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- Character Animation -
- Week 1 -
Introduction to 3D Animation, The bouncing ball
The first Principle in the classic animation is the bouncing ball.
If you have not seen this video about the 12 principles of animation, here is the video:
This video is very helpful because the process of creating an animation is not that easy, to start you need to know the rules.. It is the same with the bounsing ball. The bounsing depends on the material of the ball, if the material is not rough it means the ball is soft.and will be different bounsing that if it is rough.
First of all, let start with Maya and the controls.
1. Maya Controls and begginer guidence for animation
1.1 Maya controls for animation
As we all know, Maya has been designed for as a 3D Software, it is a builder for 3D objects and 3D Animation used along with 3Ds Max in the Productions. I have been using Maya for a year now and all the interface is familiar to me.
There are the features about the Animation. Let's start with the interface, here you can see the Range Slider, Time Slider, Cached Playback Status Line, Playback Options and Controls.
Frames: If we work on a VFX Project, we need to work on 24 fps in genral - for Films.
In America , they were using 29,97 fps, it is not full 30 fps/ for TV. In EU and America for TV used to be 25 fps and 29,97 fps.
Films are general 24 fps or 23.976 fps.
If we work on a game - it can be 30 fps or the most common nowadays - 60 fps.
The higher the frame rate - the smoother the motion is!
1.2 Maya Set Keys in the Official Site of Autodesk:
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2019/ENU/?guid=GUID-7DE56A30-EEB4-4FDE-B4C4-6E53F4755822
1.3 Maya – Key attributes (Channel Box):
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2019/ENU/?guid=GUID-154C65AF-D65E-4356-A49B-E9B5BF05754A
1.3 Maya – Graph Editor navigation:
https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2019/ENU/?guid=GUID-6D38EAEA-6032-471E-BD0E-54A74D4443C0
2. The Bounsing ball
In the beggining, it is a good idea to look at some reference images about the Bounsing Ball because it needs not only creative mind but logic. It is not that simple to recreate live events such as bounsing ball or falling tree and etc. It is preferable to know the real material of the ball, is it going to be represented as soft ball, or it is going to be with hard surface. That is why, I desided to look at some images.
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Time Slider
Playback Controls
Range Slider
Cached Playback Status Line
Playback Options
Framerate Menu
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Loop
Catched Playback
Auto Key
Animation Preferences
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It is clearly visible to see that on the first two images, the ball means to be soft, on the last image, it is not. When we try to animate a ball, the harder part is the rotation, the part where the ball meets the hard ground and how it baunces.
For my first Assignment - Basic Animation Principles, I will create my oun chart with my own calculations about my ball. I will create a good texture that will reflect with the rotation and help it to be more visible. The main aim in the assignment is to recreate real-based event with a ball and a surface.
3. Maya and the ball for a first time
As we know, animating is a long process but if we know the right settings it will be easier for us to start. I started with a basi project. You can see there is a PolySphere as a ball and stairs with basic texture from colours just because I love how it looks in Arnold.
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I adjusted the frames in the animation settings as 24 fps because in this way, the falling ball will apear beliavable on the screen. Usually, it is good to adjust the settings because the whole movement will change in front of the screen.
The windows settings:
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Overall, the whole animating prosess for a begginer is easy. There are two ways to hit and safe the Keyframe on the Time Slider. The first is only pressing ''S'' key from the keyboard, the second is Cntrl+W keys. Next to the Time Slider it can be changed the timing, it depends on how long we want to create the animation to last. On every movement, this saving key needs to be pressed - S. When you move the the ball first, then second to put it lower, then third for other actions and etc.
Also, there is an Auto Key which not automatically saves the frames unless you start the first key frame. When the Auto key is on and you scrub through it saves every movement automatically which is a good way, too.
W can select parts of the frames of the Animation in the TIme Slider with Shift Key on the Keyboard and Left click on the mouse. It helps for adjusting a seperate Key frames or deleting part of it.
With the time it becomes more complicated. We can select keys for the scale, rotation, visability and etc, from the Channel Box and to work on only a selected keys. We can animate textures as well, also to work a lot with the help of the Attribute editor.
Here is a .mp4 of how my first try started:
Also, there is a Graph editor navigation which represents the graphic of the animation with a graph or a curve.
Access from: Windows -> Animation -> Graph Editor
That does help if we want to change the motion of a frame, it is a graphical representation of the motion overtime. It shows a time slider and key frames. It is good for fixing broken parts of the animation.
