Final Animation

With all our groups animations but together and rendered out this is our final animation clip.

Final Animation 

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3-74FtaO8

Characters Introduction

After completing the scare animation and using a sound track for that lip sync i went on and made an introduction lip sync as well, where my character introduced himself. 

I got a bit of video reference for this scene from this movie Monsters Inc University to see how mike introduces himself. 

Video Reference

This was achieved by simply looking at myself in a mirror saying the phrase and identifying the key mouth movements and positions then replicating that on my character. This was my final outcome for this animation.

Introduction Animation 

Scare Animation

For our animation and the idea being based of Monsters Inc we each needed to complete a scare animation for the final cinematic. For this i did a few reference sketches which are shown earlier on in my blog and using these and some video references from other monsters i created my scare animation.

I noticed that with the scare animation using slight movements and wobbles of the arms and facial features increased the intensity of the scare. Also from testing out the animation on myself in real life when shouting, you breathe out causing your body to deflate in a away and move further towards the ground. I tried to replicate this is my scare animation below.

Scare Front View

Scare Side View

Storyboard, Animatic and Stage

In order to know what each team member was doing and what extra animations needed to be complete molly came up with this storyboard with the basic blockouts of the story of our animation.

Storyboard

With this in place and our basic ideas down Reece went and produce an animatic which contained a lot more detailed but based of the storyboard. These two elements helped the team to know what needed to be done and what our idea was going to be like. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO8WmVkTOe0 

Animatic Link

With this in place we had to make an environment for our animation to take place. I was tasked with making this stage scene.

This was the first stage i did and presented it to the rest of the group and they really liked it. They did mention having it as a closed off scene and included a few more extra details so i went away and improved the scene based on their feedback.

With the feedback i made these improvements to the scene. I added some back stage props to fill it out a bit and also made the stage seating area which i then closed off with the walls. I also added a semi circle part to the stage at the front where the characters can approach the audience more. This was the final improvements i made to the stage environment. 

Extended Idol

For this animation i knew exactly what i wanted to do for it and it was pretty easy to animate as well. For my extended idol animation i had my character just looking around at the environment it could be in. I decided to do this as it's something that we all do every day. When in a situation we tend to have a look around so i though it would fit pretty well.

My character is always quite nervous at times so i thought it went well with his bio.

Push

When i had to do a push animation i remember thinking it was going to be a bit of a challenge and it was. I had a look at a few references to see what the basic shapes and movements were and what i learnt in my lecture about it is that a lot of the information is shown in the curve of the back. When arched in different positions it shows the viewer if any force is being put in to the push or not and this is were i think i succeeded with my push animation.

Push Reference Image

Push Reference Image

Push Reference Image

Push Reference Video

Another part to the push animation was the anticipation of it all. For this i did a simple little animation to give the impression that my character is thinking about pushing this object and how he's going to go about doing it before it all occurs.

Trax & Graph Editor

Trax Editor:

The Trax editor is something completely new we were taught this semester and it's a really good edition to animating in maya when you can clip off an animation within a character set and then start a new one. I soon got the hand of using it and it made things a lot easier.

Trax editor is a helpful tool within animation because you’re able to make an animation cycle for a rig and clip it off in to the trax editor where you can save, edit and repeat the animation cycle to get the sequence you want.

You’re able to make many clips and place them in a certain order to create an animated scene for your rig. With the ability to simply activate the keys back in to your main viewport you can just as easily re-animate that cycle to your preference.

This editor is located in the animation editors. Once you have the trax editor opened, select the rigs controller hierarchy that you want to take the animation you’ve created off and put in to a clip in the trax editor.

Then under the character menus, select ‘Create Character Set’.  Next in the trax editor window select ‘Create’ an ‘Animation Clip’. Name your clip something relevant so you can easily recognise it if you have many clips all loaded in the trax editor.

After creating the clip it should appear within the trax editor as a little block, showing you how long the animation is. You can export this clip and save it somewhere so you have that as a separate file.

This will take the key frames off the rig and save them in the clip. To re-activate these clips on to the timeline, simply right click on the clip within the trax editor and select ‘Activate Keys’.

