Week I
To head easy into the new academic year we started with a simple 'Maya' scene of a really basic spaceship. The goal was for everybody to just play around with it for a short amount of time and render whatever the outcome was. Mine ended up being a tentacle alien spaceship.
The second part of the class was a quick animation of a falling ball, where we used the graph editor to smoothen the fall/bounce a bit. This will be continued in further classes.
19|09|2017
Week II
This week we took our bouncing ball animation further. We started with filming ourselfs throwing a ball and importing that footage into AfterEffects. Adding the frame numbers to the video helps timing your own animation, because you can check the frame number in the video every time the ball bounces off the ground. In this video I accidentally put the timecode in instead of the framenumbers.
This is my first try recreating the above video. I'm quite happy with the overall timing, but the hight of the bounces isn't perfect. Texture and visual rotation of the ball would also improve the quality.
In this screen record, I'm breaking the tangents to optimize the speed of the ball movement. This is a good way to kind of simulate gravity, as the ball doesn't slow down while falling, only after it bounces back up and reaches its final hight until gravity pulls it back down again. The tangent I choose to break in this record is just to generally show how to break tangents, I didn't keep the changes.
The second part of the class was focused on a rigged ball. The goal was to stretch and squish the ball to add a cartoony look. As shown in the screen record, each part of the rig moves a different part of the ball, so you have to be careful which part is selected and furthermore on which part you set your keyframes.
This is the result of squishing and stretching the ball during the animation. It is a really short video with just one bounce, just to visualize the above mentioned effects.
The last challenge was to get the ball to bounce off objects. I chose to do another cartoony squish and stretch ball with kind of its own life (imagine the top bit as his head) rather than a realistic one. Nevertheless, the timing still has to be good, otherwise it looks just wrong. Apparently, something's wrong with my Vimeo, my videos get different glitches with different quality, even with HD.
As an additional exercise, I created a realistic ball with rotation because I haven't done that in the previous examples and I wanted to leave them as they are.
26|09|2017
Week III
Parenting
Parenting makes animating a lot easier. With setting up a parent/child relationship you tell the 'child' to do exactly what the 'parent' does but the child is still able to do everything independently. In this example, I set up three planets. Selecting the child object first (in this case the smallest planet) and then shift select the parent object (the next bigger planet). Pressing P creates the parent. If I now want the animate the small planet circling the bigger one, I just have to rotate the bigger one because the 'child' object moves with it. I still can move the small planet individually, but if I move the parent planet, the child moves with it. After that relationship, I did the same with the middle planet and the big one.
Using that technique I brought a simple hand skeleton to life. With just creating and duplicating (cmd + D) boxes and adjusting pivot points (pressing D and then move the pivot point) to match where the joints would be you can start to animate a functioning model of an arm.
This is the result of the animation created in the above video.
Continuing that method makes it pretty easy to bring a bunch of boxes to life
In the second part of the class, we had to download a rig of a floursack and create three different poses with it. Happy, shy and sad.
03|10|2017
Week 4
Inverse Kinematics
After animating arms and the upper body part in general last week, we started with the legs this week. In contrast to the upper body, we did this with inverse kinematics (IK). This gives you the freedom to just create and connect the joints with IK handles and maya calculates the movement of every joint for you.
Here you can see how it works after everything is correctly connected. Now you just have to set keyframes for the two feet handles (the circles) to create an animation.
This is a grahpic illustration by Richard Williams of a walk cycle.
This is the result of the animation by moving the two feet handles and taking the above graphic into consideration, moving the hips up and down and also tilt them a little.
10|10|2017
Week 5-7
Week 5 was used to improve our ball animations for our first assignment which you can see above, in week 6 we went on a course trip to a VR Expo (details in 'Individual Work') and week 7 was study week which means no lectures.
Week 8
Poses, Head turn, Weightshift
We downloaded a rig of this character and first of all had a play around with all the available blend shapes.
After playing around with the character and figuring out the rig we started to create poses. The goal was to create realistic poses with attention to the legs/feet because that's a difficult part.
The next challenge was to create a realistic head turn. It looks easier than it is. The most important part for me was the eyes. Making the character blink and also moving the eyeballs slightly faster than he turns his head helped the animation a lot.
This is a screen recording of the head turn to watch it properly.
The last part of the class was to create a weight-shift. Like imagining standing in a queue and slightly changing position. As this is something that happens without realizing, we all tried it to visualize it better. I went for a model pose with one arm on the hips and the full body weight on one leg, before shifting to the other. My first attempt looks a bit robotic.
This is a screen recording of the second attempt at the weight shift to watch it properly.
It is my improved attempt at a weight shift. I changed the timing of the legs, to make them move separately, rotated the hips a bit more, made the head move slightly, rotated the shoulders a bit and made the character blink.
07.11.2017
Week 9
Lifting weight
This week was all about lifting weight, so we made our character lift up a box. To parent the box to the hand at a specific time, you have to select the hand first, then shift select the box, go to the Animation Menu --> Constraint --> Parent. After setting a keyframe on the box you get a Blendshape option for the parent to set a keyframe (Shown in more detail below). This is my first attempt where the character isn't able to lift the box at the first try.
Reference material we recorded before starting to animate. The footage includes the frame numbers to adopt the timing.