The Bounsing Ball reference videos of different types of bounsing:
If we want to see the path (to track) of the motion, we can create a motion trail in the viewport. Access in :
Visualize -> Create Editable Motion Trail. We can also edit and create frames with it.
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- WEEK 2 -
The Obstacle course
1.
Let's start with my little breakdown of the difference between a rough surface ball and soft surface ball (squash and stretch).
- Motion Trail -
- Assignment 1, Begin -
The motion trail show us the path of the animated object and also where are the frames ser in the time and space for the 3D model. It has it's oun window in the Attribute editor.
I have created a project where I wanted to animate a ball falling through stairs. Here is how it is done with the help of the Graph Editor and the Motion Trail. I created the environment where the scene is. and created every key frame with the frame rate first 24 fps and then transfered it to 25 fps.
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I created the path and you can see the first bounsing of the ball with ghosting. This is the beggining.
Here is how through the trail to adjust the right direction of the ball. The whole process of creating it.
Then I created environment for my ball and built illusional space whre you can see the ball is like someone dropped it from the door 1 and fell into the stairs, at the end went out through the second door.
The first video is with the motion trail. The second is the pure motion of the ball.
- Obstacle Course -
Exercise
I downloaded an example scene from Blackboard and worked on it. About the obstacle course. First I tried to with a motino trail.
After that will start with exploring the actual obstacle course.
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I will show you all the features in the outliner of this example. It is very easy to animate with it, it is like a puppet. Here is how to create a good bouncing ( scuash and stretch).
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So far, It is not that hard to create a basic bounsing. The only thing that you need to use are the Outline features for the obstacle course.
Here is my example:
Controls:
1. Main Yellow Curved control (ball_placement_ctrl) is used for overall placement and to relocate animation.
2. The Blue ball_move_ctrl will be used to animate the position of the ball.
3. The Green coloured top and bottom controls named ball_top_ctrl and ball_bottom_ctrl are used for Squash and Stretch on the rig.
4. The dark blue coloured ball_deform_rotate_ctrl control allows us to rotate our deform controls to offset our squash and stretch.
5.
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- Floursack Rig -
It is of the principle of the cartoon characters and as you can see the model looks very scuashy and it is like a pillow. It has all the featurers as the obstacle course and you can see how I tried to animate it. It is a little animation how it walks.
How I edit it:
1. ‘Arm’ Controls at top and Bottom can be rotated to pose ‘arms’ and ‘legs’
2. Red ‘mid_control’ in middle of rig provides offset rotation control. Note nice S shape above.
3. The bottomarm_shoulder_controls have Parent switch in the Channel box to control whether or not they move with the body. World means they remain locked when the body rotates and moves whilst Hierarchy means they follow the Body.
The animation:
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- Arm Rig -
Exercise:
In Maya, I created an arm with the help of PolygonCubes, duplicated (the fingers) and scaled together all.
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Then I freezed the transformations through Modify -> Freeze Transformations. It is better when I start animating.
Then I centered the pivot of all the fingers to save time while animating.
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I understood the purpose of this exercise. It is easy to animate it but it tooks a lot of time. We can create a rig for the easy pointing the movement through the animation prosess or just to select couple of the finger parts and to move them, rotate and then with key S to set a key with a movement. Here are example videos of it.
- Assignment 1 -
Part 1: Modelling
As my first Assignment, the Brief is creating an animation of a bouncing ball. Several seconds of a bouncing ball.
My idea was to create an area where the ball to interact with a door, so I possitioned a front hallway between two doors and stairs where the ball to bounce. The illusion is that, to be beliavable how the ball is dropped on the floor, it is been throun whrough Door 1, falling into the stairs and at the end interacts with Door 2 and the door opens. It is the first principle of the animation, so that is why I put simplisity in this Project and tried as much as I can yo create a good movement. The whole project took me 1 week with the rendering and description.
Let's begin with the modelling and texturing. You already sam the previous descriptions of this started project.
Part 2: Animation
- Motion Trail -
- Assignment 1, Begin -
The motion trail show us the path of the animated object and also where are the frames ser in the time and space for the 3D model. It has it's oun window in the Attribute editor.
I have created a project where I wanted to animate a ball falling through stairs. Here is how it is done with the help of the Graph Editor and the Motion Trail. I created the environment where the scene is. and created every key frame with the frame rate first 24 fps and then transfered it to 25 fps.
