Bottle Strike - Mery test animation

Two months ago Meryproject.com released a rig named, you guessed it, Mery.

It is very Disney/Pixar inspired, but also very easy to use.

I decided to test out the rig in a animation, but I didn't want a simple walking or talking animation.

I wanted something more physical, so I came up with the idea of having Mery using her charm and strength to immobilize a annoying disturbance that won't let her enjoy her drink in peace.

I started off by recording a reference video where I just basicly threw a bottle up and down, and made swinging motions, to get the animation right. It helped a lot to get the physics right to get a smooth curved animation. It took a lot of tweaking to get the arm to swing correctly, but it was a easy fix once I rearranged a lot of the keyframes, since I ended over complicating the motion when it's just a simple curve.

Afterwards I started tweaking the facial animations for Mery's face, which was definetly the most amusing part of the process. The rig comes with a very extensive picker and poser extensions that really helps out. Did run into some issues with it at first since it wouldn't react to my script commands, but I managed to sort it out.

Check out my youtube channel and website for more animation

#2 Inktober 2014

Second #Inktober drawing. Was going to just be a simple anatomy drawing of a hand, but added in a small creature in there to make it more interesting.

#1 Inktober 2014

Decided to join the bandwagon of the Inktober craze. 

Not because it's popular, but it's purpose as a genuinely useful incentive to keep my drawing skills sharp. It can be very easily dulled, especially when you tend to focus mostly on 3D animations like me. This is my first entry. Not sure if I'll be able to post one every day, but I'll do as many as I can per week if I got time. #inktober

11 Second Club - August 2014

This was my submission for the August edition of the 11 Second Club competition.

The idea was to have a woman blinded by a bright light, suddenly finding herself in a interrogation room with a suspicious and authoritative man holding a folder in his hand, which contains curious information that probably relates to this woman on the spotlight.

Since the animation ended up being longer then I had planned, I didn't upload the whole thing unto 11 Second Club, and instead edited down to just the man speaking. However, for this I uploaded the whole thing here.

I started off animating by my references, but I started to dislike it more and more until I decided to just follow my instincts. Which ended up being the better option. References did help a lot with animating his right hand tapping on the chair, but it got too distracting when I started animating the entire body, as I felt it got increasingly "fake". After I removed all distractions and just went by my own imagination, things got a lot better. Looking at it now, I feel I should have added more squash and stretch to the male character's face, to sell further on his devious attitude of having this person in his clutches, but facial animation is still one of those things I need to really improve on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQyEdsY1AnU

11 Second Club July 2014

This is my submission for the July contest of 11 Second Club.

I went for a more darker atmosphere as I try to convey the mood of a deluded murderer who has killed a man for mysterious reasons in a cabin, out in the woods.

I went about this animation by picturing how each person would move and react.
The woman was obviously going to be angry and upset, and I imagined her holding the victim as she
accuse the other man for killing him. The main point was to figure out how the murderer would react and move as he tries to explain himself, starting with a angry swift denial and then turn it into a slow deluded explanation for his actions. I was going for a split personality motive for him, starting with a angry personality and then ending with a calm personality to represent his duality about the fact that he has murdered someone.

My main attention went to animating the murderer, so I filmed myself for reference, then blocked out the characters movement and then added the keyframes necessary for a more expressive animation.
At first his movements we're a bit twitchy, seeing that I had added too many keyframes, and so I ended up having to redo many of the arm movements and hand expressions to suit my idea for how the character would behave. I even ended up deviating more and more from the reference as I formed a better image in my imagination for how the character should behave.
The actual animation took about 5-6 hours in total to do, but I tinkered with this video for about a week before I decided to submit it, seeing how I wanted it to be good enough for the contest.

As such I also took this opportunity to practice more on lighting, camera and rendering.
To get the eerie late night cabin in the woods feeling, I used a lot of blue tinted lighting to create a darker tone for the event unfolding, as well as trying to recreate moonlight. I used two spotlights with blue colouring, one outside the windows aimed towards the three characters, and one solely for illuminating the front of the murderer, since he was left too much in the shadow. I was going to initially render this clip in mental ray with ray tracing, but figured that it might be more beneficial in terms of time to simply render in Maya Software without additional shadow effects. Mental Ray gave deeper colours and stronger shadows, but Maya Software gave a much softer look that I felt would benefit the scene more.

