Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 4
Week 10: Calendar and planning
During this week we were reviewing what is necessary for our final project, today I am going to go a little more in detail about my process.
First of all, all my processes are divided into quadrants: (click on the image to make it bigger)
The first stage in all the animations is the longest, it is the creation of all the key poses, with some breakdowns, the checklists that I am using are those mentioned in the previous blogs, the animation checklist, Lip Sync and all the feedback that I have. received in different exercises.
The first stage in all the animations is the longest, it is the creation of all the key poses, with some breakdowns, the checklists that I am using are those mentioned in the previous blogs, the animation checklist, Lip Sync and all the feedback that I have. received in different exercises.
Once this process is done, it will be a matter of adding all the drag and overlapping of the secondary elements (ears, clothes, hair, tails, etc.)
And finally after finishing the necessary of the assignment, I can concentrate on adding extras.
But ... what is necessary in these assignments?
- Walk cycle: No less than 6 seconds, with personality.
- Character Performance: No less than 8 seconds, based on storyboard and lin sync.
- Attack Combo: Not less than 5 seconds, must have at least 3 hits (extra if it has narrative)
Why do I work this way?
This brings me back to my times when I work in an advertising agency, all projects are clients with deadlines, everyone wants their project to come out first, EVERYONE WANTS TO LOOK THE BEST.
With this I learned to prioritize, WHAT does my client want? WHAT will my added value be? What will my cushioning mattress be if a mishap happens?
There are 3 animation projects and one CGI (I explain this in my other blog, starting in part 2).
I have the advantage of having my own computer, but also using a virtual access to university computers, so I am animating on a computer while rendering CGI tests on the university computer.
Why do I plan for the worst?
In my beautiful country, in my hometown Tegucigalpa, we have the disadvantage that we never know if the electricity is going to fail. So I used to having backups, emergency batteries and trying to collect all my documents in a memory drive, instead of the cloud (because you don't know if the internet is going to fail as well).
So, call it experience.
PROJECT WEEK 1: Key Poses and Motion Trial
Walk cycle
This first week I focused on the creation of Key Poses, for my walk cycle I tried to create a direction with the head from top camera and it worked in a certain way, but after the feedback I was told how to fix the poses since the exaggeration was it was getting out of hand.
A very important point was to assign the weight to one leg at a time, in the sense of not losing balance in the steps (or at least not until the end).
Among the best points achieved were various poses that define the character, the expression and how I am trying to show that the character is drunk.
Another point to consider is who are doing the hands, add appeal.
Attack Combo
In the same way, I worked on the key poses of the first two kicks, I must be especially careful with clothes and using the tail in the line of action.
For this animation, I am recommended to work it in the way that you can see the pose well in different cameras, since it would be a good example of character animation for video games (yay!)
First Kick
Second Kick
After having worked on these two kicks, we had a session with another of our instructors, Mr. Constantino; this was his feedback:
- More fingers movement.
- More frames in the beginning
- Consider your poly-vectors
- Bring your chest and head
- Fix your anklers
- Add an small step in the beginning.
- Avoid over extention.
- HIPS!!!!
Performance
Elaboration of key poses BUT also the environment and the cameras, for this case I will be breaking the model favoring the camera.
The lines that you see in the camera are guide lines for the rule of thirds (the basics of the basics in camera position haha)
The poses for Douglas were simple at first, but with the help of my teacher we were able to achieve a better emotion.
Also, very important to mention: my teacher recommended to add a pose where Douglas is looking around to emphasize that he is trying to sneakily eat empanadas.
Feedback for GoodBoy:
- Add look around before getting on the table.
- Improve poses
- Yes, deformation is ok, but be careful with your transitions.
- Pupils (0u0)!!
PROJECT WEEK 2: Key Poses and cleaning breakdowns
This week is to determine my most important keyframes and start adding breakdowns, this week I was focused on verifying that all transitions were functional (but not yet stylized)
Functional but not stylish? What do you mean?
I mean that since I'm constantly moving the characters, I have to be careful that the rotations and translations are working correctly.
The best example is with my Attack Combo, in this aerial view I have highlighted where the foot is positioned and in which direction it is rotating, if we see in my graph editor my rotations AND they are in constant elevation, since we are rotating.
Why is it important to understand this? Technically speaking, the position of my foot in 0 is the same as in 360, with the difference that 360 already has a turn. If in my graph editor I changed that rotation from 360 to 0 it would look the same in my pose, BUT when seeing the animation we would appreciate that the ankle makes a complete turn (breaking) since the number before 360 was probably 200 and the next number is greater than 360.
Oh! Math! It is these small details that help me understand how my animation is working and verify that it follows a logical sequence.
Now with this cleared up, let's see how I have worked with my animations independently.
Walk cycle
This is the first animation that I'm sure has a definite start and end, it starts with his head directing the movement and ends up passed out on the ground; with this resolved, it is a matter of working the medium (hahaha a piece of cake? Lol no)
This was the result of the week...
Feedback
- Start fixing spacing and timing, delaying some poses and speeding up others.
