It's Halloween everybody!

Been working on the poses this weekend, and here is the result:



I hope to get some feedback on them so that I can improve them before the show and tell on Wednesday.
Now I'm off to dress up and enjoy the what's left of Halloween!

Feedback and a new pose-sheet.

Sent an e-mail to Penny earlier today to get some feedback on the poses. The "What's inside" got the "green light" so that's great. The "Waiting to start" was a bit to ambiguous, so I took Penny's advice and worked a bit more on the story. After the story was rewritten to fit better to the phrase, I started working on a new pose. In my opinion the last two still worked with he story so I decided to just redraw the first one.

Here is the sketch and the reference:




I took the new sketch and implemented some bits and pieces from the reference pictures I took and here is the final pose-sheet with the rewritten story and the new pose:



Hopefully the new pose and the edited story works better now.

I have also started modelling some of the props, only the important ones yet since I don't want to use to much time on that part. I found out that I at least need the fridge for the "What's inside?" and the chair and dumbbells for the other so that I can work out the staging and camera set-up for my poses.

The poses

This post will be mainly to show you how I have gone about to create my drawn poses. I haven't done any work in 3D yet, this is just to show my planning and the finished drawn poses.

I started with the six phrases we got to chose from:

1. Waiting to start
2. Late for...
3. What's inside?
4. Troubled
5. Er.. Excuse me
6. Overjoyed

I then tried to find creative and fun ways to communicate them.
I ended up choosing "waiting to start" and "what's inside?". An example of a early idea for the first one is shown here:



I usually think out the story while I draw, it's just how I prefer to work. It's a way of working out the characters personality through their attitude, shown in the poses. So I scribble down a few important bullet points under the drawings so I will remember what each one were when I go back through my ideas at the end of the day.

I came up with two stories for the phrases and started sketching the poses I thought could help me to tell the story to an audience. When I had the poses sketched down on paper I took pictures of them and redrew them in Photoshop.
(I also took some reference pictures where I acted out the poses, even though their not exactly the same as the drawn poses, they are really helpful and makes the poses look more realistic. It's especially hard to figure out the anatomy of the cartoon-like character that I use for my poses, but also to figure out what pose is actually "humanly possible" to do and not.)

Here are the sketches and the reference pictures:







I also tried to include the staging in the reference pictures, this was especially helpful on the first "What's inside?" pose, since I want to have a camera inside a fridge. And this turned out to be quite tricky to draw. So the sketch shows the side, but the reference pictures include the shot framed in front just like I want the first pose to be staged in the scene.

I then put together the finished poses with their stories and made two pose-sheets that I will use when I start working in 3D. The sheets include a brief character-description and a set-up for the scene.

This is what I hope my finished poses will look like:

Show and tell and video refrence for the walk animation.

Today was the second show and tell. Yet again there was a lot of fun animations on display, really enjoy these sessions. They are both entertaining and helpful at once.

The feedback I got was to add a little more tail movement when the squirrel lands on the nut to make it act more like the behaviour seen in the rest of the animation. Sounded like the rest of it was working pretty good, so I'm quite pleased with that.

After that one of the students asked Penny if it was possible to use book the green screen-studio to shoot our walk-references. She got right on it and we actually got to use the studio from 2-5 today. Almost the entire class showed up so we all got 3-4 versions of our shots with different actors to get more variety in the shots. I am not completely sure if I am happy about my reference yet, I'll have to have another look at them when they get uploaded to the server. (The reason for this being that I had not thought about the walk yet, still working on the poses. I had a brief idea of what I wanted, but it might be a bit too much of a cliché..)

The idea is based on what I saw on my way into town the other day;

A huge "macho-guy" was walking towards me. He had his arms way out to the sides, chest held high. There was a zebra-crossing between us, and as we approached it the guy still looked kind of threatening, until he pressed the button and had to wait to cross the road. My initial thought was; "He's not stopping for anything" - But he did stop, and he suddenly "fell into" a much more relaxed and non-threatening pose, almost as he's inner self came through the "tough shell" for a brief moment. When the lights went green he suddenly went back to his macho pose and started walking all macho towards me again.

The references I got today might have been a bit too exaggerated, but I'll just have to wait and see. There is still time to redo the reference if I need to.