Rendered with Maya Software.

Rendered with Mental Ray

I have also added this video to my youtube channel, which can be accessed by clicking this link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCosmwSqngbzDqKmlYef3IfQ

Walk cycle and backflip

As I've got more time between the end of my BA education and finding work, I felt it would be best to spend some of that time to improve my showreel. So I decided to add in more physical movements to my showreel, such as a female walk cycle and a simple backflip.

With this I wanted to show in my showreel that I can do realistic keyframed walk animations.

The way I approached this was by first finding a appropiate reference video, which is just a short youtube search away, and then keyframing the legs at note worthy frames.

As in her legs touches the ground at frame 10, move and keyframed, and then they slide towards mid-section at frame 15, moved and keyframed, and so on.

When all of that is done then I start looking through the animations to see if anything is out of place, like the foot spins or knee starts jerking. Once the legs are done I start animating the upper body, since the movement of her arm and torso is just as important as her legs moving properly, since no one walks with stiff arms and shoulders unless they are a android. After that I move on to smaller details, such as the head, hands, toes, etc... Everyone has they're own style of animating, but with this I usually take 30-45 minutes to do the entire walk cycle, although using references helps a lot to keep the workflow strong.

Here I wanted to show I can do more complicated movements, that both looks good and realistic.

Once again I used references, since it's a tricky move to get right, and I approached it just as I would a walk cycle by keyframing major movements. The biggest problem with this was that the rig kinda made itself confused when I flipped it over, meaning that it's feet, legs and arms spontainously started to spin on themselves between keyframes, which meant that I had to go back to each keyframe "clean" them.

11 Second Club - May Submission

This is my submission for this month's 11 Second Club competition. I kept having problems with the shadows when I rendered this, but I'm hoping they will look past that and focus on the animation, but I will still try to render the scene again if I have time.

Other then that, I put extra effort into making my characters show more body language and facial motion, to properly convey the dialogue. I feel this finally shows the improvements I have done since November, when I decided to focus on becoming a 3D character animator. Following the advices from my mentor, I made sure the audience knew who/what the characters was talking to, and made the dialogue very clear to understand. I acted out all the dialogue in the audio clip and made notes of what both characters are doing, and how to progress from one motion to another without breaking the flow or making the motions stiff.
That helped me a lot to plan out the scene, because most of all I want to catch the audience attention and get them interested in the exchange of words between those characters, which won't happen if you don't find the animation fun or compelling to watch.

To get a proper portrait of how the old man should react to the woman, I filmed myself mouthing the dialogue and acting out how he would behave. Took a lot of takes, but I liked this one the best.

It worked as a excellent reference material, and it helped me a lot to improve my animation.

11 Second Club - April Submission

This was supposed to be my submission for the 11 Second Club competition for April, but due to other projects I missed the deadline. Decided anyway to render it out anyway for my showreel.
It shows improvement in my character animation skill, the way my characters shows emotion better, but it's still too stiff. As such I need to improve body language. One of the problems in this is that I didn't properly act it out myself before I started animating, and as such it feels stiff, even though the character is properly emoting his dialogue.

A Light From the Dark - Report 3

In this shot, we see the girl running past the camera and deeper into the warehouse in panic as the monster has just crashed through the door behind her, further increasing her will to run like hell. 

The way I approached this shot was to first assess where she was going and how fast she was going to get there. Of course I knew she was heading towards the aisles, but I had to figure out how fast since there needs to be a distinctive pace between the start of shot and the end, since the eye needs to catch the action.

From there I went on to animate the running cycle, following closely a reference provided to me, and then I made sure each keyframe looked good from a profile perspective before I checked it again from the camera perspective. Afterwards I tweaked each keyframe to make the run look more autenthic and uniqe, rather then just a plain running cycle.

In this shot we have the girl running down the hallway, away from the monster, and then turning her head to look over her shoulder. This was playblasted with two different camera, but on the same project file, so I edited them together for this clip. I went on the same approach as the previous shot and did a very exact following of my reference before I altered it to suit the situation of the scene better. I then made the camera follow the girl as she runs, and simply animated the base to give the illusion of her physicly running since the camera won't see her legs anyway. 

