Constraints are a special type of controller that can help us, animators to connect an object or something to a target, something that will follow the animation of another animated thing. Parents can be used to control an object’s position, rotation, scale and direction through a binding relationship with another object.
For example, if i want to animate someone walking with a wallet I can constrain the wallet to the model’s hand and it will follow the position and rotation of the hand. There are a few types of constraints:
Point constraint – constraints the objects position to a target but it does not follow rotation or scale.
Orient constraint – Constraints the object to the rotation of another object
Parent constraint – constrains position to the other object and the constrained object cannot change it’s position individually, it always snaps back to the position of the object to which it is constrained to.
Scale constraint – Constraints scale to another object
Aim constraint – Constrains an objects orientation to another object.
In this class we talked about contraints and were given an assignment in which we had to make a walk cycle with a prop using a contraint, we had the option to add a prop to the previous walk cycle with ballie from animation mentor that only has legs, or we could make a new walk cycle with a full body model.
I choose to make a new walk cycle, to push myself a bit further and added a skate to Franklins hand, he has a very nerd look, he looks like my history teacher from the 7th grade, never saw him with a skate and decided to try. Again, it is my first time adding props to a model, the only thing I did before was a path constraint with a car following a path.
How can they help us animate?
This is a very usefull tool that allows the animator to be able to attach something to another object, automating its animation process and saving time to animators that don’t have to animate individually the object following the hand of a humanoid model, for example.
Parenting vs. Parent Constraint
When parenting an object to another this object will be following the other object’s movement, scale and rotation, but if we want to move the child and modify it we can. When parent constraining an object to another object, it will be copying its position, scale and rotation too but the object does not make part of the other one. An object’s movement can also be constrained by the average position of multiple objects.
In outliner, when parenting, the child will go into the parent becoming part of an hierarchy and in parent constraint the object remains independent and only has a parent constraint node attached to it.
I can’t even begin to explain how important is a good rig, us, animators work with it, it is almost the same as having a good computer, without a good one everything you do on it will take much more time and effort. A good rig is just as essential, it is what allows us to make different poses and key them for animation. So, if we ever have to work with a bad one we should just fix it or ask for it to be fixed, the goal here is to try to always work with good ones.
If a rig is slow, the joints break, you can’t scale it, it’s not intuitive or for some reason you can’t find the controls and quickly get the hang of it, well then, that is a bad rig.
I don’t think I ever worked with a bad rig, when I was taking my bachelors we never really touched rigs, my first contact with it was when I was making my portfolio and downloaded stewart from animation mentor, which, in my opinion is a good one. The controls are all where they should be, it was very easy to use – and I had never worked with one, so for a first time I believe I chose a good one. Ofcourse animation mentor has very good material and professionals so I went there with the objective of having a good tool to work with as a first time.
Last week we had an assignment in which we had to make a full body animation, and I chose Franklin, which I like, is a diferent model, his posture is diferent than what I’ve worked with so I tried it. I find Stewart much easier to work with, but this one is more complex as it has face controls and his posture is diferent, it is understandable that I find this one more dificult to work with.
A question brought up in class and a very important one, since the beggining the media have a very high impact on how people think, percieve things and create opinions about certain subjects. So, how can they reach us?
These are examples for each media format, in how politics affects it.
Games
Gamers tend to hate it when politics have an important role in their favorite game, although if there isn’t enough political influence the games end up being left in the shadow or called “games for cowards” like far cry 5 who was heavily criticized for it. I just started by seaching videos on youtube about politics in video games and most of the videos in the list were how much gamers hate it when politics becomes part of the game experience.
Although it is hated by most it is also important to actually have an ideology behind the story of a game, I do not consider myself a gamer but I play assassin’s creed odyssey and it is all about politics. The narrative is placed in greece, the place where politics was thought and “made” and even if I don’t agree with some ideology it is trully just a game, it will not make me want to go outside and kill people just because i want their sword or there is a bounty on their heads. But, some people don’t have the right education or background to percieve things as I do, so it is important to be aware of how much do politics or ideas weight in the players mind calculating worst and best case scenario.