Otherwise I am working on my poses, still drawing and trying to come up with new stories for the characters and settings to put him/her in. I think I will be working on this for a while, the better the drawings are the easier it will be to pose the rig when I eventually open 3dsMAX. Good planning is just as valid for this task as any other even though there is no actual motion, so I think it will be useful for me to do it in that order.

Lecture day and preparaion for show and tell.

Today's lecture was on walks since that is the next task after the poses. We saw a few video examples of walks, my personal favourites where to videos by Richard Williams (author of the "Animator's Survival kit" and animation director on "Who framed Roger Rabbit") which showed a lot of walks, but also how fun and interesting it can be to study people for improving your animations.

What I remember best from the lecture is that you can have an exaggerated walk in your animation, it's both more appealing and entertaining, but if you don't have a realistic walk to sculpt the exaggerated walk from, it with all end up looking unrealistic and unappealing.

We also went out of the classroom for half an hour to study people and how they walk.
We could chose ourselves how we wanted to take our notes, so I did some really rough sketches and added additional notes to them to help me remember later on.
Here is an example of a few of the walk-poses I managed to sketch down:



(It's probably hard to read anything out of these sketches without the additional text that belongs to them, but it's mainly posted here to illustrate how I go about when I do my observations.)


I also brought my "ball with tail"-animation with me to the lecture today and got some more feedback on it. A few minor changes was suggested. So when I got back from the university I got rid of the squirrels reaction when it lands on the box and instead of it stretching and the tail goes stiff it now moves/slides over to the edge, wiggles the tip of his tail and jumps down on the nut. I think it worked out better this way as well so the feedback was very useful. It also shows that the squirrel is aware of the nut falling down and is determined to catch it instead of being surprised by it.

I have rendered the version I will be bringing along to tomorrows show and tell and you can view it here:



Now I am going to leave the laptop alone for a while and start planning the next task at hand; the poses.

Alternative endings to the animation.

Got a reply from Penny, and I found out that I did indeed not for-fill all the criteria in the brief the way the animation was in the last preview. She gave me a useful tip on how to solve this, so I sat down and came up with alternative endings. As Penny said I could have the squirrel jump off a box in the beginning and then I could keep my old ending.
But I also had a fun little idea I came up with while I was at the gym this morning and I had written it down on my phone just in case.

I ended up going for the idea I had written down, since it seemed like a fun challenge.

I also got some feedback from the MA-group on Facebook, so I have worked on the speed of the slide to make it look more believable.

So this is how the piece looks at the moment:

A few poses

Took a break from animating and drew some poses. Except for the boy "eating candy while walking" and the guy "checking the time while walking" which I saw on my way to the store today, the poses are polished versions of sketches I have done during the weekend.

Time to post the animation for some feedback.

I am having some problems with my staging at the moment. Or, the staging along with the story. I want the story to be kept as it is, but that means the squirrel needs to jump of the box without the viewer see that he lands. To me at least that is a better ending because I feel it provides the piece with a bit of comedy and that showing the squirrels landing seems a bit unnecessary, it's more entertaining if it just disappears behind the box.
But the problem is that the brief is "ball with tail jumping on a box and off a again", so I need to send an e-mail to Penny and ask if it is indeed wrong according to the guidelines not to show the actual landing when the ball jumps off the box.
(The box will be scaled bigger if the piece is approved the way it is now, so that the squirrel disappears behind it.)

I am also already at the 10 second mark which is the limit so I need to figure out the best way to solve this issue before I move on (The clip does not show the first 2 seconds).

Otherwise I had some issues with the last jump, so I threw away most of the tail animation at the end and started over again so that's why that bit looks unfinished in the wip_video:




I am going to post it in the MA-group as well, since I am at a point in the animation where I need some additional feedback before I start cleaning up.

Some adjustments on the animation & a couple of good animation sites.

I got some feedback on the animation yesterday and did some adjustments on the timing. It all happened a bit too quick, so I have added an additional 50 frames which hopefully will provide the viewer with enough time to understand what's happening.
At the moment I am struggling a bit with the tail on the first jumps. The tail is a bit to stiff at the moment so I need to work more on that.
Also, the staging you see in the preview is not the one I will be using for the piece, it's mainly staged this way to help me see if the ball and tail "behaves" as I want it too. It needs to look good from all angles, not just for the camera.
(The staging will probably be more like the one seen in the storyboard I posted earlier).

