Evaluation

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:

www.animationmentor.com/webinar/replay/2010-timing-and-spacing-in-animation-explained.html

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.

It is freely available to save off from here:
iam.tugraz.at/zedi/formotions_org/formotions_org/wp-content/uploads/trail_curves.mel

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.

more on that next time!