Ofcourse, this is my personal experience and there are a lot more games with much different ideologies than the ones i just refered, like mortal combat. This game is highly controversial because of the amount of violence and has been criticized over the years, also because technology is better and better and it is more realistic than ever. It is literally showing kids how to kill people, commiting murder. It is even funny to think about it.
Also, sons of anarchy game, for example, has a pretty strong political and ideological ideas, including the advertising of violence. The main character Jax mentions that everyone in california can carry a knife as long as their not more than 6 inches long and that it is part of the motard culture.
TV
Since the beggining the medium that was trusted and had the biggest coverage over news and what was happening in the world were the print media, the journals that sometimes even had two editions per day. It was the format that used to reach more people, but, when tv appeared the popularity of the paper news vanished. The TV just does the work for you, whoever wants to be a bit more informed about whats happening in the world (right now) just needs to watch any news channel for 20 minutes and you’re good to go.
The thing is, tv does not have a lot of time to tell the story so it only covers the most important topics of it. If someone really wants to know the details of a story the papers are a much better way because it is a matter of space, not a matter of time.
Ofcourse, today, if I wanted to know more about a certain subject I would probably just jump to the internet and type in what i want to know. A curious thing is – these story that I’m looking forward to hear more about was probably realeased and written by a newspaper company, like “the washington post” or the “Times” Magazine. These companies still have a very strong impact on the public. They are like the magnets for information, if for example, a politician wants something released to the public just go to one of those newspaper companies and make up your story for them to write.
TV is based on what the common people and minorities will consume. The people who probably wont go looking for more detail of a story because that minute on tv was enough for them to know and trust that information even though sometimes is not the real story.
Cinema
Cinema is also a good way to discretly (or not) mention a subject and work from there. For example womans rights, there are many biographic and historic movies that are obviously about it and make the viewer understand a certain point of view.
The suffragettes – a movie about the suffragette movement when women did not have the right to vote nor equal rights (still don’t but we are getting there!) , iron lady – about margaret tarcher the first prime minister of the united kingdom and her fight in a mans world in a mans time and hidden figures – a movie about the women that helped launch the appolo 11 mission and made possible the trip to the moon. Three characters in the shadows of men that were also a big part of it and never mentioned.
Now more than ever, movies have a strong political and ideological messages to target viewers and most of them use characters to be the ones in the shoes of who is being mistreated or left behind just because of how they look or where they came from or even their sexual orientation. And the oposite can occur, the movies can use characters who give the public an idea of being a certain way just to attract audience from those specific groups, like “gaybating” when there is a character that apparently is gay but turns out to not be just to attract the LGBT community.
And again, just like in games some tv series and movies advertise too much violence, like Game of Thrones in which the good and the bad guys kill people with an amount of violence that is not usually displayed in tv.
Advertising
Advertising is the main financial support of many media like tv broadcast and journalism, so these tend to not report stories that criticize in any way their bussiness partners. As well as, a news channel will never report something bad about themselves, that is just basic, no one does that. The best example of politics in advertising is also facebook, that lives of advertising.
Ofcourse adds need to be watched and consumed by the public so they tend to be always looking for the best media format to play it and eventually end up supporting one political side or opinion.
For example in the movie Top Gun with Tom Cruise, ray ban made a product placement in the movie and for a long time the ray ban sunglasses model used in the movie was something that was associated with the U.S Navy, and the movie itself also increased the recruitment rate for the U.S Navy. The best advertising for something is really the movies, because the audience thinks it’s cool and wants to experience the same thing as the main character.
Online Streaming
With websites like youtube, come a lot of people who make their living of online streaming like youtubers, gameres and their game plays and those sorts of things, and these also have a strong political influence. Youtubers are people and have their own opinion and their not restricted to what they can or cannot say like tv broadcast or the news, these people can actually say whatever they want and their followers and viewers (who apparently agree with that youtuber) will support their ideas and who knows? help them do something about it.