Very simple character animation of the girl leaning over to pick herself up, but the actualy standing up part was cut to save as much time as possible, so the next shot is of the monster, and then cut to her running. 

Not much to say about this one other then it was a bit tricky to convey her feelings, when you have very limited potential for facial animation and only a few seconds of screen time to do so. 

New website

Currently I have a new website up and running over at Weebly.
Check out here, and I wouldn't mind feedback on how to improve the design.

Animation Mentor: Squirrels are fun

Probably old news by now, but Animation Mentor released a free rig simply called 'Squirrels'.
I tried it out, as you can see in the video above, and it's a lot of fun.
It really helps me with my "squash-and-stretch" animation techniques and I actually recommend this rig to anyone who wants to practice more on 'cartoony' character animations.

I started off with just stretching the hell out of the rig off-screen, and then squeeze it all together when it 'lands' on the ground, beginning the sqaush technique. From there I stretched it upwards for 5 frames, then down at 3 frames, and finally the remaining bounces at 2 frames to get the springy look.
For the head turn I keyframed it to look down before each turn to get a smooth turn that doesn't look stiff and robotic, since it's a character that's very bouncy and energetic, so every turn makes it's entire body move, or at least look like it does. From there I did some minor animations, like making it's ears go up and down when it turns it's head, and animating it's mouth to open when it's bounces or turns it's head, and closes it when the body rests.

Check out the rig here, and give it a try yourself.

Friends Are Like Umbrellas - Report 1

To fill in the gaps between the long waits of cinematic progress in the other projects I am working on, I have found myself employed in another bachelor project called Friends Are Like Umbrellas, directed by Elisabeth Haukås. In this short, a girl is in posession of an umbrella, which keeps the friendship of her and a boy very strong, despite hardships along the way. I was put on the project to do rough animations for certain shots, which I am posting below, and I will explain how I went about each of them. I hadn't done any 2D animation since my first year in the course and was really rusty, which can be seen particulary in the last clip, however I did get a lot of advise from Elisabeth on how to approach these problems. I have almost entirely focused on 3D character animation this year, so it was nice to have a chance to develope my 2D animation skills as well.

In this shot we have the girl grabbing a star in a shot that shows how she uses that star to mend her broken umbrella, that was ripped up by thorns. As such I had to animate a human hand going in a upward motion, extend it's digits, close the digits around the star and then move the hand downwards and in opposite direction. The problem I had here was the speed of the motion was too constant all the way through the animation, and it also had last for only one second. So I had to make it look good in terms of animation, but it will be gone in a blink of an eye due to the short duration. So it has to look belivable in a very short timeframe.

This one was a very difficult shot for me, being very rusty when it comes to 2D animation. I had to animate the girl and the boy sitting on a blanket, and then the girl uses her umbrella to give them shade by planting it on the ground, but then a strong wind comes and flies it off. The difficulty of this shot presented that I had to do a 2D character animation, which has different approaches since the benefits of 3D animation is that you don't have to re-draw the characters. This made the characters look wobbly when they move, which I would try to cure by animating by two's, but the integrity of the characters still looks uneasy. I do enoyed having a go at making a 2D character animation, but it is obvious that I do need more practice at it.

Not a cyborg

I kept having difficulties with this rig in the newer 2014 version of Autodesk Maya, since the rig seems to be unable to be rendered in Mental Ray or Maya Software, while it works just fine in 2013 version. Seems unable to find it's textures, even though it's all linked up in hypershader. So this clip is done in playblast, so at least the animation can be shown.

I used a sound clip from Monsters vs Aliens (Rob Letterman, 2009) as my reference this time, since I felt it would be great for extreme motions and character acting since we have here a woman that starts off calm, but then panics out of hysteria.

I started off with blocking each pose by listening to the sound clip and making notes of which parts I should make a pose and what kind of pose there should be appropriate to the dialogue. This made things a lot more easier since I would only need to clean up between the key frames to make sure the rig animated properly.

The rig I used was Bonnie

Quit

This week's clip is from Airplane (Abrahams, 1980), with one of the many hilarious lines from that movie.

I wanted to practice more on facial animations, so I decided on a clip that was short and precise that was easy to work on, but ended up being a bit more difficult since the actor says his syllables quite fast.

