Final animation link and module summary

Here is the the youtube link to my final animation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVOfOE_JJeA


Overall I enjoyed this module. Being the first time on the course that we had looked at any animation it was very interesting to learn the basics of it from the very ground up. Learning to properly use the graph editor within Maya was probably the single most beneficial thing I learnt at it makes animating within Maya so much easier that trying to do it solely through to the viewport.
By the end of the module, I definitely feel that my animating skills now are, while still very basic, a good starting point for any future animation work. I feel that throughout the module I was able to fairly easily complete all of the class tasks and certainly have a firm grasp of the basic principles of animation. I also feel that the research and planning that I did for my animation, including the reference videos, script and dope sheet were all up to a high standard as they proved to be a massive help when it came to actually creating the animation. As for my final animation itself, I am pretty pleased with it. While there are a few areas in it which could probably be improved, I am pleased that I was able to get the hang of animating in Maya, allowing me to create an animation which I believe is good enough for a first ever attempt.

Animation Creation

Once all the possible planning was completed, the only thing left to do was actually make it. The first thing I did was created an extremely basic set for the animation to take place in. For my animation this consisted of two walls and a basic framed picture. This helped to ground my characters, giving a point of reference to both their movements and the movements of the camera.
The first bit of animating to be done was the body movements of the main character. Thanks to the reference video, script and animatic this was relatively straight forward to do. I found the graph editor incredibly simple to use once I had been taught it.

Once all of the body and arm movements had been completed, the next step was lip syncing. This was one of the trickiest areas of the module to get right. To practice for animating the faces, we were given the task of animating the face of a rig into various different emotions.

Here are the emotions I did.
            Surprised                                                   Fear                                                  Confused

               

              Disgust                                                  Happy                                                       Sad

               

Angry

After doing this I had a slightly better idea of how to animate the faces on the rigs. I was then able to do the lip syncing for the whole of my animation.

Dope Sheet

As another part of the planning process for my animation, I created a Dope Sheet. A Dope Sheet is used to give a clear idea of what is happening at various points in the animation. It splits the animation down into several blocks of frames, each block encompassing a distinct action along with the relevant section of dialogue.

Here is my dope sheet.

Animatic

The next step in planning the animation was creating an animatic. The idea of an animatic is that it is essentially a storyboard but set alongside the actual audio to create a video. I created the animatic using the basic extreme poses I looked at in my reference video, but I mainly used it as a way of show how I wanted to camera to move in the animation along with the rough composition of the shots.

Thanks to my use of the reference for poses and the careful planning of camera angles and positions, my original animatic didn't need any changing as it accurately represents the final animation.

The animatic can be viewed on Youtube here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-gMXlZDtss

Reference Videos

To help understand movement better, and to give us a better idea of how we should animate our scenes we were tasked with taking two videos, one of a certain action and another of ourselves acting out our animations. From the videos we would then take the frames that denote the extremes and create stick figures on top of them.
My first video was of someone falling off a chair, here are the frames from the video and the stick figures.

Here are the frames showing the extremes from the video of me acting out my animation, along with the stick figures.

Planning

The next task was to begin planning the animation. The first thing I had to do for this was to decide on my 11 second section of audio. I ended up choosing and extract of dialogue from a film called Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. The next step was to decide on the rigs that I would need for my animation. After auditioning a few different rigs I settled on using two custom designed versions of the Norman rig. I chose them both for there excellent rigging which made them very simple to animate, but also because the look of the two rigs in question fit well with the dialogue.

The next step in planning was to right up a script for the animation. For this I looked at each line of dialogue individually, and wrote the basic movements of the characters involved. The first draft of the script was just this but for later versions of the script I also added notes on camera movement and shot composition for each line.

Here is the final version of the script for my animation.

Animation Script Final Draft

“if you hold back anything, I’ll kill ya”

Speaking character begins walking towards camera, looking off to the left of camera. Makes stabbing gesture towards character out of shot at end of sentence.

Camera pans to the left, keeping speaking character to the right of shot.

“if you bend the truth or I think you’re bending the truth, I’ll kill ya”

Continues walking. Speaking character raises one finger on the word “or”,makes gun shooting gesture towards left of shot at end of sentence.

Camera continues panning left, following speaking character but begins to pan back. Speaking characters moves into the centre of shot.

“if you forget anything, I’ll kill ya”

Continues walking. Second character appears into the shot from left. Speaking character taps head then makes cut throat gesture.

Camera continues pan. Speaking character is moved back towards the right with second character appearing on the left of shot.

“infact, you’re gunna have to work very hard to stay alive Nick”

Moves face to face with second character, prods other characters chest on “you’re”. Second character blinks repeatedly, worriedly. Moves close to second characters head near end of sentence. Second character backs away slightly.

Camera stops panning left, zooms in on both characters until mid chest of both characters is at the bottom edge of shot.

Intro To 3D Animation - Presentation

The first task for the Intro To 3D Animation module was to do short presentations in group, on one of four related topics. The group I was in chose to do Games Animation. I chose to focus my research on Stop Frame animation, both the general principles and the applications within a game.

Here are the notes I used to present my section.

Stop Frame Animation

·        Makes objects appear to move on their own by creating each frame individually with small adjustments made between each shot.

·     -   Most common method is Clay-mation which uses plasticine models.

·     -   Widely used in film and television, rare in video games however there are a few notable examples.

·     -   Clayfighter Series, 1993-1997, fighting games using clay-mation characters.

·     -   Magic and Mayhem, 1998, RTS game with clay-mation creatures and characters.

·     -   Platypus, 2006, shooter featuring clay-mation spaceships and plasticine scenery.

·     -   Klaymen Series. The Neverhood, 1996, and Armikrog, July 2014, point-and-click adventure games and      Skullmonkeys, 1998, platformer. All featuring clay-mation characters, environments and cutscenes.

Stop frame animation is a filmmaking technique which is used to manipulate objects to make it appear as if they are moving on their own. It works by having each frame individually photographed with small adjustments being made to the objects between shots.

Most widely used form is clay-mation which uses plasticine models.

Stop frame animation is rare in video games but there are some notable examples:

• ClayFighter Series by Visual Concepts, 1993, 1994, 1997. Fighting game featuring clay-mation characters in basic computer generated environments.
• Magic and Mayhem by Mythos Games, 1998. Fantasy real time strategy game featuring clay-mation creatures and characters.
• Platypus, 2006. Side scrolling shooter featuring clay-motion spaceships and plasticine scenery.
• Klaymen Series by Doug TenNapel. The first, The Neverhood, 1996, was a point-and-click adventure game. The second Skullmonkeys, 1998, was a Platformer. The third, Armikrog, July 2014, will return to the series point-and-click adventure roots. All three games are created using claymation for characters, creatures and props along with clay-mation cutscenes throughout.