Progress Report - Week 14

Hello again, some more updates on my animations. Probably my last progress report before hand-ins.

The drunk guy walking into a pole animation is still pretty much done. I did some tweaks as he falls down to the ground at the end. From the timing it appears almost like ragdoll physics which is unexpected but I like it. Its definitely not realistic but for an animation its totally acceptable.

The sword swing animation has been really tough. I had to re-do the arm in FK because IK was just not working out. I've also discovered just having a character do anything that has them rotate their body is painful to do with 3D animation (I guess like any animated format?). Trying to keep the sword swinging 360 in a consistent pace is hard, I chose to use IK in the arms for that sole reason to keep the sword moving in nice timing but the arm snapping was much more distracting.

As the sword and/or body does sort of slow down from time I am going to work with this putting in some rotation in the body in the opposite direction (i.e. up and down) so that it appears as if he is fighting with the swords momentum. This may help to make the motion of the sword appear more natural.

I am pretty happy with the footwork though, this was also hard to predict as you can only do so much with animatics, you kind of have to work out where his feet go as his body spins and hopefully keep the balance correct. I think I did this quite well considering how I wasn't entirely satisfied with how the rest of the animation turned out.

The spell casting animation is one I am pretty happy with. Although not perfect the timing for this animation is a bit better, maybe too slow towards the end but I'll get to that in a minute. I like the hand actions and how the interact with the orb but I'm not too sure if they are "epic" enough for the brief (at least at the start) but there is a margin of change I seem to be getting away with for the rest of the animations so I should be fine.

As for the hands at the end, another Maya technical weirdness I had to contend with. The initial keyframes for the hands and arms wasn't getting the motion I wanted. Maya was doing that weird thing where the arms would flop around through the body before getting to their designated positions. I've fixed these type of problems before with the graph editor but this one was going to require more keyframes just to set the arms on the right path. I got them to do what I wanted in the end but I wanted to make them quicker. I will definitely try and correct this before hand-ins.

The stream jumping animation was interesting, I still struggle to animate any convincing run animation. It appears as if the character is being careful of her footing rather than running, which in a way works for this setting as it is hazardous after all. Again timing was an issue here, the actions themselves seemed decent enough, they were just sometimes a little jittery from the timing.

The story in the animation changed a little bit from the animatic, instead of losing balance on the rock the way the character's momentum was working I though it'd be better to just continue with the jump and using her arms and legs to balance hereself as she was doing that. I feel that was better than trying to stop to balance when it didn't really need it.

Finally, the desk flip animation has been working out fine. Although not the main purpose of the animation, the typing part worked surprisingly well. I was happy with the main action of the table flipping and I think this is one of my better animations for telling a little narrative. Having thought of this one last I think it was the result of learning from experience.

On a side note, rendering stuff in Maya 2013 is weird. I picked the exact same render settings as in Maya 2011 but it decides to do that weird thing where the video flickers and its cut in half and stretched diagonally? I don't even know how but... Maya. Anyway, I rendered the video uncompressed which works then used MPEG Streamclip to compress the videos right back down to an acceptable level.

Long post, well hand-ins are this week so I better get back to work.

Self Evaluation: Animation Power Centres

Note: The animation work done in this post was done for Creative Research. However the evaluation has been solely written for this blog.

In Creative Research I have been exploring power centres and how they are used in animation to help convey a mood or sense of personality or emotion in a character.

I decided to evaluate this task on these aims:

• Timing
• Posture
• Personality/Character

Timing

Power centres dictate where a character's energy comes from. A more characterised person will be more influenced by their power centre. Power centres also affect the rhythm of the character. A character with a low power centre will naturally have a slower tempo.

In each of the three animations I made sure to aim to capture the right rhythm for each power centre. I think this was done well, however in the second video (power centre in the waist) I think the timing was off and could have been better worked in with the movements of the waist and hips.

Posture

The aim was to have the power centre of each character affect their posture as well as the way their posture moves as they walk. I think this was done most effectively in the low power centre animation as the character's back seems to bend around the point. As he walks he also bounces around the power centre. This animation I think was most effective in conveying a sense of mood.

With the middle power centre there was not enough rotation in the waist and this would've better helped give him a posture more fitting to his character. In the high power centre animation I think I got the posture correct although I'd have liked to have tried more iterations to try out different ideas.

Personality/Character

My aim of the task was to see how power centres affect a character's personality. I think it was most effective where I let the power centre characterise the character more such as in the low power centre animation (first video) and was least effective where I didn't allow the character to be as influenced as much by it such as in the middle power centre (second video). I think the high power centre (third video) was a happy medium and was satisfactory for the aims but more iterations of that one power centre could have yield different personalities.

Overall I think this task was attempted well but I could have gone further with a lot of things. More iterations would be the best idea moving on and there's nothing stopping me from coming back to this task. I think it will help my animations this semester, particularly with the desk flip animation where the character is very tense where he types.

Progress Report - Week 13

Hello, just an update on where things are at on my animations.

The "walking into a pole" animation is basically done, just a few tweaks here and there when I have time.

The sword swinging animation is getting there, I struggled with the technical side of things getting the sword to attach to the hand but I've got that working now. (turns out you can keyframe the parent constraint at the frame where its meant to bind)

I am having problems with the IK (inverse kinematics) in the arm, I thought it would be easier to do this instead of FK (forward kinematics) but as the character turns his arm retracts and snaps a lot which is the opposite of what I wanted it to do, the arm should be straight at all times as the sword pulls him along. Currently the way to fix this is to set a lot more keyframes than I'd hoped which may lead to future problems. Alternatively I switch back to FK and re-do the arm, which is a shame because I just figured out how to switch to IK to begin with.

The stream crossing animation like the spell casting is being done in Maya 2013 so I can use the very advanced Mery rig which is a joy to work with. I've currently got to the point where she is ready to make the first jump. She initially flexes her arms before making a short run up to the stream. From there I'll have her make contact with the rock and attempt to bring down the other foot so to carry her momentum.

The spell casting animation is looking all right, I've got her hands and arms moving in a way I'm happy with. I'll get to the fingers later. I've added in a polygon sphere as a sort of placeholder for any particle effect that would've been used. Its helping me to get an understanding of what she's actually casting and how she will use it. Still need to animate the part where she uses the spell to shoot at something.

Desk flip animation was put on the side until last week or so. I have a good idea for it and like the drunk walk its going to be fun to animate. I've got the scene setup and some initial keyframes done on the body as he types and reacts to the computer failure.

Not much else to say, I'll just carry on making stuff.