Line of Action which should always be taken into consideration while animating characters
I fixed the problem in the Attributes Editor. In the 'Parent Constraint Target Offsets' tab I needed to update the position of the box to where it should be relative to the hand it is parented to. I also needed to set a Keyframe, otherwise, the box would also be in the updated position in the previous animation, which it shouldn't be.
I encountered a problem while continuing the above animation. Because I saved the file and closed it after I fixed the problem I can't go back and show the original issue, that's why I use this example. As you can see in the video below, after the character failed to pick up the box the first time, he repositions his body and specifically moves his hand which is parented to the box to the bottom of the box. While moving his hand I set the 'Blend Parent' Keyframe to 0 so the two objects wouldn't be moving together as a parent. After repositioning his body the character lifts the box again, so I had to set the parent to 1 again.
Here begins the problem. Setting blend parent to 1 enables the parent which it should do, but the box automatically jumps into its original position related to its parent object. You can see the problem demonstrated in this video.
This is a short video of the fixed lift. obviously the animation isn't finished, this is just to demonstrate that key framing the parent works now.
14.11.2017
Week 10
Walk cycle
Week 10 was dedicated to walk cycles. Walk cycle basically just means to animate 1.5 steps and set the last frame exactly as the first frame so it loops smoothly. This is my first attempt for a normal walk.
After watching a few walk cycles online as reference, I attempted a more happier walk with more emotions.
21.11.2017
Week 11
Silhouettes
We had to create silhouettes of poses where you can tell by only looking at the silhouette what emotion it is supposed to represent. We had to create joy, exhaustion and dispair.
As today is the submission deadline for the second assignment, we used the time to finish and submit everything. This is the final result of my character picking up a box. The video contains three different angles.
Closeup look at one angel only.
28.11.2017
Week 12
Lipsyncing
The main focus today was on lipsyncing and building up on this, choosing an audio clip from the 11SecondClub for our last assignment. With lipsyncing, you try to move the mouth of your character to match the spoken words of an audio file. This is quite tricky at the beginning and even with more exercise, it's still hard to get it perfectly right. This is my first attempt on a short audio clip.
A good way of getting a decent lipsync is to break all the spoken words down into an excel sheet. With all the words you need you just create a list and check how the mouth moves to each individual word. You can do this by simply saying the word out loud and pay attention to how your lips move. All you need to do after this is just tick the boxes (like in the example on the left) if your moth is opening or closing and if you're making a wide or a narrow mouth.
Another helpful tip for face rigs with a lot of features is to create a MelScript for each individual facial part that you need. You just open the Maya Script Editor, clear all the commands, select the facial feature of your choice, click on the button Save Script to Shelf, enter a name of your choice and select MEL Script in the end. After that, you have a finished MEL script in your menu which automatically selects your chosen feature by clicking on the script. This helps a lot for face rigs with a lot of different handles in close range. Another thing to keep in mind is that Maya puts the MEL script into the tab that you are at the moment of creating, so make sure you create all MEL scripts while your Custom tab is open..
05.12.2017
Week 13
The last two weeks of this semester are workshops to help us put enough time into our last assignment. After looking through www.11secondclub.com where we had to choose an audio clip I could only narrow my search down to a few clips because there were so many good ones. I thought about a story for each of these few clips and finally decided to go with this one on the bottom. The next step was to think about the story in detail and sketch a storyboard (my first time to draw with a Wacom tablet in photoshop and as I'm not good at drawing anyway it didn't turn out very well, but good enough for a storyboard) to make sure I don't animate or lipsync parts that aren't visible in the final shot. My plan was to put my character on a stage and to perform a sort of show. I plan to view my character for half the video from the back, that way I don't have to lipsync everything.
After pre-visualisation, I started to animate the first few basic steps and the drop on the knee. As Maya 2018 constantly crashes during playblasts, I did a screen record, that's why the audio quality isn't good.
12.12.2017
Week 14
The last session of the semester and another workshop. The goal was to finish as much as possible of the last assignment so we could enjoy our holidays.
Here you can see a more developed walk and the fall on his back. I also started animating the right arm. I got the idea of making my character flip his fingers (click his fingers?) during the first part and liked it so much that I decided to view the character from the front for the whole video to see it properly. I originally planned to view the first part from the back.
What helped me a lot for the finger flipping and for the next part - lipsyncing - is MEL scripts. I created scripts for the thumb, middle finger, right lip, left lip and the jaw to speed up animating.
After finishing most of the animation I started with the lipsyncing.
This shows the almost finished animation with the finished lipsync.
One of the last steps was to build a simple stage to use for the rendered version of my animation. I downloaded wooden texture for the stage floor and carpet texture for the rest of the floor.
I found a glitch in the rendered version when the character closes his eyes and wasn't able to fix it. I know that a few others encountered that glitch as well.
This is my final animation. I put a few more face expression in and tried to make the fall on the knees a bit more real with a little 'bounce'. I recorded myself falling on the knees and putting frame numbers in the video, but as there is music in the video and it has to be in sync, my recording wasn't much use. I also gave the left hand a little bounce when he hits the floor and tried to slow his fall back a little at the beginning. The lipsync isn't perfect, but for my first real attempt it's ok I guess.
19.12.2017