Week 10 - Final

With my final animations complete and fully rendered It was time to send them over to Krzysztof to combine them with his and Joe's animations in Adobe After Effects. After Effects is a motion graphics software used for video editing in the post production process in film making and allows the user to create animations and effects. This would be the software Krzysztof would be using to combine all our animations together, edit them, add effects and finally render as a whole package.

These below were the final renders I sent over to Krzysztof using the render process I talked about in the last post.

Idle Animation

Walk Animation

Sword Animation

Ninja Close up Animation

Crouch Animation

Crouch_02 (Different Camera Shot) Animation

I was happy with the final forms of my animations and however I felt there could have been more that I could of really added and maybe done a tiny bit differently. Looking back at the planning process from earlier in the term all of my animations played out how exactly or not far off how I wanted them to look and be presented. Still I can never be 100% happy with the work and when I keep looking back at those final renders I still see parts and points that I wouldn't mind changing. However these are not dramatic and too extreme and probably hardly noticeable.They just stand out to me, due to me working on and watching these animations over and over again for the past term. Looking back from my animations from the first year I feel the progress in my animation has come along well and I saw this in every new animation I worked on. At the start I was nervous to get back into animation again due to it being such a long time since I last did any form of animation on the course. However once I got the ball rolling with the first animation which was the idle animation I was getting the hang of the new rig and getting some form of movement with the character.

So with that to one side, all of our animation was edited and the final render done in After Effects was complete. Below is the final animation render.

          

All of the animation I worked on plays at the start of the video. I have to say I was really impressed with what Krzysztof did with the added light change and different camera positioning I really like who well they look and play out. One other thing that I'm happy with is that even though we were all working on our own animations and for the most part animating them alone, they all relate and work really well with one another. The basic plan for our our group at the start of the term was to have my animations of the ninja play out in the style of a quick time event and Krzysztof and Joe's would be presented and laid out as if a player was controlling the ninja character (in game footage). From my point of view I believe that our animations do play out how we wanted them to.

Finally getting to see all your work over the past term presented in a video that lasts 55 seconds is just crazy.

Week 9

This week involves me finalising all my animations and getting them into my main stage and have them rendered. Again as I'm doing this I'm always tweaking the animations and getting them to look as best as I can.

One thing however I have done this week is go over my original storyboards from earlier in the term. I felt when looking back on my blog that the storyboards were one thing I could easily improve by making them look a lot more presentable. These storyboards follow how my animations are at now, compared to the previous storyboards I had were slightly different to how all my part of the show reel plays out.

When it came to rendering the animation instead of just rendering it as a AVI. like I had been doing for past renders of the my animations in my blog, I rendered the animations as JPEGs. This meant each key frame would be perfectly rendered in quality meaning nothing gets compressed like if you were to render the animation as a AVI. Other things I changed in the render settings before batch rendering the animation was making sure the quality was at HD 1080 and that Motion Blur was turned on and set at 2D. 

Once I was happy with all the settings and they matched up with how Krzysztof and Joe had theirs set then I clicked batch render. Once the animation was rendered fully, it was broken up into the correct amount of key frames. for example my walk cycle was 96 frames long so 96 frames were individually rendered out. here's a quick example below. 

Now that I had all my animation rendered I would need to now convert it into a video. For this I used Windows Movie Maker and dragged all 96 frames fro the walk cycle in the open space in movie maker. all that was left to do was adjust the duration settings under the Edit tab and set it from 7 seconds to 0.04. This would then adjust the playback speed to it's correct state for my animation. Once I was happy I did this for all my other animations and saved them all as 1080p in quality. When I was finished I sent them other to Krzysztof to add to his and Joe's animations s that they could be rendered together. 

Easter Break - Week 3

This week Krzysztof took my animations and began placing them into a scene where all of our animations will take place. Here is my opening a window animation in a scene, with all it's lighting.

With all the assets and lighting placed, you could tell the Maya software was struggling and running slow on my laptop. When opening up on my desktop computer there wasn't much difference. I rendered the animation below to see how it all looked. 

