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.