Here is the newest wip_clip:



You can see where the additional frames have been added, it is after the ball slides. It now stands still longer and the turn around is slower than it was in the previous clip. The time I have provided for these two actions are useful to help tell the story and build anticipation. I like the turn better this way, but it stands still a bit too long after the slide. So I could either keep the turning speed and cut down a bit on the time used on the "squirrels" reaction, or I could keep the reaction time and make the turn a bit faster and try and build up more anticipation to the reaction.
I would just have to try both methods and see which one I prefer.


- Oh, and here is a few really helpful sites I try to check out frequently:

http://www.animationmentor.com/resources/webinars/

(This site is probably well known to many, but I'm posting it anyway).
There aren't that many "webinars" on this site, but the ones they have are really interesting, inspiring and helpful!
The latest webinar is with, Dr. Stuart Sumida whom I had the pleasure of talking too at Animex 2010. He is an expert in anatomy and during Animex he talked about how he was employed by Dreamworks to help their animators animate the dragons in "How To Train Your Dragon".

Another great site is;

http://graphics.pixar.com/library/

Where you could read up on a selection of papers written by PIXAR that shows us how they do things over there.

Ball with a tail

You have seen the planning for this animation in my previous post, so now I'll give you an update on my progress.
I had to make a decision between modelling and rigging my own ball or to go with a free rig. I had one already, but it has it's weak points so I did some research to try and find a more functional and easy rig to use for the task in hand. (I spent quite some time on this, since there is such a poor selection of free rigs for 3dsMax.)
After some time I found a blog that actually had a decent selection of rigs for max, so I will definitively be using this site in the future!

For this task I found this rig;


( Image and rig taken from: http://rigsarena.blogspot.com/2011/08/ball-tail.html )


I thought it looked really simple, easy to use and I liked the visual look of it as well.
But when I tested it I found several flaws with it.. The squash and stretch kind of worked, meaning it did squash, but not stretch.. Which would make this a pretty boring animation piece.
It also became apparent to me that it was not even a ball, it was more.. Egg-shaped.. So I did a quick block with it, but decided to throw it all away and start over from skratch.

The rig I already had was one my friend, Daniel had sent me earlier this summer. I had tried it out once before, so I kind of knew what I needed to sort out. The rig was apparently from the same site, and that was convenient. Here is the rig:


( Image and rig taken from: http://rigsarena.blogspot.com/2011/08/ball-tail-advance-rig-3ds-max.html )

The only problem with this one I found during my blocking. The rig would not rotate. Or, to be exact the ball rotated, but the tail did not follow. But fortunately a quick "linking-experiment" solved this issue, so I decided I would continue animating with this one.
(The only thing I don't like about the look of this rig is the fact that the tail is separated from the body. Had I made one myself I would have modelled it differently, but then again; By using a free rig I save time that I then can use on the actual animation and I thought that was a more reasonable decision..


Now, let's move over to something more entertaining (hopefully).
I have been animating for the last two days and I did not post any work in progress for you to look at yesterday, due to a social event with my fellow MA-students.
(We took a break from work and went for a pint at the Hub. Turned out to be quite inspirational towards the "sing and dance" animation we will be doing later on in the course..)

Anyway, here are two wip_videos of the ball with tail task:



And the latest one:



As you can see in the first clip I have struggled a bit with the rig, but it's getting better. There are some controls on the rig that are supposed to help you add personality (for insatance a feature that allows you to squash and stretch to either side to sort of point the ball towards a direction, without rotating it. But it took some time before I figured out how to work with/around them.. They will mostly be left unused, I don't want to end up losing control of the poses..)

So that is where I am at on this task.
I'll continue working on it tonight and tomorrow I thought I'd go out and do some more pose-sketching.

Show and tell followed by planning "Ball with tail"

Today we had "show and tell" at 10. I was both excited and a bit nervous to share my work with the rest of the class, but I was most of all looking forward to see what the rest had done with their tasks. I must say there were a lot of good pieces on show today!

I got some pointers on what I could change to improve my animations;

* Some easing on the tennis ball where it stops and on the basket ball, a slight adjustment of the curves + adding a key on the last bounce to slow it down.