I contorded and twisted his jaw to over express his words, as well as pulling his face muscles around his mouth to make his theet more visible. Still, I feel the lip synch could use a lot more work to more visibly emphasise each word, but it may not come across well anyway since the syllables comes quite fast as previously mentioned.

What I also did was put more effort into making the character move his entire body, and not just the arm and head. This I feel helped a lot to feel the character is a lot more vivid and alive, and to make it more belivable that he is in obvious distress about the creature he is currently holding in his hands. I didn't use any graph editor in this animation, so it's all just plain keyframing.

Rigs

Alex: http://vimeo.com/55507904
Rexxy: http://animationbuffet.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/rexxy.html

The Girl Next Door

I finished this animation on friday, but due to a freak storm the internet was promptly shut down. I guess that's what I get for living in a rural Cornish farmland. This animation took me a bit longer to animate since I wanted to really perfect the animation on both character, but I still feel there's a lot more room for improvment.

The audio clip I used was from The Girl Next Door (Greenfield, 2004), and the idea for this was to have the characters do a lot more motions with they're bodies as they speak, to increase the dialogues substance.
The graph editor ended up being my best friend in this regard, as I could make exaggerated movements with the characters hips and arms. I also put more time into facial animation, as you can see the characters pulling faces and making large mouth movements. I feel all of this helped making the dialogue more interesting and vibrant, which is key to make the audience bored of the scene.

Bonnie having a chat

My weekly/bi-weekly animation got delayed due to a sudden rush of work, but finally got some few hours to work on my next one, which will be a 15 second animation based on a audio clip from the movie "The Girl Next Door". Decided to work on something that would really flex my character animation skills, and so there will be better body and facial animation in this one.

Here's a short playblast of what I've done so far. Hopefully I should have it animated and rendered before the end of week.

A Light From the Dark - Report 2

This clip was to see how rig would react to being animated to walk in reverse, which is more of a way of making me practice on unusual movements. Overall it wasn't very difficult since the FK controls on the rigs feet are quite good. Only problem I've had is that one of it's feet refuses to 'roll', meaning that it won't do a realistic step, for when you walk forward or backward you're heels are elevated and one of the feet's refuses to do that. I found a way around it by just animating the entire foot and the toes separately.

A simple physical motion of the character being knocked back as the monster pounds on the door she's desperately trying to keep close. Making her fall is quite easy enough, but I only had a second of animation to make it look believable that she was hit by a massive force on the other side of the door.

So I animated her to look curved as she is tossed back, making it look more fluent rather then having her fall like a sack of potatoes.

This animation is based on a reference, but I didn't want to follow it too closely since I felt that if I did that I might as well just motion capture it all, but it was used as a very handy tool to figure out how the girl would grab the door and then turn around completely to get into position.

I don't often animate characters running, apart from 'on the spot' running cycles, so this was also a very good practice at animating running without using the root control as a cheat to 'float' her over to the door.

A simple animation of the girl landing from an extensive elevated jump.

It has nothing to do with the actual production, but I just wanted to see how flexible the rig is with extreme motions. The problem with this animation was to prevent the legs from going right through her torso, since there is no limit on how far forward or backwards her legs can go.

It led to a lot of clean up, but after some minor tweaks I managed to make it look more fluent and realistic, much thanks to the graph editor which helped me curve some of her motions. 

A new running cycle for the girl, taking in criticism that her previous running cycle was too stiff and unnatural. This time I took more time to make sure her legs did more to absorb the shock of touching the ground and to make her torso react more flexible. I followed reference very carefully, while key'ing each animation at every third frame to make sure her speed look natural.

Following reference material, I animated the girl from a laying position to a standing position, which was quite tricky since the knee and elbow controls don't automaticly follow the body around. So I had to individually animate each and every joint as she turns around and stands up. The idea is that during one of the scenes she gets knocked down by the monster and has to get back up before running away.

Following reference made it even more difficult since I tried so hard to make it look as similar as possible, which ended up with me having a lot of trouble cleaning up the animation.