- Use more of the chest and hips, to gradually eliminate that "floating" animation.
- Use the control of the ankle instead of the entire foot for this movement:
- Try not to overextend the leg muscles, this can be repaired by editing the Stretchy attribute.
- Focus on the hips, chest and legs; hands later.
Attack Combo
In this update, he added the poses for the third stop and the final pose ... for now, as let's remember that I want to add an ending with the bag falling on his head.
For this feedback, they mentioned several aspects similar to the walk cycle, fixing the ankles, spacing and timing. However, one aspect to highlight was to add secondary movements in the chest and legs during the "impacts", adding more force in the contact.
I take this opportunity to say that the reason why I am not working with the bags at the same time as the character is because my reference (Don Chibi!) Was performing the movements without impact, this with the purpose of having the cleanest silhouette. It is not the only way to work a combat animation, but for the purpose I want to achieve, it has worked in my favor.
Performance
Finally we have our friend Douglas, applying the various poses suggested by my teacher have helped to give more life and drama to our character.
Among several things, it was to give more emphasis to the eyes and the movement of the ears as an indicator of anticipation of direction, thoughts and emotions, in addition to exaggerating more some poses.
Regarding the feedback, I have received very good opinions about the direction this animation is taking, especially showing the personality.
This does not mean that it does not have points to improve, on the contrary many points are the same as the Walk Cycle and Attack Combo, this I can take as proof that I have patterns or habits that are slowing me down (for example, I did not experiment enough with my rigs before starting the animation).
If we see what I have worked on this week, I hope I can say that my goal of understanding the story without dialogue has been achieved.
This means that now I have to get into lip sync, let's stop for a moment and see what else I have to do in week 3:
Walk cycle, Attack Combo and ... oh
For those who have not been aware, I have also been working on a CGI project (click to see the whole process, or only in part 2 to see specifically project) for my Perfecting the Look class which is delivered the April 22 (Earth Day!) So considering that my computer will be rendering the entire weekend of week 2 and I will be focused on finishing that project, I have to consider a delay for the 3 animation projects (which are delivered on May 3).
This is why I've been strongly considering changing the ending where Douglas steals an empanada and just cutting it off when he's caught. We have to prioritize scenes! And the priority at Douglas right now is adding audio.
Unexpected problems
After receiving my feedback, I tried to convert my animations to stepped mode (I had left them in spline for feedback) and every time I did it in my walk cycle the program would freeze.
I tried creating copies, removing animation layers, changing the animation display type from Parallel to DG and it still kept freezing to the point that you had to close it with Task Manager.
Fortunately our teacher was able to give me a hand by reviewing the file in different versions of Maya (2019, 2020, 2021) and in one he found that the problem is that my animation has "ghosts", do not ask me how to activate them, but it showed me how to remove them and that fixed the problem.
As you can see in the image, it is a matter of being in your animation mode, go to visualize and select Unghost all.
In addition, the creation of animation layers has slowed down the way I work, so to optimize myself I have been creating sets of parts that I need to edit independently, I did it following the class tutorial :)
PROJECT WEEK 3: Mouth Shapes, overlapping and drag
Part of last weekend and this week was almost exclusively dedicated to finishing the CGI project (click to see the final result) so I had to dedicate more time to the animation that I needed the most: Performance, since being the animation that it will have more score and for this week it still had not started with voice synchronization.
Let's start there
Performance
What will our friend Douglas tell the world? many will ask. First I want to start by saying that in audio matters if I averaged from 1 to 10, it would give me a 3 because since it is difficult for me to hear the errors, so I seriously consider using some movie audio.
In class we shared the following pages where you can download free audios: Movieswavs, movie-sounds, SoundBoard and FreeSound.
However, the talk we had with Ed Hooks + his book inspired me a lot to make a funny audio with a dog, so here we are.
I'm a good boy,
I must resist... but
Maybe just a bite
No no no no!
She would get MAAAAD!
I can... always blame the cat... :)
To be honest, I was very nervous with the remaining time of my animation and the creation of mouth shapes (even now I do not feel 100% with them) even following the advice from class and the festival (how to play with visemes, phonemes, block our jaw movement on 2's, etc).
But at that moment I felt a wind coming through my window, I turned to the corner of my room and said "Y esta rosa?" And with joy I saw this video of How to animate lipsync in a hurry by Alexander Williams
(Reference to a program in Mexico called La Rosa de Guadalupe, for those who do not understand I want to say that by pure luck this video came out in notifications hahaha)
With much more confidence and a bottle of molten dew, I dedicated myself to creating my mouth shapes, here is a sample of how they were combined with the poses.
With this ready, I dedicated myself to clean the arcs that are created with Dougla's ears, legs and nose; always taking into account appeal poses.
This week I started to clean the arches that are created with the ears, legs and especially nose of Douglas; always taking into account appeal poses. Also try to reduce this '' slip '' effect that he on the legs.
Feedback for the 3 animations
Already mentioned, because of the pressure with CGI work I had to run the work times in the animations, so I will talk about the long list of changes that I received on the weekend in part 4.