The Four Second Club

Token doodle made earlier:


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 four second club

During the session we talked about the 100 frame animation challenges that are seen on http://spungella.blogspot.com/

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.

New Animation Pass

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.

Without further ado, here's the latest pass:


As a reminder, here's my youTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland

and here's the Public Wave:
https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+kuLKyPoWA

Feedback and comments welcome, they can only make it better.
till next time, cheery oh.

Arcs and Tangents

Hello!



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.

Here's my youTube channel if you want to see the progress so far:
www.youtube.com/user/BarryBland

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.

Ball on nose example
To make it easy to maintain and modify animation arcs a script like the one below for Maya is a really useful tool:
fliponline.blogspot.com/2007/01/track-those-arcs.html

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.







For further reading here is a PDF originally by Walt Stanchfield on the subject. Scroll down to page 6:
www.animationmeat.com/pdf/misc/waltstanchfield/16ws_dimensional_drawing.pdf

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.

A little piece of character animation

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

Feedback is welcome!

There is also a Google Wave being generated to document feedback and changes, if you want to take a look, here's the link:
https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+kuLKyPoWA

again, feedback welcome!

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.

till then!

Long time no see!

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.

in a bit!