I created the path and you can see the first bounsing of the ball with ghosting. This is the beggining.
Here is how through the trail to adjust the right direction of the ball. The whole process of creating it.
Then I created environment for my ball and built illusional space whre you can see the ball is like someone dropped it from the door 1 and fell into the stairs, at the end went out through the second door.
The first video is with the motion trail. The second is the pure motion of the ball.
A lot of ideas came to my mind, so I modelled a roof wall, adjusted the walls and modelled the doors with handles, frames for the doors and scurting. All of this is part of the Interior Design part, so to be like a part of a real house.
Overall, for the modelling part I used Cut, Scaling, Rotating, Hard Edge and all the basic things as combining and etc. All this is done in Modelling mode in Maya 2020.
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Part 3: Texturing
The Main thing for me is how it looks in the Renderer. So, the modelling and texturing were the easiest part from all of it.
All the textures are taken from www.textures.com
The HDRI image for the SkyDom light is from: https://hdrihaven.com/
Textures:
I also lost my textures two times and at the edn needed to save my scene, then open a new file and put the whole scene again. Then I used ther File Path Editor. Here is how to use it:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2020/ENU/Maya-ManagingScenes/files/GUID-33E848B6-51E9-4D92-B44F-BE9D169D70C1-htm.html
It is very easy for use and when you manage to transfere files in new forlders you can relocate the important things which occur as errors in the system of Maya and then they will appear again.
All the textures I adjusted with the UV Editor and Hypershade.
Part 4: Lighting in Arnold
I used these two tutorials for my lighting with which I had problems.
I worked with Arnold Renderer's lighting. I used SkyDom Light, Pointing light and 2 Area Lights. So, I used a lot the Attribute Editor and understan why there is a noise in my renders. I needed to load the samples to 3 from 1. And then used Exposuring of the light, adjusted the colours and scaled the figures in the 3D area. You can see the difference:
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Here is a video with which I worked for the noise and lighting in my scene.
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- Part 5: Rendering a Sequence -
I watched a tutorial about how to render my Sequence of Renders. I choosed to render it with Arnold renderer because it will look real life based. And it was a bit hard. I understood from where the noise in my renders is comming. For the quality of the images and how to connect them with Adobe Premiere Pro.
First, I used multiple times the Render settings for adjusting different things as from which frame to which to render, the name of the renders, which CPU or GPU to render, why and how to prevent when it crashes all the time and etc.
I did it once and my first try was awful but let me show you.
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Overall, I created a bouncing ball with motion trail, using the graph editor for adjusting and the time slider. The Animation is 25 fps with overall 86 frames. The modelling and texturing was simply done for 3 hours.
I had problems with Arnold and tried to render the whole scene but for only 6 frames it took me almost 20 hours, so I decided to try with the Viewport 2.0 and created a lighting in it and became like cartoon.
I even worked with Premiere Pro for more features.
The Final Video here:
-WEEK 5 -
Posing and ‘Head turn’
After Assignment 1 with the bouncing ball, we started learning more about wor to animate a character. I am really involved in that kind of animation, so my curious mind will go through all the exercises for animating a Character. Our first tack is to learn how to create the posing for our character, little lighting and head turn.
1. Posing Research
First of all, posing is part of our everyday life. How we stand, it shows our body features and etc. It represents the same with our character. So here I can show you some references about posing figures and later we will talk about Dynamic Posing.
Every feature which is part of the body of the character can be manipulated. Which means, we can control the facial expressions, the pose while standing and animating and etc. You can see that different poses are good for different characters. So lets start with the exercise.
We will work with a project for Maya called ElevenRIg_1.2.
This is a built character with all the features for starting an animation. Today we will pose him and will look at the character.
This is our Character. I had problems with his head, so I needed hypershade to recreate the colour of the face because it was black, but that is easy. The character can be manipulated very easy.
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We can easly move every part of the body, rotate it but not scale it. I will show you a video.
Dynamic Posing and Rendering in Arnold
- exercise -
For more information about the rig:
http://elevenrig.blogspot.com/p/tutorial-videos.html
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Head turn animating screenrecordings:
WEEK 6
- Walk Cycles -
The walking cycle is a bit hard for animating because a lot of the parts of the body needs to be animated at the same time and that is why it is difficult. Here I can show you some refernces about how a walking cycle needs to be done. While practising you can see how it will be done in Maya.
