Character Animation - Project 2

For the second animation project I animated a character to a sound clip provided. Below is my final animation:

Below are the exploratory thumbnails, storyboard, and action breakdowns:

Below is the progress I made with each pass:

Blocking

2nd Pass

3rd Pass

4th Pass

In this project, I learned how to lip sync which is a vital skill in animation. I also learned about the importance of overlapping actions and follow through. Overall, I'm very happy with how this project turned out, even if there are some small things I would tweak.

Character Animation - Project 1

This month I was in the character animation class and we had two projects to work on in the four weeks.

Final

For the first project, I chose the scenario "your character walks up to lean against a tree (or sit down on a bench) and a spider drops down and scares him." Below are my exploratory thumbnails, storyboard, and action breakdown for the scene.

Below is the progress I made daily on the animation:

Blocking

2nd Pass

For the 2nd pass I adjusted my camera angle to improve the horizon line and to make Antsy take up more space in the frame. I also strengthened some of my weaker poses and began to add breakdowns between the actions.

3rd Pass

At this point, the walk was basically done and I added anticipations to the actions.

4th Pass

In this pass, I worked on improving my weak anticipations and adding them where they were much needed. In the final animation at the top of this post, you can see that there were a lot of anticipations missing and I had to work to improve the final pose.

This project taught me a lot about animation and showed me what I still needed to work on in order to improve my skills. In this project, I learned the proper poses of a jump, but I still had some trouble with the landing since he was falling. I also learned about the importance of anticipation, which was always lacking in my animations before I started this class. Overall, there are still a few things that I would fix in this project, but I'm happy with how it turned out.

Character Rigging: Rigging Job

I found a job as a Technical Artist (Rigging) for Telltale Games in San Rafael, California.

Link:  https://telltale.com/jobs/?nl=1&jvi=oCyt3fwq,Job&jvs=Indeed&jvk=Job

Here are the responsibilities and qualifications they require (from the link above):

Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with Animators to design, create, test and maintain character rigs
• Skin character models efficiently with an eye for quality deformation
• Develop character rigging pipeline tools for deployment to other team members
• Troubleshoot pre-existing character rig setups/scripts
• Develop new techniques and processes to solve character production challenges
• Work with Character Artists to create topology guidelines that meet technical needs
• Work with production management to prioritize tasks
• Maintain coding standards of the Tech Art team and submit code for peer reviews

The skills and experience you’ll need:

• Expert Autodesk Maya proficiency
• MEL, Python proficiency
• Experience with setting up production pipelines while being able to follow guidelines
• Self-motivation and taking initiative
• Ability to collaborate with multiple teams such as Character Art, Animation, Engineering, and Production
• In depth knowledge of Maya, preferably 3-5 years of production experience

And you’ll really get our attention if you have:

• C++ experience

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Most of what's part of the qualifications for this job have been covered in CRI to a certain extent. From this list, CRI has taught me how to skin character models, create rigging tools, and what topology is needed for certain rigs. Also, CRI introduced me to coding, MEL, and Python. The structure of the class has also taught me how to be self-motivated and how to troubleshoot issues with my rigs. For this job, it seems that I would have to learn more about coding and how production pipelines work. These qualifications seem to be in line with most job listings for rigging, besides the fact that some companies require experience with 3ds Max. Overall, CRI has prepared me greatly to gain more experience in rigging and to be fully qualified for a job like this.

Visual Development

Final Render

This is my final project for the Visual Development course this month. In this scene I UV and textured the pulley and scraper, and added textures and stickers to both the wall and glass bottle. A useful tool I learned this month was how to utilize the mila_material. The way you can create multiple layers on the material made adding stickers and posters extremely easy to accomplish. A tool I explored on my own was the program Nuke. We did not need to use Nuke for the class, but I decided to check it out and play around with the program so I could get familiar with it. Overall, I'm happy with how my render turned out and I'm excited to apply what I've learned from this class to my future projects.

Below are my light render and texture layouts for the pulley and scraper.

Lighting Render

Pulley Texture

Scraper Texture

Character Design and Creation

In this class, we were tasked with blocking out multiple characters then choosing two of them to finalize throughout the month. In this project, I found that using ZSpheres worked best for blocking out characters and establishing their silhouette. Dynamesh did not work for me in the block out phase because it was a lot more difficult to establish solid and smooth forms.

Asset 1 Reference and Block Out

Asset 2 Reference and Block Out

Once the basic silhouette was established, we had to separate objects, create clothing and push secondary forms. This was a lot harder for me than it should have been because I already had major clothing edges in my block out which caused me to get odd-shaped extractions. What I will do differently next time I model a character is make sure that my block outs don't have excess detail so I won't have to backtrack and smooth the shape when trying to extract clothing.

 Asset 1 - Secondary Forms

Asset 2 - Secondary Forms

Finally, the last two weeks of class were spent working on secondary details, props, and hair. The only major issue I encountered was towards the end when importing Asset 1 into Maya. After decimating the pieces and importing, some pieces of the hair had black spots due to back-faces overlapping with front-faces. I attempted to fix this by building up and moving the back-faces, but unfortunately this would ruin the entire object since there was not much thickness to it. Fortunately, I avoided this problem with the Asset 2 hair by extracting thicker pieces.

 Asset 1 - Final

Asset 2 - Final

Besides the black spots in the Asset 1 hair (which is only a problem in Maya, not Zbrush), I am surprised and extremely proud of what I was able to accomplish in this class. I see small issues like rugged edges and facial features that could have been shaped better, and the hair detail is also a bit blocky. Overall though, I think this was a successful project and I hope to avoid these issues in my future projects.

Project and Portfolio 2: Final Project and Reflection

Here is my final project for my second portfolio class this month:

REFLECTION

After a month of working on this animation, I can say that I have learned a lot and I am proud of this work. Right at the start of this project, I instantly began to learn new techniques that have aided me in improving my craft. In the first week, we were told to focus on only planning and creating reference for what were were going to animate. I found the amount of time given to complete this to be a bit much and I began animating in the middle of creating reference. This turned out to be a bad idea because most of my key poses were not strong enough and needed tweaking. This obstacle was a valuable learning experience for me because I realized the importance of reference and thoroughly planning before animating. Another aspect of animation that I learned during this month was how to convey weight in poses. When I came into this class with only a month of animation experience, I did not realize the importance of contrapposto and shifting weight during movement. After finishing all of the key poses and breakdowns, I noticed that my character was stiff but I did not know how to fix that problem. The instructor then pointed out that the hips did not move enough nor did it show enough weight to be a believable pose. He then showed me how to improve my breakdowns by moving the hips and getting his whole body to move during the actions. With the help I received, I was able to significantly improve my animation and succeed in making my character believable. If I were to scrap this project and start over, I would plan out my actions more thoroughly and pay closer attention to the weight shift of the character. All in all, I learned a great amount this month and these new lessons have helped me create an animation that I can be proud of.

3D Animation: Final Basic Walk

For the final project in the class, we had to build upon our walk cycle and create a moving walk plus a simple action. In order to do this, we learned how to import out walk cycle and make the ant move in space by adjusting the graph editor. We also learned how to plan a simple action and how to utilize overlapping action to make the animation not seem robotic. By using what I have learned throughout the month, I was able to create a convincing walk and a solid simple action.

Blocking out the key frames

Final Animation