You can blend two different clips together to create a fluid movement from one animation cycle to another. This can be done by going to ‘Create’ and then ‘blend’. As well as blending two clips together you can also split a clip if you only need a certain part of the animation clip. You can do this by selecting the clip and going to ‘Edit’ and then ‘Split’. 

The graph editor is something i've been using for a bit of time and it always helps me a great deal to make my animations look a bit more fluid and smoother. After blocking out the animation i'll always be mostly using the graph editor afterwards to give the animation a polished look about it.

Graph Editor

Trax Editor

Walk Cycle Version 2 & Ref

After i wasn't that happy with my first version of my walk cycle i went through it all and started to block out the basic stages of it all using some references i had found on the walk cycle.

Looking at this i can see that the character i'm basing my rig on is very over the top with his walk and moves a lot with his arms and upper body as well as his legs so i tried to add this to my walk cycle as well.

A walk reference image so i knew what the key poses were within a walk cycle.

With all this information gathered i went back to my walk cycle and made the improvements i found necessary to make it look better. Here are my results and final walk cycle. 

Walk Cycle Version 1

I started the walk cycle and started adding in some of the more of the curves seen in human movement but it doesn't look right. I can't get the rig to really look like he's planting his feet down when he walks and it also looks quite slow. I tried adjusting the timeline but it didn't balance out right so I'm going to create a version 2 and start the walk cycle again, trying to learn from my mistakes.

Character Poses Research & Sketches

With this module I've currently just blocked out my walk cycle and i need to go back in to the graph editor and make the necessary changes and small tweaks to make the animation cycle a lot better than it currently is.

I've also been looking at some of the stills of the character my rig is based on. Trying to see how i could implement some of these typical movement characteristics. I got some research images of the internet and re-drew them in my sketch book and tried to draw my character in a similar pose as these might help me when it comes to animating them if they are needed in my groups final animation sequence.

Happy/Confident Pose

Scare Attempt Pose

Disappointed Pose

Apart from a few stance movements i think i need to exaggerate the pose on my character when it comes to animating it. I think the face emotions will also help to portray a certain emotion. 

I aim to to complete the walk cycle within the next day or two and move on to the pull/push animation task.

Will also try to set my character in some of these poses above afterwards.

Breathing Idle & Walk cycle stage

With some help from my fellow class mates I messed around with the play blast settings within Maya to render out a video of my breathing idle. So here's my breathing idle for my character.

I'm currently still working on the walk cycle. With the help of creating a new character set I'm able to clip off certain parts of my animation and start a fresh one. This will help me save a bit of time and give me the chance to put all of my animations together in a certain order.

I've currently blocked out my walk cycle and now I'm going back through it all making it look more realistic and representative of my character.

Character Bio & Breathing Idle

After watching the clip a few times of the scene my group was going to animate i went and created a bio for my character.

Animation Character Bio

Mike Wazowski: Monsters University

Mike is a very intelligent young monster and is very confident in his academic abilities. He is a great dreamer and won’t stop until his dream to work as a professional scarer has become reality. In order to achieve this he will stop at nothing and won’t let anything get in his way. The only thing that holds him back is his practical ability when it comes to scaring. When faced with tense and nerve racking situations he is very easily intimidated by more influential monsters with a better scaring ability. He just simply wants to try his best and impress his fellow monsters, students/academic figures. 

With this complete i went on to creating an idle breathing position for mike which my animation could slot back in to within the scene my group is going to animate. 

I would of liked to of uploaded this video on to this blog as well, but it keeps coming up with an error when uploading the file. I've tried different file types and tried down scaling the size of the video but nothing seems to be working at this moment in time. 

   

Week 1 - The starting point

With this module (animation for games) we started off by going through the key aspects of this assignment and what was expected. I went in to a team with two other students which i get along with really well and know will work as hard as me.

We started off by brainstorming ideas for what kind of animation we could do. A big part of animation came from places such as Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks studios. We had a look at films they had created and others as well. We found a good scene from the lion king which had three characters, one each for all of us but realized that one character wasn't involved as much and we began to make stuff more complicated than it should of been.

After discussing the topic further we changed our minds and went for a scene from the Monsters university film. My assigned animation character is mike and so far I've studied the scene we've chosen to do and tried to see how he holds himself and how he moves about.