Not to talk about the fact that youtube itself also lives of advertising, which is highly political. That said, youtube is one of the media sources with most restrictions depending on the country we’re in, its rules vary from place to place depending on its political rules.
Facebook is forbiden in china, and in europe and america is something everyone has, even our grandparents.
Conclusion
Politics affect media in every way possible, now more than ever. Starting with the fact that in some countries some movies cannot be displayed or certain game is not available because of who made it or it’s political ideas. Including every other media source, tv broadcast, streaming, advertising, even books.
It is also scary to think about this, it is proof that everything we see is manipulated and made specifically to make you think in a certain way or have a certain opinion without it actually being true. Every bit of information can be misleading or not true and if we’re not aware we might end up believing something completly wrong or defending a cause for the wrong reasons.
This week we talked about matchmove and rotomation and what impact does that have on us, animators….
So…what is Matchmove?
Matchmove, also known as motion tracking, is the way to incorporate 3D data into live footage matching position, scale and orientation, like the bridge between those two in order to be possible to animate things in real world footage. The virtual camera has to move exactly like the one in the footage to ensure that everything we see in the movie can be captured by the 3D software and make it editable. The process of matching the movement of the camera with the one in 3D software is called matchmoving. The 3D software that performs the matchmove uses a tracking algorithm to find points in the footage that are already there (on a character or object) or through the contrast the software finds points to determine the distance of some objects, creating a 3D dimension in a 2D footage.
Camera knowledge is very important (focal length and angle of view) for all this to work, the camera is the viewer, it needs to see everything properly, we can never forget, the camera is also a character!
Matchmove is used in movies and television and even live broadcasts, for example in basketball games some of the advertising that is on the floor is not really there, it is generated by computer, whether in 2D or 3D.
I found this video and believe it is a good example of matchmoving:
When in 2D, matchmoving only tracks 2D space and it doesn’t really care about camera movement or distortion.
But, when in 3D everything is possible for that footage, the tracking software creates dots in space to allow the camera to have a 3D notion of space.
the points create depth in the 2D footage
Nowadays with all the technology, directors of movies like the avengers can preview how the shot of a scene will look like before going into post-production. Ofcourse it’s not exactly how it will be in the end of post-production but it will give a pretty good idea of it.
Rotomation!!
The first time I heard about it was in class, I never really though how did they match the movements of the 3D elements into the actors, the chroma key ofcourse, is the main ingredient but I was totally in the dark on this subject.
Well, rotomation is the name of that! It is the process of animating a 3D element on top of the tracked motion (matchmove) frame by frame to match an actors movement or an object in live action plate. For this to be possible the camera has to really match the footage, or else the work will never look good or finished. This is a technique that comes with a good matchmove requirement.
rotomation
These two are a new thing in the industry, not much people know how to do it or what it is. My main focus is animated movies but I find this technique trully interesting and… who knows? But I wouldn’t mind learning it and eventually work on it in the future.
In my view, the work of animators in an industry that is creating movies with amazing 3D content and VFX techniques is really focused on these two techniques that work together. Matchmove is focused on the camera, that is also a character and needs a good animation like everything else and rotomation is animation on top of real life footage and it is a door for a world of possibilities in the cinema and games industry. I see these two as a bridge between the real and unreal 3D world that still has so much to be discovered and done.
A render is the process of generating an image, wether it is a photorealistic one or not, from a 3D or 2D model using a computer software. It can generate a group of images from each frame of an animation to create a video and moving image. It is a process that requires a long time to perform and good equipment, it is the way to produce a final image.
A playblast is something similiar but does not have the benefict of the good quality, it is maily used to preview the work that is being done in the animation software, but it is much faster at making the video, so it is a very usefull tool for animators to preview their work before rendering it.
So, both have qualities and flaws, and each is used for different porpuses even if they seem the same. Render is for a final result and good looking images(frames) and playbast is to preview the work while doing it and before achieving a final thing.
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.
Blocking
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.
preview
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.
The difference between these three industries that rely on 3D animation is the speed at how and what they work.
So, in games the goal is to minimize as much information as possible because it runs on a game engine and can’t be too heavy orelse it will be limited to where it can be run and played.
