. I didnt want to spend the time doing as I felt I could progress better by getting the animation to a near finished state and moving onto another piece. (apologies for the horrific amount of name dropping in this paragraph)
IK/FK The rig I used to create the animations is getting on a bit now, in particular i had problems switching from Inverse Kinematics where I would pose the arm by controlling the hand, to Forward Kinematics where the arm joints are controlled individually to pose the arm. My rig does have an IK to FK switch that can be animated however I found that the arm would click unconvincingly when switching between the modes. In the end I simply used IK all the time. Unfortunately with FK it is much easier to create smooth appealing arcs with the limbs. In future I would set up a proper FK/IK switch or simply plan the animation better to be aware of when I would use FK and IK. To remedy the situation I used a maya script to create trajectorys. By being able to see the trajectory I could smooth out the arc and create more or less the same effect. As above, I still need to practice implementing and polishing arcs in an animation.
Rendering Rendering, what a time suck. To be honest this is another area I did not plan properly, tried to cut corners and ended up spending much more time on it then I should have. In future I will use backburner to render between multiple machines. Learn more about the rendering features in the latest Maya, many of these have leapt beyond Maya 7 and could save me a lot of time and fiddling, not to mention frustration. With all that in mind im not too disappointed with the final piece however im really looking forward to getting started on the next one with the lessons I've learnt from above.
So England drew because we have a goalie with feet for hands. I say sack him. Moving on... After an epic struggle with my PC, (*rant below if you're interested) the render is now done. I've uploaded the final pass of my animation to You Tube. YouTube has kindly saved it in HD too!
Im going to write up an evaluation for my next blog post to say where it went right, where it went wrong and what I have learned from it. Quite a lot fortunately. That's the anim pretty much finished. It's time to move onto a new project. More on that in good time.
However, it's done and I'm happy! I'm really looking forward to starting something new. Thank you so much to EVERYONE that helped me out by critiquing effectively, giving good advice, looking at the same anim again and again. For their unwavering support, special thanks to Aron D, Rich B, Al B, Rosh K, Stephen S, Alex W, the animators on Team iMP and the lovely Helana S. Go Brazil!
*Rant Warning: My Video editor decided it didnt recognise TGA's (only certain TGA's that is). It also decided it have to .NET installed plus a service pack and then I found my ambient occlusion layer was out of sync with my colour layer. Also when my wireless dongle gets too hot it locks up my entire PC, no blue screen or anything, it just locks up. Brilliant. Finally, to top it off, Windows decided it HAD to install an update and shutdown whilst in the middle of a render last night. I got through a few glasses of Whisky. The good stuff.
above is the latest pass on my animation, there are some big changes in it.
My good friend and colleague Richard Blackley kindly created some foley sounds in his own time. A very talented guy, the audio adds a lot to the animation, some of it is subtle such as the doctors hand opening and closing near the beginning. Some of it is vital such as adding some ambient sound to the beginning and the captains hand slam near the end.
I've added some environment scenery such as chairs, plates, cheese, a cheese knife, another glass and a coloured background. I chose the dark slightly desaturated green to complement the captain. To the right of the background it changes to an orangy brown to complement the doctors blue hues. For the chairs I made the captains chair have baroque connotations to reflect the captains rockNroll personality. The doctors chair contrasts with sharp angles and straight lines to reflect his personality. I deliberately left the detail out of the chairs so that they complement the minimal style of the characters and don't become distracting. The bolts on both chairs are there to tie both the chairs together. Im trying to say that they both belong in the same world.
For the animation, i've been trying to add some texture to the timing of the movements to make it more interesting. I see this as the weakest part of the animation, the area i need to do much better on next time. To add the texture some movements have been sped up, some slowed down. I've heard people describe it as the crescendos and and low points in music. If music is the same volume, speed and tone all the way through it becomes very boring. Maybe that's why i dont listen to a lot of hardcore techno.
Of course, any feedback i get will be added to the wave: Animation Wave
I showed the latest pass to Doctor Durkin last night and he had some very good feedback which may mean there will be changes to the camera cuts and compositions in another pass.
Next steps are to polish a couple more little bits of the animation, make a lighting rig, render it in HD720p, render an ambient occlusion pass, combine the layers in a video editing programe, render out a video file and evaluate the whole thing objectively in a blog post...phew! Better get cracking!
On Thursday night we had an Animation and Discussion session, it was a good turnout and an interesting discussion. It was good to see the stuff the other animators have worked on and give some feedback.
I got lots of feedback on my Anim which I've typed up below. I'll be implementing this feedback, performing another polish pass and then evaluating the animation. Make a render and probably move on. I feel like im going as far as I can with it and would like to take the lessons learnt and benefit from them.