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I started this new project with the same Eleven_rig and tried experimenting with the figure of the Character.
When I select the figure, in the channel box are all the features which are part of the rig. I can adjust the body of the figure, If I want it to be a male or female. I created a male figure with adjusting the body. Added some muscles just to show a better example with my walking cycle.
Aobut the walking cycle, it is a bit complicated, my first time as you can see is not very good because I am not coordinating the parts of the body very well. It all took me 30 min to create this walking cycle with a posing at the end. You can see the two videos with my working process and how the Character looks.
As I made a mistake with one of the legs, with the first stepping the leg ment a bit above the wanted, so I placed a little box there like the Character does not want ot step on it.
Videos of the workflow:
Here are video tutorials and walking refernces that I used and will try again.
- Week 7 -
Walking Cycle Part 2
and
Lifting Weights
1. Walking Cycle Part 2
I opened the new project with the Eleven_Rig - Walk Blocked and then imported the Refined one. To see the difference of both walkings.
The refined one has better walking cycle, so his legs are more opened which means the length of each step the character takes has been increased a bit to create a more natural stride.
The ankle control has been animated to adjust the movement of the walking. The hands are adjusted too to create more fluent shaking.
Here is the reference:
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Lifting Weights
To start with an article that I red because of this exercise:
https://www.animationmentor.com/blog/how-to-create-believable-weight-in-animation/
Creating a character which lifts something that has a big or small weight is a little complexed prosess. We need to make a beliavable motion where the Character lifts, not he being lifted by the object with the weight. It is all upon the gravity, so that is why it is hard.
as it is said in this article, It is all about the right timing. In the animation, weight is a visual presentation of opposing forces. The animator needs to recreate visual this internmal or external force.
Here are visual examples of a Characters lifting weights:
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So, I started with the basic thing - a ball. I opened the Eleven_Rig and started nimating. I had a lot of crashes of Maya while doing it because of my computer and needed to recreate the scene 4 times but still feeling good about it. It comes to be fun animating a character.
I adjusted the gaze of the boy to look at the ball. Working with the legs, hips, head, hands and posing. I created a short animation but couldn't finish it because Maya wasn't responding.
Here is a short video of what was I animating:
And at the end I worked with the weight lift, so it all took me a lot of work, at the edn it still looks cracked a little but the lifting and the face impression was my target. It took me an hour to complete the exercise.
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- WEEK 6 -
Rig Recap / Jump
Assignment 2
THE JUMPING MAN
The Running Man is the name of my project about Assignment 2. The whole consept is about creating an animation about a man on a street, he sees a box falling from the sky and strarts running into it and catch it after that. It will be only several seconds, but the important is the creation of the animation.
1. Creating the world around
The whole scene is only 2 walls, 1 floor, a lamp, the box and the ElevenRig which is my character - The Man. I wanted to create a simple visual scene just to create a mood and then to interact with the character.
2. Plan and creation
First I created the scene, then I created the Poster that you can see above this text, with the help of Arnold Renderer and then Photoshop for adjudting the lighting, creating the text and cropping, exporting as jpeg.
The second thing is my research about catching and running. I created my own sketches about the main keys of running and how will be the facial expressions.
3. Animating and Rendering
The Animation will be shown in a process and then everything will be rendered in Arnold, conpiled as a sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro and also edited there.
The reference Boards that I created about the Run Cycle and the Face Expressions:
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All the modelling took 10 min, I will show you the textures and also I used a HDRI image for the SkydomLight because I am keeping it simple. I used, scaling, rotating, Multi Cut for the box and UV Mapping for the textures, Combining and etc.
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Textures:
Animating
To begin with the posing. I posed my Rig and will animate multiple elements at the same time as we know. As I already know all the controls because of the exercises, I know that each thing has to be framed as it is at 00:00:01. Then I started animating and will record the process.
I created every frame on both the Rig and the box, each frame was created one by one. The frame rate is 25 fps and the animation sequance was rendered in 1080 HD Quality.
At first time the animation was a bit broken and the timing was off, so it took me 3 hours to adjust the time properly for me and as you will see at the final animation, at the end when it catches the box is a bit too fast. I needed to adjust the halpf of the posing on each frame.