   

                                     

After looking at the render I'm happy with how it all looks. One thing however I might want to change the way his eyes move in the clip. Around half way in when the character is turning back I fell his eyes should be either looking to the right still or already be facing the left side.

_________________________________________________________________________________

So after looking over the animation again, I made changes to the eyes by not having them move so much while the head is slowly turning. Here is the new render. 

                                    

Easter Break - Week 2

Coming into week 10 I am pretty much happy with how my 4 animations are playing out. I keep making minor tweaks to each of the animations (especially with the walk cycle), however these are the renders of the the 4 animations below. I uploaded the render videos on my group Facebook page and team member Krzysztof said he likes the animations now it's time to start combining all our work together.
Idle:

Walk Cycle:

Pull out Sword:

Crouching:



Easter Break - Week 1

Slow progress this week due to my other module specialist 3D, which also involves me animating. In that particular project I'm looking into comparing Pose to Pose and Straight ahead animation. Back to this module, I uploaded the animation that I had for my final piece so far to my teams Facebook group. One of my team members Joe pointed out that at the end of my animation the sword my character is holding is facing the wrong way. However apart from that he liked the animation. This tweak would be very minor as I only needed to move his wrist slightly so the swords blade is facing the front.

Here's the rendered version of the edited animation. Comparing to the last rendered version of the animation, you can really see the difference and improves that last final pose. The next thing I need to do is look over my 4 animations and make sure I'm happy with how they look and play out and finally combine them all together.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Above I have rendered the walk cycle I animated a few weeks ago. I've been making a few changes to the characters right foot. I felt the when the right floor is about to make contact with the floor the animation looks clunky and doesn't look as smooth compared to when the left foot makes contact with the ground. Also with the rendered animation, I have also displayed how we might present the walk cycle. As a group we thought it would be a good idea to have the walk cycle play out like this in our show reel, as moving the camera around will add variety to our show reel.

Week 8

This week I have made very slow progress with my animation due to big deadlines in other modules like Applied Game Art Project which we had a major Alpha deadline which we had to make sure we hit. So majority of the week has been spent on that.

Where am I up so far with this module? I have 3 animations pretty much done, with some like the walk cycle needing a few tweaks here and there. My final 4th animation I have started, the idea for the animation has changed slightly. Originally I was going to have my ninja character walking then turning when he hears a noise and pulls out his sword. However I felt that have the character walking then turning was going to be tricky to animate. So the plan is now to have the ninja character pull out his sword while in his idle pose. This animation will still take place before the opening the window animation. I feel this will be an easier animation to get done seeing how much time we have left to get every thing done in our groups.

When looking back at some of my previous animations like the walk cycle for the ninja, I felt that the animation could do with a few tweaks. For example when the foot is about to make contact with the floor with one of my characters legs it seems very rush and clunky. While watching the stop motion film ParaNorman, I noticed a key piece of animation that could really help me. I managed to break the couple seconds of animation into screen shots showing the up close walk cycle. Here this demonstrates how when his feet are about to make contact with the ground, he leads with the heel and the toes curl up. Whereas in my walk cycle the character feet at one stage just goes straight down. However once this minor tweak has been made, I'm pretty happy with how that piece of animation looks.

Here is what my final animation looks like so far rendered. There's still a lot more work to be done to the animation however I'm liking the way it's turning out so far.

Week 7

I used this week to continue working the animations that I have already started on in the previous weeks. First the walk cycle, I wasn't convinced that the characters legs were correct in the way they were positioned. I got my other team mates Joe and Krzysztof to give feedback on the animation. With the walk cycle the key frame timing was correct however, adjustments with how high the feet were being lifted off the ground needed to be changed. Once I did this the walk cycle was less force full and a tad more relaxed. When I was happy with how the animation was looking I went and started animating the rest of the body. Below is the rendered animation of the walk cycle for the ninja.

After went back into my into the crouching/opening window animation. I showed this to one to my group and feedback was that they felt that the animation needed to be longer. what I mean by that is so far the animation finish with the window moving and the ninja staying in the same stance before the window opened. This working in our scene doesn't make sense because if the ninja is sneaking and trying not be caught, once the window opens he would probably duck and hide. I added 24 more frames and have the ninja lower himself behind the window.