Lip Sync Update

Lip Sync Update

This is a link to my progress so far on the lip sync animation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weuQV0NgFPo

Over the last few days I have been working more on this lip syncing animation. I should note that I “wasted” a few hours yesterday trying to get image planes working in Maya to allow me to import my reference footage directly onto them. I got close but not close enough…

Anyway, I have finished working on the mouth for today but I think it could still do with a little bit more tweaking to get the timing just right. I also think that when I start animating the body, I will have to adjust the mouth accordingly to fit with it, but I anticipate that won’t be too much of a struggle.

Most of the videos on lip syncing in 3D animation start off with the body then the head then finishes on the mouth/face but I genuinely have found it more intuitive to start with the mouth and then work out from there. This is only my first lip sync so I could find that is doesn’t work but because it felt intuitive to me I thought that I should try it that way first to see if it would work. Even if the professionals are right in doing the body first I still feel it is important for me to learn myself through practice. If I am wrong in doing the mouth first, then it will surely come through in the quality of my work and will teach me for next time.

Summary:

This animation still needs facial animation as well as body animation to finish it. Only then can I give it a proper analysis. That should be close to complete by the end of the week.

Lynn Parker Meeting

Lynn Parker Meeting

Today I have had a meeting with Lynn Parker (tutor).I wanted to talk to her about the overall point of my project/research aim. Before I was more focused on exploring the 12 principles of animation but it was established early that I was looking too narrow and I needed to broaden my research a bit. This turned into focusing more on character performance. 

Another point I brought up was that I prefer stylised animations with a focus on exaggeration. Lynn's response was basically that based on the work she had seen from me in the past, I should try and focus more on creating the illusion of life in my character and perhaps I could then do some exaggerated animation but I should focus on the illusion of life in my character performances. Since this is an animation project, I should still have some focus on the 12 principles but Lynn made the point that some are more time consuming than others, like timing is something that I could spend weeks on trying to get right but squash and stretch is something that could easily be explored in just a few different animations.

My main focus for this project is going to aim more towards the character performance that will also include some research and reading in the 12 principles but it will also look into character performances.

Possible research questions from this meeting that have surfaced in me are:

How to create the illusion of life in 3d Animation? - This seems a bit too broad but it is something I would like to explore. This could mean I explore the 12 principles, acting, the use of reference footage, body language science.

How to bring a 3D character to life? This is just a reworded version of the one above.

Summary:

I am now going to focus more on character performance. This means my scope has gotten a little bit bigger but that is for the better. This will allow me to research a larger area and to improve my craft by doing so. I still want to go ahead and create lots of short animations to improve my animating.

Life Drawing 03

Life Drawing 03

Today I had another 2 hour life drawing class. The class was with a nude model and we got three poses out of him. The emphasis changed from analyzing the muscles to trying to capture the proportions as accurately as possible so I could maximize my learning from the longer poses.

This drawing below looks like a nice stylized version of the model but since I was trying to capture him realistically, it was somewhat a failure.






This drawing below turned out better but the left leg didn't match up and in reality his left foot was actually in line with his right. Again, this is somewhat a failure, a good one though since I had improved from the first one.


This drawing below could have been really successful but the left side of him is too far to the left and he is a lot wider than he should be.


This is my last drawing today, it was with a 40 minute pose whereas the other two were 20 minute poses. This is by far my most successful piece today. Everything seemed to line up nicely and I feel I managed to capture his pose really well. I was also able to add a bit of tone since I had the time and I actually managed to not ruin the piece by doing so, which is often not the case for me.


Summary:

I have now undertaken 3 life drawing classes and I have been able to analyse how the muscles relate to each other and how they change when they are put under stress, I have also analysed the general proportions of the human figure. Hopefully all this will help in my animation performances. I already feel that I have been approaching these classes with more maturity and I have been trying to take in as much as I can about what I see and trying to also understand it. Unfortunately I won't be able to make it to next weeks classes because I am booked in for a guest lecture but hopefully I will be able to do the week after.

Case Study 03 - "Life is Beautiful"

Case Study 03 - "Life is Beautiful"

"Life is Beautiful" - Ben Brand

https://vimeo.com/76127035

The reason I have chosen this as my third case study is because it follows the tough life of a short character. This intrigued me because of how the animator has animated a short character in a normal sized world. There are plenty of animations where the characters are small like this but they tend to be in a world where they are all the same and they live in a world built for it. This animation sets itself up for exploring how a small character would move around a world that is much larger than himself. 