* On the pendulum it's adding a little more movement on the chain when it has moved up. The chain straightens out a bit quick and kind of "stands still" for am moment before it moves again.

I should be able to do these changes without any major issues, so I think it could work out pretty well in the end.

Planning for "Ball with tail":

As we learned in class last week; When it comes to animation, planning is at least half of the job.

I have started on my planning, but I won't be following the "recipe" we learned in class all the way, since this is a ball with a tail and that it shouldn't include any dialog, facial expressions or acting. The task is to animate a bouncing ball with tail on to a box and off again. In this we should include all the principles used in the two previous tasks + personality.

What I have done is to include what I found where the most important parts for this task. These are;

The idea, "who & why", research, storyboard, staging, key-poses & the primary breakdowns.

My idea in short is; "A squirrel ("who") is jumping along and passes a box with a nut lying on top, he suddenly stops because he's hungry ("why"). He turns around and jumps on to the box, but he manages to knock the nut off the box and has to jump back down again to get to it. "

I did research on squirrels, just to try find familiar things about them to help the audience understand what the ball represents. I found good use of these two videos:

(this first one was especially helpful!)

I then sat down and drew up my idea as a storyboard including some poses:

I also drew up some examples of the tail movements I saw in the videos to hopefully better see how the tail should behave when I start animating:

This last one is just an example of some early drafts I made. Most to show you how I prefer to do my planning.

(When I'm in the process of coming up with with a story I like to draw down my ideas just to have something to look at instead of just writing everything down.)

Bouncing balls and pendulum Animations

Animation tasks:

Here are the rendered versions I will bring along to the "show and tell" tomorrow:

Now it's back to the old pen and paper and continue planning the next animation-task; Ball with tail!

Lecture day and feedback

Had an interesting lecture on posing today. Some of it was repetition to me since I had teh Character Animation module last year, but useful non the less. I had already done some research of my own on the subject through Keith Lango's tutorials; "Creating good poses" and "More on creating good poses".

(All tutorials are found on his youtube-channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/keithlango )

I must admit that a lot of this is basically his words and examples rewritten/drawn, so I could just watch the videos again. But for me to better understand and remember I find that it really helps to do it this way.

Here's an example of my notes:

( All tutorials are found on his youtube-channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/keithlango )

Also got some more feedback from Penny after the lecture and I think I managed to sort out the issues with the bounce. I feel the arcs on the tennis-ball looks better, so hopefully tis will help to improve the piece.

I have now finished rendering the animations that I will be bringing to tomorrows "show and tell".

Closing in on the animations

Getting close to "hand in" now.. ("Posting" might be a more correct phrase in this case since it's all going in to the blog.)

Anyway; Posted my wip in the MaCharacter-group yesterday and I got some feedback from previous MA-students, really helpful. I also e-mailed Penny earlier today and got some feedback from her as well. Hopefully I have managed to solve some of the issues on the ball-animation. I feel there is more work to do on that than on the pendulum, and the feedback seems to back up that feeling.

I have made some new wip-previews to post here and also to bring along to class tomorrow so that I can get some last minute feedback.

Here are the previews:

(Experimented a bit with camera angles and found this one to look a bit better than the previous. + Worked on the entry-arc on the tennis-ball, slowed down the first bounce and reduced the hangtime.)

(Changed the beginning of the swing at the end-position, so that it starts a few frames earlier, since there was a bit of a delay + Worked on the transition from swing-extreme to straight chain where the pendulum moves up).

Otherwise I took some time away from the old computer today and went to the life-drawing class. It was really hard to get back into it since it's been nearly half a year since I was there last. But I enjoyed it!

I was a bit rusty, but here are some of the sketches I did:

Work in progess

Been animating on both animations today. I think the pendulum has improved a bit, I managed to solve the issue I had with it speeding up as well. I can't quite figure out what's wrong with the ball-animation, I think there is some "bouncing issues". So I'm going to post it in the MA-group on Facebook and hopefully get some feedback on it.

Anyway, here are some previews of my wip:

Bouncing tennis and mini-basketball:

Pendulum:

Animation and some redrawn sketches from yesterday.

