Category: 3D Animation Fundamentals

The last task for this unit is a final showreel of all the animation work made in term 1

Previosly, we had a rotomation session with Dom, where we had to place an iron man helmet on the head of a man on the street, this time we had to apply a full body model of a robot on the body of a man on a bike. Super exciting but challenging, in these sessions it is expected of us to be extremelly focused so we can really understand how it is done as it can be our way in the industry.

The first step was to create a Maya project folder and create three new folders: Models, 3DE_Scenes and Maya_Scripts, copy the robot model to the Models folder and the textures to the sourceimages folder. We must have a footage folder and a maya project folder.

Camera Tracking

On 3DE, on the basic environment, import the image sequence set it to start at frame 1 and end at frame 300, set gamma to 2.000, export buffer compression files and save the project. The goal is to find points in the different depths and track them – as the bike was moving and the background blured a bit these points were harder to track so they took longer. The camera tracking has to be in a camera group and the body track has to be in a different point group, also it’s always helpfull to have the image controls panel under the object browser as we need to change brightness and saturation multiple times to help tracking.

After all the camera points were tracked this is what it looked like:

As the first group of points is tracked, we have to calc from scratch and use result if everything is in its right place – like the image below

The paralax is tracked, now we had to track the floor and repeat the process. After that save and start taking care of the lens. On focal length tab change focal length from fixed to adjust and open parameter adjustment window.

As the footage is downloaded from the internet we don’t know what camera was used to record it so we have to hit Adaptive at least three times, so the software can adapt to the footage and give us the best option. Now, we select the distortion on the lens tab and on parameter adjustment window select brute force all, make sure both A and B lens range is on fine and hit adjust.

After this we add the quadric distortion – degree 4 and repeat the process, but this time the expected result is a cube, which I gladly had! Not so much trouble in this session!

It took much longer to adjust than the previous ones, so Dom told us we could hit stop when the red line reached half of way, as long as we had a cube being created. Again… Save and version up! If 3DEqualizer crashes it corrupts the file and we loose all the work. Now we must calc from scratch again and use result.

On the basic environment, add new point group on the camera group, double click on it and name it body_group – a new group where we are going to track his body. Dom said we had to find points only on the shoulders and neck, which in my opinion were even harder because he was wearing a black leather jacket and the wrinkles would change so the tracking took a long time, but fortunately I managed to get the amount of points that Dom asked.

When all the points are in it’s place, we create a new scene on Maya and set the project to the one in the beggining of the session, import the model in to the scene, select the body of thee model – export selection to the Models folder as an .obj – name it – save!

Back on 3DEqualizer, with the body group selected – right click and import the model in to the scene and repeat the process from last session: open a second 3DE window, having one of them on lineup and the other on orientation environment so that we can assign the body points to the body. On orientation window we must place the model on top of the footage through scale, translate and rotate. As soon as the model is in the right place, on lineup window go to edit – project points on 3D models. I had a problem when doing this in which the model didn’t follow the man.

The way to solve this was really to re-import the model and redo the scaling and position again and project the points on 3D model, and it worked! So, time to save and export the .mel script and save it on the maya projects folder, finally run warp4 and render footage.

Maya

The model now follows the man on the bike, but it is still very unrealistic as the body is in it’s original position and none of it’s limbs are in the right place; that is where Maya comes in to action.

As animators we are also actors – how can you give life and personality to a character if you can’t act or represent them correctly. You must know your character and make him unique.

This last task of term 1 was to create a performance animation in which we had to shoot our own footage and audio. I admit I could not find a sound clip that I actually liked for a long time, I wanted something funny so I went looking for things in Jim Carrey movies as he is a very expressive person and has the best facial movements. But then I realised I could never perform something close to what he does. Modern Family was also in mind but I couldn’t decide so, I watched a video from Sir Wade on youtube and he had some tips about picking audio clips for animation and it really helped.