Following reference material, the girl faces a wall as she runs away from the monster, then she turns around to face the horror. This one I used the graph editor heavily, since I wanted her turn to look as less stiff as possible as she rotates around, finds her footing and reacts to the creature behind her. So I made her lean towards her right side as she turns to simulate a bit of centrifugal force as she quickly reacts to the threat behind her, followed by a short "settling" animation. The last part was a bit tricky, because at times the keys changed a bit abruptly to each other, which is why the graph editor came in handy once again. This made the animation a lot smoother overall without having to add extra time or tiny altering keyframing to make it work better.

Light From the Dark - Production report 1

Unfortunatly, Lone Wolf has been cancelled or temporarily put on hold for the final third year bachelor project, and I have moved over to another project that I was still attached to that uses 3D animation.

Yesterday the project went into high gear as everyone has finished they're dissertations, and finally have enough time to focus on getting into post-production phase. For now I am doing test animation for the protagonist, practicing on various physical motions that will be in the film, as such it will help speed up the animation process. 

Here the protagonist falls down after a sudden hit.

It was a bit tricky to make the fall look believable since the movements had a tendency to be jagged.

Another tricky thing was to get the FK joints to do what I wanted since they went a bit crazy as I turned the rig in a horisontal position, so I had to plenty of clean up for just that few second clip.

I started off by posing the rig in a free fall position and then animating the entire body to fall and slide in one motion, and then I animated each limb and body movement to correspond with the impact.

The protagonist is trying to shut a heavy door, using her body strength.

This one was to test myself in physical acting, just as in the fall test, because it's important to get the audience to believe that she is having a hard time closing the door. As such I keyframed places in which her body would move slower as she pushed to simulate resistance, and move it fast back as an opposite effect.

This is a basic running cycle to get myself acquainted with efficently posing and keyframing a run cycle.

Sometimes it can get tricky since the timing might be off by a tiny milisecond and throw you off by how unsymmetrical her running is. I keyframed each pose three frames at the time to make sure her running was as smooth as possible, and give the illusion of fast running. I ended up not having to do much animation for her feet since you barely making them out, but I added toe rolls on each kick since I didn't want to cut corners.  

Waiting on the bus

Time for weekly practice again. This one was sort of last minute, since I had to finish up my dissertation.

On this one we have a man waiting for the bus, bored out of his mind and not paying attention to his surroundings. He looks around and sees a small creature sitting next to him, not caring at first, but suddenly realises how bizarre it is and panics. It was originally going to end with the creature being annoyed and gets on the next bus coming, but I didn't have enough time to animate the punchline, hence the sudden ending.

I only got started on this on friday, and I managed to do the entire animation sequence for both rigs in just two hours. What I did was that I just positioned each rig on designated spots and posed them, then I did a breakdown with keyposes throughout the designated frame count of 410 frames. Then I filled in the gaps as fast as possible, fixing things as I went on to make sure it was all animating properly. Both rigs are very well made, so luckily I didn't have any problems with any IK or FK joint movements, since I worried that they would break as the Ben rig jumps up and moves away. The Hobo rig was pretty straightforward as well, with easy-to-use control panel that allows me to give him a nice springy animation as he leans away and jumps up to face Ben. Hobo didn't require much keyposes since it is pretty much just a flexible blob that can be thrown around without breaking anything or the animation getting screwed.

The setting was made as quickly as possible on saturday, just modelling basic blocks and propping them up like lego blocks to make a bus stop shelter, and then I made a quick building in the background as purely to fill in the void behind Ben. Lighting was done very quickly as well, and I wish I could do more with it, but it ended up just adding unnecessary amount of time it would take to render the entire scene without breaking it up.

Ben rig 

Hobo rig

Car Speech

Time to restart my weekly/bi-weekly animation practices after too many weeks of no updates.

This one here is where I tried my hand on a bit more acting practice.

My own critique is that I should have animated his mouth more, but hard to justify it since the dialogue is very low key and subtle. I still chose this sound clip because I felt it had potential for some emotional animation.

We have a man with his car in the garage the night before a big race. He is obviously excited, but knows he doesn't have the best car. So he gives a speech to his car, which is more intended for him, about not to be intimated. The sound clip is taken from Top Gear UK.

The background is just a flat image, but as you may notice I forgot to turn off "recieve shadow" on the plane.

Which causes the moving shadow in the background, if you are wondering about it.