I have been animating all day basically. It's been mainly work on the pendulum, but I did do some work on the ball as well, just to change my perspective for a bit. I have chosen to make the pendulum as it is following a path, just to experiment with moving it around in different axis and animating the chain thereafter. But enough talk about the piece, here is my wip_clip:

(The thing I am struggling most with at the moment is that the chain speeds up a bit where it is supposed to settle down. Hopefully I'll manage to fix it when I have rested my eyes for a bit.)

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I took a break from animaton after dinner and redrew the poses from yesterday. I like to use the same character for my poses, just to keep some sort of continuity in them. It can't be anything else than beneficial for my drawing-skills to do it this way, even though it takes up a bit more of my time. I will at least keep on doing it as long as I've got the opportunity.

Here is an assembly of my personal favourites:

Coffee, sketching and pendulum.

We are trying to arrange a few "sketching-trips" which everyone in the class can attend if they like, today there were only Rachel, Harshali and me, but hopefully others will come along with us next time. Met up at the union and sat down with our sketchbooks and a cup of coffee. Mostly got sketches of people eating, sitting around and talking today.

(Guess Terrace-Bar isn't the place for the really fun ones..)

But non the less; Going out together to sketch is so much more enjoyable than sketching by yourself.

Animation-wise I am working on the pendulum. Got quite a lot of work done on it today, having some trouble with the slow down though. But I have gone "blind" on my own work now so I'll rest my eyes now and hopefully I'll solve the issue tomorrow.

Animation principle presentations

So today we had our presentations on the animation principles. I must admit I wasn't exactly looking forward to it.. My thoughts beforehand were to get it out of the way as soon as possible so when Penny asked who wanted to go first I nearly jumped off my chair.

It's not that I am particularly shy or anything, but it's something about the idea of doing a presentation in your second language that kind of puts a bit more pressure on me..

But I must admit it wasn't much to "fear" really.. I think I managed to present my subject in a different way than usual and that was my initial plan as well.

(I will include a picture of my presentation slides in this post to give an idea of how it looked and I'll include the animation I made to show "slow in and out" as well.)

(Hopefully this image can give you an idea of how the presentation looked)

Oh, and before i forget! I did include a slide with my links and references , but I did not show it in the actual presentation. So if you find it of any interest, here's the slide:

And here is the animation comparing two boxes with and without "slow in and out":

Otherwise I am currently working on the pendulum task. Got a bit tired of the bouncing balls yesterday.. I guess that is also one of the main purposes of handing out two tasks simultaneously, it at least helps me to jump back and fourth like that.

Week two begins

As usual I went to the gym this morning, I like to exercise before I start working (or else I get restless and lose focus easily). But I grabbed one of my notebooks before I ran out the door, just in case I would "stumble upon" some new and interesting poses.

I must say, the gym is really a great place for sketching poses. Or, the poses you see are great, but sketching them down can be a bit tricky. You need to sketch even faster than when you sit in a pub or café and observe people. Another issue is that when you just stand around in a gym and watch, people tend to look back at you and wonder what you are doing. I tried to pretend like I was taking notes on my lifts, but I'm not sure they all bought that one..

Anyway, I sketched down a nice bunch and also managed to capture some pose-to-pose actions.

(The sketches were really simple since it all happened so fast, so when I got home I drew them more thoroughly in my sketchbook.)

Here's an assembly of the poses:

I have also continued on the ball-animation, started to animate the mini-basketball today.Got some feedback on it from my friend Wei as well.

So now I have some pointers to where I could do some changes, to hopefully improve the animation.

Going to tweak some more curves now and then I'll have to arrange my files so I can bring it along to class tomorrow and get some new input and feedback from the class!

Slow in and slow out

Been working on my presentation all day. It's getting there I guess, but it's difficult to decide what I should and need to write down in the presentation itself and what I should say when I am presenting it. Haven't got that much experience with presentations like these so I guess I'll "learn by doing".

Have done some more work on my ball animation and got some more feedback on it.

Here's a preview of what I have so far:

(I have only animated the z-position and rotation on the ball so far.. I want to make sure that this looks as good as possible before i start squashing and stretching it. The reason I do it like this is that I know how easily I could "lose control" if I do it all at once.)

Tennis ball, presentation and childhood memories.