Then… It came to my mind! Monthy Pitons! My father was always a fan and made me watch it all as a kid and it is certainly fun – ofcourse I could never perform like them either but I could be more creative in representing the dialogue. They have much more monologues and a very thick accent so I took the challenge. The audio clip is from the 3rd episode of the series Flying Circus (1959 – 1974) in which Eric Idle playing Arthur Nudge engages a man on a bar to ask how it is like to be with a woman, so he has a very confusing and weird way to ask the man how it is and in the end he says “… what’s it like?” and reveals he has never been with one.

As he talks very fast I had to write down what he said and repeat it over and over in front of a camera – very embarassing! I wasn’t made to be in front of a camera.

– Is a… is your wife a goer? Ay? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Nudge nudge know what I mean? Say no more!

– Your wife? Does she go? Ay? Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Does she go? Ay?

– I’ll bet she does! I’ll bet she does! Say no more! Say no more! Know what I mean? Nudge nudge!

I chose the rig called Clairee Boy and recorded the reference footage – which was not great

This rig has the best phoneme system, the chin is included in every mouth movement, I only noticed this when I started working on it, it was a great surprise. When the phoneme animation was finished I had to start blocking everything else.

I went to the shot for reference and used mine too, although I was reading the script as he talks too fast and I always missed something when I wasn’t looking, so the reference footage I shot is really just a reference of real movement to complement with the original footage.

I had to have some sort of set dressing even if it was just a table and a few chairs so, I found some on free3d.com and added them to the project and had my character sit on a chair so it looks like he is talking to someone, even if it is in a monologue mode.

Blocking

After I finished the blocking I sent my work to Luke for feedback and I realised my blocking was half done, the feet don’t really move nor the eyes and eyebrows nor the fingers. I was so focused on giving some expression to the spine, arms and neck, that I forgot the rest. This project definitely opened my eyes and taught me that I have to be more aware of everything else, the more we work on something the better it looks – even if my character is sat down and no one really looks at the feet, they are part of it and everyone moves every part of their body while talking, the eyes don’t stay on the same place and we blink more than we think of.

The next stage of this project is to improve my blocking and polish the final shot.

Ofcourse, character animation is nothing without facial animation, it gives life and personality to the character, it indicates what is going on on a specific situation. So, we were asked to do a phoneme animation, we had access to 3 different audio clips which we could use and ofcourse choose a character from the library with a facial rig to start animating.

I was super curious to try a facial rig with a phoneme system, not because it’s easier but because it showed me the right movements of a 3D character face, everything moves not just the lips. I went through every rig in the library as I always want to try a new one, but I ended up using Franklin again as his facial rig was amazing, in my opinion. His face is lifeless until you use the phoneme system, he looks boring and his body is super weird as it has weird curls in his upper body.

At first, I was quite scared as I thought it would be much harder to do this task, but I was wrong, it was super fun mostly because I was looking at myself and I realised I do the most awkward faces when talking – every one does, but we do all those movements so fast that no one notices.

The first thing to do is ofcourse shooting reference footage, choose a character to use, create a project folder and insert the audio clip on the timeline (the prefered audio formats are .wav or .mp3) and finally we can start animating!

This is the reference I shot:

I also found a diagram that helped me figure out the “key poses” of the mouth in specific syllabes/sounds.

It was quite fast to do the phoneme animation, but it looked boring as the only thing moving was the mouth…

So, I decided to add some life to it, I tried to find the clip from where the audio clip was taken and see some other movements the actor did, or even just to take ideas for the rest of his body.

But the actor is very still, so I just thought I would make franklin disapointed while talking.

This was the final result:

I really liked the final result, although it is not the best animation ever, I really enjoyed doing this task as it was fun and I learned somethings I didn’t understand how they worked.

Body mechanics, as the name suggests, is the way your body moves, it’s unique mechanics to allow you to move and do everything a human (in this case) does, everytime we move, a lot of movements are done, no movement is done by one muscle or member.

