Week 6 - Presentation

Week 6 marked an important landmark in the module for our group, this week we would have to present our overall progress and blogs to the class and Sam. In Tuesdays lesson me, Joe and Krzysztof stood up in front of the class and presented our work so far. The main objective in overall work progress that we had to have done for the presentation was to have our blogs all up to date and detailed with images and us talking about our progress and work. The other was to have two of our animations done for the lesson. The two animations I had done were the idle and my character opening a window. My other team mates Krzysztof and Joe both met the required objective to. So our group is currently on track to get the show reel done. The general feedback from Sam was positive with some handy tips to help with my animation. One thing for me was for my crouching/opening window animation I needed to be careful with how the head moves to the rest of the body. With the idle animation, she said that it looked fine and wouldn't really need to add much more to it. However the crouching/opening window animation is still kinda in the blocking out stage so I can add a lot more to make it better and interesting. This she would go through with me in next weeks lesson once all presentations were done. Overall I'm happy with how our groups animations are coming along and I know we'll meet the deadline.

This week I begin my third aniamtion, which will be the walk cycle that the ninja character goes into after the idle animation. I tried to brekdown my primary research video of me acting out the walk. I paused the video at the key points and took a screen shot. Below is an image of the walk cycle brocken down, showing the key poses.



I would then use this to help me with the block out of the walk cycle. I haven't done a walk cycle since the first year module for animation. I found it tricky at first, the walk cycle started to look clunky and a unlife-like. However once I collected some primary research and found some images that helped me last year, the animation finally started to look like he was properly walking.

                                        

Week 5

The first lesson this week I was introduced to the software Motionbuilder. Like Maya Motionbuilder is made by Autodesk and is used in video games. When first loading up the software we had a selection of files on udo to help demonstrate the various ways of working in Motionbuilder. When first looking at Motionbuilder it seemed like it was going to be really complicating and still kind of is looking back. The main part you notice when starting up the software is the viewer, this is where you'll see your animation taking place. This is very similar to the scene viewer in Maya. However that for me was where the similarities ended. Everything else just looked foreign to me. We were given a piece of animation captured using motion capture. We would then be able to attach this to a model of a character given to us on udo. This was unfortunately as far as we got with the lesson and with Motionbuilder. I have since then downloaded the student version of Motionbuilder and I plan on looking into the software further in my spare time. Below are some screenshots from the lesson showing the various rigs we used.

Also this week I finished recording the last video reference material I needed for the rest of my animations. Now I could begin working on my next animation ready for the group presentation next week. Below are the videos to help with my crouching, walk cycle and turning around animation.

 

 

I began work on my second animation with the deadline being the presentation on Tuesday. The second animation I did was the ninja crouching and opening the window. In the scene to demonstrate him opening the window, I made a simple (very simple) window setup.

This is no where near finished and there's still more I would like to fine tune on the animation. However the ways it looks at the minute, I am happy with how it looks.

                                        

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The YouTube video above is a animation progression research video for the film 'Horton Hears a Who'. The video displays 4 mini progression videos showing a video of the animator acting out the scene, early block out animation. Then finally showing the animation near complete and finishing off with the animation all rendered in the lighting. This video gave me a better understanding of how to actually go about this process for my own animation. This was the first time we were properly acting out our animation to help plan and help us while animating.

Week 4 - Start Animating

This week Sam talk to us about the presentation we would have ready for week 6. In the presentation we would talk to the rest of our class about our idea and the 4 animations we are doing each. The presentation will be informal and not require a power point, but however we will present our blogs with all our work on them. One big task for the presentation is to have two animations done each (one idle and one other animation). With no animation done as of yet, this will be a objective for me.

Also this week Sam showed us (me and Krzysztof) a ninja rig that maybe would be useful for us for our animation. When having a look at the rig we found the rig we were already using before was easier to control. However one element we liked from the ninja rig was one he was all black. So going back into our original rig and we both changed the colour of the rig to make him more ninja looking. After doing this I started to tweak my idle pose a bit to make him resemble Krzysztof's ninja character (due to us both animating the same character).