See the prosess here:
The Final Animation of ''The Running Man''
Posters
I created these renders for fun
Assignment 3
- HOME -
Assignment 3, overall, is our last and important assignment for the module ''Character Animation''. We have to create 11 seconds animation with sound, purpose of animating and to render it.
As I am a person who loves creating a lot of details, I decided to think about some ideas about the world of the character, what to animate, the whole aesthetic of the scene.
1. The World
I started with searching for ideas about the world of the character. At first I was thinking about some Cyberpunk WOW thing, but then I realised that I really miss my home, mo country and culture, even living abroad can be hard and then the idea about creating a Bulgarian Scene with Bulgarian house with garden and trees. Everything to be tematical with my culture.
So I started searching for a Reference images about a house and etc. And then I realised I already have a house and a lot of materials for modelling from a Project that I created in my first year as a Student. The Scene is called ''Bulgarian Old House'', so you can find it in the page called '' Digital Toolbox''.
I found the scene, found exellent reference images and started recreating it.
Reference Images:
2. Modelling the world:
I opened the old Bulgarian House project and just set up a new scene inside the old project, so I started with scaling the house, creating a ground and adding details. As the previous scene I used a lot of the beams for creating a lot of different objects. So it was nessesary to repath the textures from the Repath File Editor.
After that I started with creating a ground from PolyPlate and used technique which we used in ou first year. Part of the scene is a tree that I also modelled in my first year and used in a previous project. I used ZBrush and Maya for creating the tree.
Every organic part of the scene as bushes, flowers and ets are from the Content Browser, I used brushes for creating them, converted them to Polygons and worked with Hypershade for the textures which appear in Arnold Renderer. The HDRI image is from www.HDRIheaven.com .
Overall, the scene is 408,417 KB.
Screenshots of the process:
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Working with Arnold and Rendering:
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Textures:
3. Story behind the Animation and Animating the scene
As I am very homesick sometimes, this year I decided to create something with Bulgarian aesthetic again. This time is animation it is not only modelling. That is the reason why I chose the name ''Home'' because it is part of me. Maybe this piece will help me overcome my homesickness and can show you part of my culture as well.
My decicion is to animate 2 Characters - Eleven_Rigs and to import them with the animation in my scene, because of the whole small parts in the main scene for ''HOME'' it is almost impossible for me Maya to not crash.
So I animated it all in a new clean scene. The consept is how one of the boys sleeps in the garden under the tree and the sunset is comming. But suddenly he wakes up from a nightmare and it is very scared and confused. And then his friend comes with a smile on his face and extends his hand to help him feel good and to tell him without words that he is already in home because the home is in our hearts, not only the place.
I worked with their facial expressions a lot. Researched for how to recreate these positions and also, how to made them feel fluent performed. It was a bit hard work for me but this time I had more experiance with the timing. The ANimation is reated on 25 fps and without edit is 11 sec.
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All the animating took 3 days and I feel very happy about it. I worked with lighting, cameras, animatino, modelling, rendering, editing and etc.
So, here are some refernces that helped me a lot for animating it.
4. Cameras and Rendering:
I tried to create an Ubercam and it took me only 10 min to do it because it was easy, I followed the instructions from my lecture.
So I decided to create 5 static cameras in 5 different positions. I say a tutorial which explains about how can I adjust my camera lenses, which angle is good and etc. So, I played around with it and then wrote for each camera from which frame to start and end.
Camera 1 - 1 - 0.60
Camera 2 - 0.60 - 0.120
Camera 3 - 0.120 - 0,177
Camera 4 - 0,110 - 0,177
Camera 5 - 0, 177 - 0,240
And recreated the uber cam but I had major problem with Maya and couldn't fix the isue, so at the end I renderred each Camera individually. I do not mind about it but will be better if I could do the Ubercam sucessfully.
To render them all, it took 12 hours for me.
The music that I used in my animation is called ''Vetre'' and it is traditional Bulgarian Folk music and here is the reference:
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Renders from the Main Captures:
After Rendering all the Sequences, all was imported in Adobe Premiere Pro and there I putted them all together. All the 5 Cameras and music, colour editing, exposure and contrast editing, video transitioning and etc was created there. I Exported from Maya jpeg images 1080 HD Quality and then from Premiere Pro, I exported again in 1080 HD Quality in mp4 format.
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Final Production:
- HOME -
I am proud of my work so far and this module gave me a new opportunity to learn new interesting skills such as animating. I enjoyed it and made a fine progress.
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