So, in animation, we have to know how body mechanics work and be aware of every tiny movement, they are the key to make a character unique and alive. Movement is part of the personality of a character, no one moves the same way, as no one has the same body mechanics, orelse we would just be robots, repeated and standard movements all equal. It’s just not appealing nor realistic.

When animating, the things we need to be aware of are the secondary actions and overlaping movements of the body, for example, when a character jumps from a high place to the floor the arms go up and follow the path of the body, and go down a bit after the body hits the floor as a way to give some balance when landing. Also, in a jump the body doesn’t just go and falls, it needs preparation, so it usually bends to boost the jump. All these actions are part of body mechanics, it’s instint, nothing moves without a force either driving or pulling it.

A very good example of body mechanics are sports, parkour, challenges like Wipeout, Ninja Warrior, World’s Largest, etc. Things that take effort and require some skills and training.

In this exercise, we were asked to do, ofcourse, a body mechanics animation. Look for reference, choose a character and animate it. I chose parkour, every teenager had once the dream to do those jumps and behave like a super hero. Ofcourse in reality we do fall more than we actually look cool.

At first I wanted to make my character do something like a circuit with some obstacles and walls for it to jump. So i downloaded some videos and got them together as reference and decided to do just the first clip, as it was more complex and had more than one jump.

My set up was inspired in the first reference clip and I modeled it directly on MAYA. At first it was much more complex as I wanted to do 2 of the clips, so I extended my circuit, only to later discover that I didn’t have time to do so many jumps and things.

In the end I reduced it to just the first part and this was the final setup.

Reference

In the reference video the man is very quick to jump the wall, so I decided to make my character run 3 steps before the jump, I used The animators survival kit reference for the run and then used both the image and the video for reference, as the video is filmed from the back view it’s easier to make your own movement with both. I chose Sam as my character, I saw a parkour spirit in him.

On the first jump I noticed the feet were not synchronized with the reference, but honestly I just thought that it would be good to do that brain exercise, to actually have to understand body mechanics and not just copy reference. Ofcourse, the next jump I had the same problem, so I changed the way he made the second jump after climbing the wall.

With this animation i really understood the value of the hips, not that I didn’t know it’s importance before, but I believe that it clicked. It’s really the key to every movement, its like the second brain of it all. The final jump was so much about the hips that if I didn’t knew it before it had to be then or the animation would never be finished.

It was much longer that I expected or wanted it to be, and just for blocking… Polishing can take longer because I want everything to be at it’s best, but blocking has to be fast. Spent too much time just for the run, then I took a break and really focused on the blocking meaning! So it was faster, seeing Pixar blocking clips was a relief because I realized that it really doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s just a rough preview of what it is going to be (not just when studying, in real life too).

The first playblast was terrible and he was just running, not even jumping and super fast. So thankful playblasts exist. So I changed the keyframes a bit further and things started looking better and I started the jump.

After this, my workflow improved and I finally got faster. Had a few problems when climbing the wall as the arms were not being cooperative and they do a very weird turn in an in-between frame as well as the feet in the final twisted jump. At some point I decided I needed to animate the knees but then that began to be a really big problem and I deleted the keyframes, I realized that the rotation of the feet where enough for the pose I wanted. Up until now my feet only have animation on the rotation x. Body mechanics forbids such thing. Everything moves.

Despite all that needs correcting I was pretty happy with the final result and can’t wait to finish the polish.

Final blocking playblast

Polish/Spline

I seriously never took so much time to finish polishing an animation, but I’m happy with the final result although some things need to be fixed. The part that really took more time were the hands as they move if I touch the spine controls, so I had a small cube near them to keep track of their position.

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On the building I also added some breaks so the character could have its fingers grab it when climbing the wall and look more realistic, or else he would be just pushing his hands against the wall.

The wall part was the most difficult as I didn’t copy exactly all the movements from the reference footage and had to make a few changes, so I ended up just imagining the movements and occasionally watching the footage for movement reference.

With this work I realised I need to improve my hand animation, and that I really should have a keyframe on every frame as it slows down the workflow – learnt it the worst way. Hopefully I will not repeat that.