I have started animating the tennisball and worked on that most of the day on both Thursday and yesterday. I also got some feedback on it from my roommate and from Daniel via skype. It is so great that I am still able to show him my WIP. He has helped me out a lot before, and we frequently ask each other for feedback when we are working on something.

After lunch I went over to the Phoenix building to work on my Power point presentation slides. I want it to be a entertaining presentation as well as informal. I have made a animation to try and show the principle "in action".

After dinner I went straight to the Terrace-bar at the SU to meet the rest of the MA-class. Only about half of them showed up, but non the less we had a great time! Went and saw "The Lion King" and for an hour and a half I was 6 years old again. I'm used to watching it dubbed to Norwegian so some of the songs where a bit unfamiliar to me. But that film is still one of my favourite films of all time.

I also watched it in a totally different way than I used to. I kept my focus on the animation and on how good they have captured the behavior of real animals. It is truly an amazing piece of animation.

Personally I love the final battle scene, where Simba faces Scar.

(Spoilers to anyone who hasn't seen the film yet..)

There is so many great examples of weight and anticipation involved. You can really see it around 45sec out in the clip, where Simba punches Scar. They hold the key pose before the punch for a long time to both add anticipation towards what's about to happen and to create an essence of force & weight in the punch.

The animation also "jumps" back and fourth from slow motion to real time which makes the scene even more exciting to watch for us as an audience.

This scene is worth watching over and over just to study the way the lions move aswell, they have really captured the essence of weight in their bodies.

Reference shot for "Bouncing Ball"-animation.

As mentioned yesterday I have done my reference shots and now I have chosen which shot I will be using as my main source of reference for this animation. I have also modeled the scene similar to the one you see in the video.

(I know we are allowed to experiment with the scene as long as the balls bounces against a surface, but I chose to model it similar to the actual shot since I haven't seen any other examples of the bouncing ball in a scenario like this before.)

I apologize for the poor quality in the video, but I haven't got my own camera yet so I used one with a fairly low resolution. But it works fine for now, and I might do some new with a better camera later on.

As you can see in the video there is some fun stuff to include in the animation. Personally I like the part where the mini-basket ball hits the tennis ball, making it bounce out of the frame.

A little help from mr. Keith Lango

I am still doing research on my animation principle (slow in/out). I knew Keith Lango has done a lot of video-tutorials that features many of the principles so I quickly went to his youtube-channel to check them out. And I found this one very useful:

The video is mainly about helping you get your moving holds to move in the correct direction. This is done to prevent losing the feeling of weight in the animation.

(But as you watch it you get a lot of information about how the slow in/out should be as well. Or "ease in, ease out" as it is referred to in this case.)

- Thanks, Keith.

Second day on the MA course

Today we had more of a fun and relaxing day. Everybody in the class brought some of their previous work to show to the class. After everybody had shown off their work I realized how much variety there is within the class. We all have different backgrounds; some had mainly done 2D animation, some had done a bit of stop-motion and there where also a lot of good illustrators!

Looking forward to working alongside so many talented people.

We also showed our sketches in class today. Interesting to see that a lot of the poses where so alike, apparently the people walking the streets of Middlesbrough yesterday where pretty much doing the same as everybody else..

After class I went home and started to do some research for my presentation on the animation principle "slow in and slow out". Found some information on the principle itself, but I also did some tests in 3dsMax, just to try and see if I can make the presentation a bit more entertaining.

After a fairly successful dinner I shot some references for the ball-animation. I am amazed of how entertaining it can be to bounce four different balls and see how their weight make them behave in totally different ways. I think I have managed to find my favourite of the bunch, but I'll need to look at them again tomorrow to be certain..

I have modeled my scene so I don't have to worry about that when it is time to start animating. Just a quick test on light to see if it works or not.

(The balls in the scene are just for me to see how the scene will look with objects in it.)

Some sketches

I also took a coffee-stop at Starbucks, sat down by the window and drew some poses to show in tomorrows lecture.

(Here is a few of them..)

Welcome to my blog.

Today was the first day on the MA Digital Animation course. It seems like it's going to be an exciting, fun and busy year.

Met the class and got information about the course from the module tutors.
We all went for coffee after class and I got to talk a bit more with some of my new classmates. I am excited to be a part of a class again, it's so much easier to get to know your fellow students!

(I also went out and bought balls for our first animation-task)