In tv it has to be the quickest because of the tighter deadlines, so less detail and time of animation.
Finally, in film animation is where it takes more time and more attention to detail is needed because films are made of it, so ofcourse animation is the main part and important thing of this industry.
Movies are a way to tell stories through images and photography and it is important to understand how they speak and make us a part of the story. It all starts with the camera, so the first chapter will be:
Shot Dialogue
How do movies speak?
Shot Lenght
How far is the camera from the action, it can be Wide or Tight (far or near) and this category is divided in 6 main shots.
Extreme wide shot – a shot from the whole scene from a distance (usually used as a “preview” of the scenary and characters position in it)
Wide shot – where the viewer sees the whole scene and it’s characters movements and full body.
Two shot – usually a view from one of the characters shoulders allowing the viewer to also see the other character (frequently used in western movies when a character confronts another)
Medium shot – a partial shot from the body (from the knees or waist up)
Close up – a complete shot from the characters face, like a portrait
Extreme close-up – used to show a detail wheter it is a facial expression or a discret action in the scene, important for the understanding of the plot.
Angle
The chapter before was about how far the camera was from the action, now this one is how high is the camera from the character.
Eye level – as the name says, is when the camera is at the eye level of the actor. Also known as a neutral angle.
High angle – the camera looks down at the subject (gives an idea that the actor is small)
Low angle – the camera looks up at the subject (gives the idea of the actor being biger or taller)
Dutch angle – the camera looks at the subject from a tilted angle (used to make a scene or action look more weird and unreal)
Depth
Depth is controlled by lens and focus, which gives us the defenition of depth of field, what is the camera focused on? like the human eye the camera focuses on important details and characters along with the line of action.
Deep Focus – long depth field, where everything in the shot is focused
Shallow focus – short depth of field in which only part of the shot is focused, and it can vary throughout the action (for example, the camera is focsused on a character that then, interacts with another one and the camera focus on that one and can jump between characters in the same scene)
Rack focus – when the camera is still the focus follows the path of an object or actor
Tilt shift – it is usually made with a special lens or in digital post production in which the focus changes within the shot
Movement
The camera is also a character and characters need movement and movies are made of it. There are a variety of movements that a camera can make that alsp tell a story.
Handheld – is when the camera man grabs the camera and that gives a much more genuine movement to the scene. It is used to make an action more stressfull or active, the camera man has more freedom moving it but much less control in the scene.
Steadicam – the camera is following a straigh line and is stabilized, making the scene more fluid
Pan – the camera is on a tripod but can still follow an horizontal movement
Tilt – also on a tripod but the movement is vertical
Zoom – follows the action with a zoom in or a zoom out (ajusting the lens from wide to tight or vice versa)
Dolly/tracking shot – camera is on a moving dolly and moves with the actors
Jib/ Crane Shot – camera moves upwards or down to a character (like it just finds a character randomly in the scene)
Editing
Movies have to be edited and cut, but sometimes there is a part of a movie which is in fast motion and displays a lot of information, multiple actions that happen continuasly, usually for a short period of time – it is called Sequence Shot. There have been some exceptions in which the director lets the movie play for a long time, but it is very hard to do and rare, it has to be filmed all at once without any cuts.
There are a few main cuts to transition scenes:
Cut – the most basic transition method
Dissolve – the current shot slowly fades to the next one
Wipe – second shot rolls over the current shot
Fade in and fade out – going to and from a black scene to the movie
And ofcourse, we have the more complex ones:
Continuity Editing – is when a scene looks like it was filmed all at once but in reality the actors had to shot a variety of shots that mimic the previous frame of the last shot so that it has a continuity effect on the scene.
Ofcourse, sometimes an error has to be induced in order to be possible to use a different angle of the scene, to show a detail or really just another view – it is called continuity error.
Screen direction, as the name describes is the direction that something is happening and has to be maintained so that the viewer knows, for example from where the treat is coming or the direction their going.