Final Playblast

We had the amazing opportunity to be learning matchmove and a bit of rotomation with a pro from the industry, Dom Maldlow a 3D Generalist.

I was pretty excited and a bit nervous, I was affraid I would get lost and well…. I guess that’s normal. It went well, and yes I got a bit lost in the middle of the session but Dom helped me so I didn’t fall behind. The session began with a small presentation of Dom about his path to where he is now professionally. It is inspiring to learn how people who have the job you want got there, it sort of makes things a bit more possible in our minds. After the presentation, we jumped to 3DEqualizer – a software that is usually learned on the job and very scary when I looked at it for the first time.

I admit I was expecting something a bit more like MAYA, it’s clear that it is a new thing, the interface is not made to be pretty or appealling, it’s made to work and the tools are great. Ofcourse having this session online makes it harder for everyone, the teacher and the student, the teacher can’t really see our screens when we have a problem so, we students have to find a way to explain whats up even if we don’t know what went wrong.

The first step was to import footage provided by Dom and track the camera so it could be “read” by the software. After importing the footage, we have to create a new camera and set up the gamma to 1.000 and the softclip to 2.000, then export the buffer compression file and only then we can start setting up the points. It is important that we find points in the different depths of the footage and on high contrast spots and be aware that the points might move when we track them. If that happens we have to put them back in their place and in some situations we have to track each frame individually.

Some points might need to be ended and then restarted if, for example a person walks in front of them or the camera moves and the point is out of the frame for a while. The first place where we found the points was the grafitti, it’s wall and the floor. Then, in the back, on the gate. The wall near the gate and finally the buildings in the back. It is important to find points in all the different depths of the footage so the software recognizes the paralax.

After all the points were found this is what it should look like:

After this we have to go to the deviation graphics and smooth the green curve, the deviation value must be under 2.00, so the curves with higher spikes must be deactivated to then calc from scratch. In the deviation browser inicially looks like this:

Each blue curve represents a point we created in the footage. After smoothing the green curve, that represents the calculation of all the blue curves. The smooth green curve must look like this:

In this process I fell a bit behind because I deactivated too many points so my curves were completely messed up. And when I hit the Calc from scratch button my footage was equally bad.

The footage was completelly distorted so I asked for help and the way to solve this was to activate every point again and recalculate that from scratch and start over in order to decrease the deviation value to below 2.00. Under the menu Point and select Timeline Weight Blending, hit calc from sractch again and everything looked so much better, I was out of trouble.

This is what it should look like. When these are good, we hit use result and every curve looks good and is below the desired value – 2.00 and thankfully no distorted footage.

When this is complete we need to go to the Parameter adjustment window, hit brute force a few times and hit Adjust, which will then look like the image below in the 3D space. A window will show up to transfer the calculations that were just made to the project.

After this we have to go to environments-orientation, select all the points and set up the locators

All set to export to maya, but as we were using the Personal Learning edition of 3DEqualizer we were not able to complete that. After the session I installed 3DEqualizer Enterprise and redid the exercise and exported the footage to maya, a .mel file, ready for the next session.

Matchmove Session 2!!

The next week we had a second session with Dom. This time the task was quite different, the footage was from a man on the street looking at his phone. The beggining was similiar to the previous session, we had to create a new camera, create a polygroup and find points in the different depths of the video and track them.

we learned a different method to track points, by pattern which means that the software will calculate the point not by its contrast but by its shape and pattern. The previous points were all tracked in marker tracking mode, which is the most used. It always usefull to know the diverse tools we have to do the same thing, sometimes a different method can be better than the most used.

Right after this, we calc from scratch, use result and save project. The next step was to create a new object inside the camera and the task was to find points in the man’s face so it could be tracked. The best places to get points in the face is in the eyebrows, forehead, between the eyes and in the hair. We had a few minutes to find the face points and in the end, mine, looked like this:

Same process, calc from scratch, use result and go to the Parameter Adjustment Window, brute force all and adjust. On this part I had a problem and the parameters i got were wrong

The problem was the focal length of the camera so I changed it and recalculated the paramenters and all looked good again

After this we had to download and import a iron man helmet .obj to place it on the man’s head.