*Shot 01 is too even in timing, it should have more texture *The lean back when the doctor starts examining the weevil should have less even timing *When the captain thumps the table the hand should clearly be in the previous shot or *the hand should not be in the scene at all. *When the captain wipes his eye the right hand should be more fluid. *The captains eyebrows should raise up on the word “dished!” …and hold. *When the doctor sniffs there should be counter action on his body. *The doctor is too out of frame on “length and breadth” the composition should be more like the previous shot *The captains hand does not read well on “in the service” perhaps remove and focus on the captains face. *The captain should only make one or two scratches on “one must choose the lesser” to focus the attention on the captains face.
The challenge is to make the best animation possible that is no longer than 100 frames around a specific theme. One theme used was "Guilty" you can see the results here. Entry number 12 won. http://spungella.blogspot.com/2010/05/spungella-anim-contest-voting.html
We all really like this approach as it takes a bit of spare time and some passion. The results been inspiring. However in games we animate at 30fps instead of films 24fps. So that we don't lose those valuable frames we've decided to do the same challenge ourselves but with four seconds worth of animation instead. The four second club.
After a bit of discussion we narrowed it down to three themes for our first animation. "Hunted", "betrayed" and "boobs". Ok, the last one was a joke, but I could work with that.
With a flip of a coin "Hunted" became the first theme for our four second club. I'm pretty pumped about it and looking forward to getting some ideas down. Im aiming to get some rough keys together for the next Animation session in two weeks time.
Tomorrow I have a meeting with the Animators at the studio out of hours. It's a get together to analyse and discuss animations, what makes them work, what we can learn from them, what we like, don't like etc.
I'll be using the opportunity to show the latest pass of my animation. Which I am about to start uploading to YouTube.... I'll be taking lots of notes which I'll add to my public wave and this blog afterwards. So you can expect another post within the next two days.
I've been working on another pass of my animation to show the guys at work next Thursday. They've given me some great feedback so far and I don't want to disappoint. We're having a get together to share animation, look at other animations, discuss and analyse. Im really looking forward to it.
The latest pass is not quite ready to show so I haven't uploaded it yet. It should be up there by next Thursday. This week I thought I would do a post of Arcs and Tangents and how they effect my animation.
Arcs Why arcs? Apart from robots and mechanical devices pretty much everything moves in arcs. The arcs of arms and legs as we walk. The arcs of pointing to the tiny movements of scratching chins. Arcs are everywhere in our as we move about our daily lives. By building them into my animation it helps to build a sense of believability into the characters. Another point is that arcs, curves and splines are generally more attractive to look at so they help give the characters more appeal. One of the 12 principles of animation.
I read that Keith Lango thinks of all 3D animation as 2D because they are shown on a flat plane. I'm trying to reflect that in the poses of my characters and how they move by paying attention to their arcs.
As im working on a character piece, a good place to look for arcs is on the tip of the nose. If the arcs are clear here then it will help make a better animation overall.
To use this I simply parent constrained a sphere to the head controller of the character and created the arc on the frames I wanted to tweak. The beauty of using a script like the one above is that the arc is updated in real time making it much easier to maintain.
Here are some screens of how the arcs on the nose look on the character, click to see them full size:
Tangents What are tangents? Tangents are points in an animation where it's difficult to tell what is in front or behind of what. For example when a hand is right next to the face it is harder for the mind to read what is in front of what. By layering animations carefully it's easier for the mind to read the image and therefore communicate the message. Which is what we're all about, communicating the message as clearly as possible.
Below I've highlighted a few areas in my animation where tangents are a problem.
Yup, that's right, Walt Stanchfield is the legend. If you dont have the book of his compiled notes "Gesture drawing for animators" then get it, it's a must buy.
That's it for me this week, ill be posting an update to the animation next week however right now im having a beer, enjoying the warm weather and getting ready to go out for a curry. Good stuff.
Sorry about the tease yesterday. Here's the deal, I've been creating a short piece of character animation in my spare time using a piece of audio taken from the film Master and Commander. The Captain and the Doctor are aboard a ship having a dinner party with the ships officers. They're all a bit tipsy. The Captain feels the Doctor is being a bit uptight and decides to play a joke on the Doctor. The animation I'm working on is being created in Maya using my own rigs and character models. I've really been enjoying it so far, its good to get back into some creative work. I've been studiously uploading videos to youTube that document the creation process from the first videos of myself acting out the two roles to the latest passes on the animation.
If you would like to take a look at how it's going here's a link to the youTube page. My youTube Channel
Currently I have just finished playing around with the timing and composition of the camera shots. Now I'm going right in to remove tangents to help with the readability and add flowing arcs to make the movement more pleasing on the eye. I'll do a separate post on these next time.
Ok, its been a while since the last post...ok a long while. I've been very busy. My job is always the higher priority and till now it has been exceptionally busy. However, things are a bit quieter now and I have been working on a little animation project in my own time that i'd like to share. I will be writing an post on it soon.