Match on action is when an action goes from one shot to another, as well as eyeline is when an actor looks in a certain direction that cuts to another where an object or action is located, allowing the viewer to have a better idea of the space in the scene. The actor can also look directly in to the camera to give the idea of one actor looking directly in the eyes of another, to enphathize emotion.
180 degree rule – is when, for example in a fight the camera always stays on the same side of the fight to give a certain balance to the position of the actors in the scene.
When the axis in a scene is broken it must have other things that give a balance to the viewer towards the space, like the direction of the look of the actores or a fixated shot of the scene that can’t change much orelse the viewer loses his orientation – that is called crossing the axis.
Before anything else, a movie has to be set, something that tells part of the story before the actors do, a location, and everything that’s part of the scene is the set dressing – the objects that are only part of the set, they dictate how the story goes but they’re not “used” by the actors.
The props (objects that actores use) always make part of their character, as for the costume that can give a lot of answers in a characters intention or background.
Lighting
Three point lighting
key light – main source of light
fill light – fills the shadows from key light
back light – to separate the subject from the background
High Key lighting – strong light, color, fill and key. Everything is vivid and colorfull.
Low Key lighting – lights are darker, has a weak fill light, can have a strong back light to enpahthize outlines.
Color
Makes feel of the movie, it can indicate emotion – for example, anger with dark colors and blues for a melancolic sensation or happiness with warm colors. It all makes part of what the movie is about and the context in which it is told.
Space
Is how the shot is composed and organized within the frame. The balance of every movement and action create a look and have to tell the story, even if the actor is interacting with something off the screen and their movements within the frame make part of how the story is told.
History of Animation and VFX
Animation is when a group of drawings are moving at once to create an ilusion that the drawings are animated and have life, tricking the brain.
1609 – The magic lantern
1800 – Zoetrope
1914 – First animated character
1928 – Introduction to music as a sound – Mikey Mouse!
1929 – Wall street crash which made the people relly on animation as entertainment.
1929 – Skeleton dance, from Walt Disney.
1933 – King Kong
1937 – Snow White – the first animated film made by Disney.
1958 – The 7th Voyage of Simbad – Stop motion animation
1963 – Jason And The Astronauts, the skeleton battlle (stopmotion animation)
1985 – Young Sherlock Holmes, first CGI character – the stain glass knight
1986 – Pixar is created – CGI animation is born
1989 – The Abyss, the water tentacle
1991 – Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the metal cyborg
1993 – Jurrasic Park, the dinossaurs. First detailed 3D characters which poses where converted form real life movements into keyframes in a computer
1995 – Casper
1995 – Toy Story – First movie made entirelly by computer – Pixar
1996 – Dragonheart
1999 – Ep 1 – Star Wars
2002 – Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers – Gollum character
2002 – Ep 2 – Star Wars
2003 – Matrix – universal capture
2005 – King Kong – Emotion in an animated characters face
2006 – Pirates Of The Carabean – david jones octopus beard
2007 – Beowulf
2008 – The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button – Brad Pitt face
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.
referencesetup
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.
Playblast (Motion trail)
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.
This one will never leave us, animators, since day 1 the first thing an animator has to know how to do is the mystical bouncing ball. It is supposed to teach us at least 2 principles of animation: squash and stretch and timing and motion spacing. So, ofcourse, the first exercise we had to do is the bouncing ball. Always fun, so simple yet so important!
I focused on the principle of timing and spacing as I always had trouble with timing, everything is always too slow or too fast. A ball takes 12 frames to touch the floor and as it bounces it will lose strength so we must reduce 2 frames in each bounce until it stops. Then we have to open the graph editor so we can actually mess with its weight and timing, edit the curves (translate X and Y) to make an animation look real.
translate x bouncing ball graph editor
So as you can see a round curve shows that the ball slows down and the more pronounced angles indicate a faster motion.
translate y bouncing ball graph editor
Then it’s always good to use the motion trail tool to check if the movement in space is correct and if it looks good.
As the ball reaches the ground the balls in the motion trail separate because the movement is much fasterAs the ball goes up the movement slows down a bit and the balls in the motion trail are closer