As we can see in the image above, the blue arrow is pointing for the iron man helmet and the black arrow is pointing to the points we tracked in the beggining of the session, in the background. Now we had to open a new window of 3DEqualizer and having one in F5 environment (lineup) and another in F6 environment (orientation) we had to select the points in the mans face and assign them to the vertices of the helmet.

When all the points are in the approximate right place, on the lineup environment we should have something like this

The points dont have to be perfectly positioned as this can be adjusted later. Now, the orientation environment window can be closed and we can calc from scratch, use result.

To adjust the helmet to the mans face a bit more preciselly we can reopen the second 3DE window and on lineup environment, select translate or rotate to adjust the helmet to its right place in the orientation env.

After this is all set, we have to export for nuke and MAYA. That was the part that I really fell behind and couldn’t really solve my problem. When I tried to export for nuke, I got an error saying that “only selected cameras can be exported” and nothing really happened when I hit ok. So I just watched the rest of the session and try it later.

When we imported the project to MAYA, we also had to import the .fbx iron man helmet and use the .mel file with the data from 3DE along with the footage to now render the model of the helmet with the correct shaders and render settings to then export and have a small animation of a man with an iron man helmet.

This was the part that I got really lost and have to redo and improve. I was not catching up with the MAYA task because my 3DE was not being very helpfull. This was a great session and I really hope we do more things like this, to me it’s always a step closer to know and learn from the industry and to have the opportunity to do something that is so new and needed nowadays was great to open our horizons and professional possibilities.

Personally I had never heard of 3DEqualizer or matchmove and rotomation until the start of the masters and it’s a field that really interested me in every way.

After the walkcycle with the prop we were asked to do a stylized walkcycle in which we had to find reference footage and do our animations based on that reference and make a storyboard with keyframes from that reference.

At first I was unsure which walkcycle to do, there are so many options to chose from, happy, sad, drink, zombie walk, sleep walk, agry, sneaky… At the end I wanted to make a zombie walk or a sneaky walk and I finally decided to do a sneaky walk. The movement is much different from what I’ve done before and the movement of the body is extreme – perfect for a stylized walk.

The animation principles used are:

• timing and motion
• antecipation
• stagging
• follow through and overlaping action
• straight ahead and pose to pose action
• slow in and slow out
• arcs
• exaggeration

Reference

Then I took screenshots of the main poses from my reference:

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With this I realized that then there is a foot forward the waist goes back and the in betweens after the contact poses the body goes back in a sort of balance for the meticulous movements. It has to be exaggerated but not to much because it is supposed to be something discreet and the intention is not to attract so much attention.

So I kept looking for reference, and found these in which I relied a lot on:

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The 3rd category of sneaks, was the reference pose I used for the inbetween from contact to passing position. This pose requires a bit of imbalance to make sense in the middle of poses that are always so secure, with both feet on the ground – the waist does most of the work.

Blocking

I chose the model David from the resource share library, I was going to use him for the prop walkcycle but then I got scared with the amount of face controls he had, so Franklin was my choice.

This time I decided to do the blocking all together and posed waist and arms simultaneously with the legs orelse the animation never really looks good when pre-viewing it. The better we do the blocking the easiest and quickest it is to polish so, I focused on that.

The normal walkcycle is usually 12 frames per step, but, as this is a slower motion I did each step in 18 frames. These were the main poses:

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Final

I had a lot of trouble with the previous walkcycle, because I wasn’t really understanding what was going on and what was wrong with it, so I was a bit nervous for this one. But, the final result for the blocking was much better than I expected, I am quite happy with my small improvement in walkcycles. The fact that I spent so much time in the previous one made me not fall into the same mistakes. Although, this one needs to be slower, for a sneaky walk is too fast.