I took elements from Krzysztof's idle pose however I made changes, so this will make it look like it's the same character, but it should also show the different variations of the character that we can take advantage of.

Before I began  my animation I needed to film and collect primary research. The first piece of footage I shot was me acting out the idle pose for my animation. In the animation I will have my character almost crouching leaning forward and then stand upright. Here below is the video.

Once I filmed my primary research I started working on the animation. With this idle I would have the characters body lowered slightly (almost crouching) then he would stand up straight. How ever after showing the animation to my team mates, they felt I could have the character doing his idle another way. Instead have him starting in the upright pose for the whole idle animation. Also in the new idle the ninja would be holding the sword against his belt with his left hand. So from the idle he can easily go into his walk cycle and then the next animation sequence I will have him with his right hand grab the sword to hold in defence. So this meant redoing the another video for the idle.



                                        

                                      

                                      

                                      

Week 3

This week I carried on with my idle poses for the ninja/samurai character. When looking back at the first two poses I did, I felt they weren't really showing that this guy was a samurai/ninja. I went back onto Google in search for more research images. My team mates Joe and Krzysztof showed me a game they had been playing called Mark of the Ninja.

As Mark of the Ninja was a cartoon style game, all the animations and poses for the ninja character were really over the top and exaggerated. This would help us as we're going a stereotype ninja/samurai character and the game's ninja idle poses would help too.  
I then transferred these references into my new idle poses. Looking at these reference images really helped me get my idle pose to appear more like a ninja. Compared to my previous poses I had done, these were by far better.

I'm happy to move on with these poses, however once I go into filming my primary research for my animation as I may want to make changes later on. Looking at both of these poses, I may have found a way to use. For my idle animation I may my ninja character in the pose at the top and over the 30-60 frames he'll end up with the pose at the bottom. This however is just an idea and I may not go 100% with the idea, Once I start filming my primary research I will hopefully have a better idea how the pose will play out.  

Week 2

At the start of this week my group had a team meeting to talk about what we had for our animation show reel so. Over the weekend I had done storyboards for brief we had at the time. In the meeting Krzysztof pitched to me and Joe a new idea for the show reel he had done over the weekend. My feedback towards the idea were very positive and I felt that his new idea would play out better than the James Bond theme. Krzysztof's idea was we would have a ninja/samurai that would now attack a guard with either a sword or ninja star. The animation would be split up at the time with Krzysztof doing the animation for the ninja and Joe doing the animation for the guard and then Krzysztof said to me I could then do something with the ninja character after.

The Next day in the lesson whilst talking about the idea still, I thought it would be a good idea to like with the James Bond theme we had a slow build up at the start, we could have this again for the ninja idea. I could animate this slow build up to which our ninja character would walk slowly down a corridor with his sword and once he gets to the door and peeks through and enters the room, Krzysztof's animation would then take over. The one thing Krzysztof talked about when pitching this idea to me and Joe was that the style of which the camera would film it would be like game play footage. However when I talked about the animation I could do at the start, that part could really play out very cinematic. This would show variety in our show reel having one part cinematic and the other very game play style. Once we were all happy with the idea, we could finally (again) start storyboarding our own sequence.

In the first lesson this week Sam gave us a lecture on trax editor in Maya to help us with our animation reel. The Trax editor is a use full tool to help improve our animations later on in the process. For example it can help us extend our animation (if we were doing a walk cycle). The file we were given to us as an example, it displayed a short animation walk cycle. Also shown was the trax editor, graph editor and the dope sheet.  

I began developing the storyboard for how my animation will play out.

Once my storyboard was finished I began to start working on my idle pose. I looked up images online to research typical poses for a samurai character.

My first two poses above were I consider the weaker poses of the punch. I felt they weren't ninja enough or dynamic enough. Just overall a bit bland. Without these however I wouldn't have come up the final two poses that were good enough to use for my idle animation.