After polishing my animation was still too fast so I used the region tool on graph editor to extend it and I believe the result was much better.

This was the final result:

After the walkcycle with ballie, that only had legs we had to had a prop to the walkcycle using constraints, the options were to add a prop to ballie walkcycle or to make a new one, but a full body this time.

Honestly my ballie walkcycle was not at it’s best and I could’ve improved it with the prop, but I really wanted to push myself a bit further so, I improved ballie and made a new one with Franklin (human model) and added a skate as a prop. I chose Franklin because he has a very nerdy way and look and I thought it would be interesting to animate a model with diferent ways to move.

The animation principles used in this exercise were:

• timing and motion
• follow through and overlaping action
• straight ahead and pose to pose action
• arcs

Reference

These were the key poses when blocking:

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When I finished blocking I noticed something was trully weird with the way he walked and I couldn’t figure out what, his shoulders and waist were moving in a weird way, so I tried to improve it a bit, but… as there were still a lot of mistakes in the hips I sent the maya file to Luke for feedback. He fixed it and recorded the whole thing which was very helpfull as I could really solve the problem, I basically had a tutorial just for my mistakes – it was awesome.

So after that I fixed the problems that were found and I finally got it right, I believe there are minor mistakes now and that in the future I will be much more capable to do and solve a simple walkcycle.

This is the final result:

Walk cycle is too one of the most important things for an animator to know, how does a character walk – always based on a reference and it also talks about the character. Everyone walks differently, so it is algo a personallity trait.

Reference, Previs and Bloking

It all starts with a reference, every animator needs it and it makes our lives easier. Previs, a preview of the path the character is walking and bloking in which the main poses of the walk are set, it usually takes. It usually takes 12 frames for a step and 24 for the character to return to its inicial pose.

When I learned to actually do a walk cycle (in a tutorial) it taught me to loop it, but that is just wrong for an animator, we need to animate everything like it was a unique movement, it makes the animation more genuine and realistic.

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Spline and Polish

After the bloking is complete, the next step is splining, which means that we have to work on the speed in which everything in the animation is happening, everything is too robotic and linear after bloking. Graph editor holds the curves and it’s time to work on them and the in between poses of the main ones.

Finally, the next step is to polish in which the final result should be a smooth animation with, for example, the toes overlap and the movements are correct and soft.

After this, we were asked to make the character do a turn around, so I blocked that action directly. It was confusing in the beggining because I was so used to always have a reference, but then I just got up and previewed the movements on myself and I think, as a first time doing it, it liked the final result.

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This is the final result…

On week 2 we had to make an animation with a tailed character, in order to use the overlaping principle, in this case the tail will follow the ball that it is attached to. Using the ultimate tailed model and some cubes for it to jump to.

It is pretty exciting to be making so much (notably) important exercises to make me a better animator, as I want to persue the movie industry this will clearly teach me how to give life to characters and its assets.

As I’d never done it, I searched the web for references in how the tail would move and behaved along with the character and I followed the example from class and created a few cubes elevating in space for the character to jump to. I used the beaver model.

This time I decided to apply the principle of squash and stretch, so thats what I did first, the bouncing ball exercise with squash and stretch and then I began experimenting movements and ways to make the tail movement look real, at first it was all looking very bad, but as I was making another and another step I would go back and change what didn’t look so good in the step before.

Animals with tail use it for balance, so I tried to produce that given balance in the animation. So, when the beaver squashed the tail would go down and has it stretched it would go up or down according if it was falling or jumping, when it was in the highest point of the jump the tail would be in some sort of in-between movement. The tail must follow the trail from the head, like a lighter limb attached to the body.

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After this playbast I thought it was too fast, so I jumped to discord to ask if anyone new how to add one more keyframes to the animation all together without using the region tool in graph editor (because I would get keyframes in half frames), and I discovered a new way to do it, but it would get too slow if I added one more frame to every keyframe.

I stretched it and sort of liked it but it was looking weird after I watched the playblast several times so I let that idea go, and stuck to what I had.

Finally…