I would like to direct you to roughly 1:30 in the video and watch the way that the character exits the scene. A normal sized person would take on a few steps and they would be out of the scene. This character, however, is obviously a lot shorter and he takes a lot more steps to exit the scene, but, I would argue that he stills exits the scene roughly the same time as a normal sized character would. Also, I can see where the animator has actually been a little lazy with his walk, it's when the character turns from the ladder to exit the scene. it just doesn't look believable the way he turns. I have noticed though that the animator has actually shown very little walking in the whole animation. I think that the animator has realized the limitations of the walk and has restricted its use which of course is a very important thing to realize with a rig, what is it's limitations. All that being said, when the characters legs are no longer in view in the first scene his walk looks really smooth and believable and suits his personality and physique. I think it's just the shortness of the legs that prohibit more believable movements.

Below is actually a GIF of what I am describing here.

As for the character performance, I really enjoyed it. You can really see the characters mood coming through at the start and how it changes from the "I'm actually going to jump", peaceful look to the relief of death when his soul emerges and floats towards the sky. I really got the sense that the character tried to go through life without making a big deal of how he was treated. This is evident when he is crossing the road, you would think that he would have learned from his whole life that crossing the road would always be like that and perhaps he would have learnt somehow to avoid it but instead the character has learnt to deal with it and doesn't seem too phased when he gets kicked around. 

My conclusion is that when animating a small character it is best to do so in the context that they are in a large world. This allows for some interesting character performances as the audience would likely be amused and impressed at how a character performs some simple tasks. When it comes to animating such a character, I imagine it must be a lot about really quick movements to emphasize how they have to work a lot harder to move at a normal pace. All this culminates in a strong character performance from such a little character.

Summary:

I have now done three short case studies on 3D animations. I intend on doing some with stop motion, 2D animation and film/theatre, all with the intent of analyzing character performances and perhaps how different mediums allow/restrict for different performances. 3D can clearly give a believable sense of movement but it can also give a stylized one as well. The same can go for 2D but maybe it comes more difficult for stop motion where the rigs have to be able to stand on their own which obviously restricts how they move. Then film/theatre are totally realistic but they would struggle to get more stylised movements which is where 3D and 2D animation really come into their own.

Case Study 02 - "L3.0"

Case Study 02: "L3.0"

"L3.0" - ISART Digital

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2014/10/01/l3-0/

"L3.0" (Making of 2014)

https://vimeo.com/118232462

This short (5 minutes) follows the story of a child-like robot in a port apocalyptic Paris. The reason I have chosen this short is because its main character is a robot, and it will be interesting to analyze how they have animated this non-humanoid character.

I have always really been of the opinion that robots are mechanical and therefore should usually remain so in their movements. This animation though uses some interesting methods of blending human and robotic movements.

There is a scene at 0:49 seconds where the character is playing Monopoly with a teddy bear. We can see its whole body and under the table its legs are swinging off the end of the chair much like a child's would. I would normally perceive this as maybe the character has weak hinges at the knees but this character performance is clearly trying to mimic a child and it works because of the design of the character itself. Usually a robotic character would move very stiff but this robot seems to have a minimal amount of follow through which works. In the image below, the character and their child like proportions, and if you've watched this animation then you know that the characters performance also goes with it. I suppose every non-humanoid character can be characterized by human standards.

The character also has eyebrows, which I don't think I should go into my thoughts on why someone has given it eyebrows. They do helps define the characters facial emotions since it doesn't have skin which obviously makes it more difficult to convey complex emotions to a human audience, maybe a robot audience would experience this better? Anyway, the maker of this robot (or the character designers) were probably thinking about how they could help convey the emotions that they wanted in this animation without making the character too human. I should also point out the massive eyes...just like a child's. This is a quick design trick to help them portray emotions easier though its eyes.

I would say that they have been really successful in portraying the characters performance as I felt like the character knew what emotions were but perhaps still didn't understand them and (based on the narrative) couldn't understand how living creatures worked and I definitely got that feeling by watching the characters performance. It looked inquisitive.

My conclusion on this animation is that you can definitely add human qualities to a robotic character. There are many animations that tackle robotic animations but this is one of the better ones I have seen. Some have made the robot move exactly like a human which works in the context of the story and some move exactly how we think a robot should move, which again, works great for particular narratives. I have noticed that when robots are being used as guards or are intended to be evil then their movements are more robotic which helps distance them from the audience so the audience know that its not a character to get attached to. On the other side of things, good robot characters tend to be given more human qualities to help the audience relate to them and to get emotionally attached.

Case Study 01 - "The Boy Who Learned to Fly"

Case Study 01: "The Boy Who Learned to Fly"

This is a short animation (7 minutes) based around Usain Bolt. This animation was made my Gatorade working with Moonbot Studios. A link to the short animation can be found below:

"The Boy Who Learned to Fly" - Moonbot Studios

https://vimeo.com/176787091

"The Boy Who Learned to Fly": The Making of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1VCyM9abHA

This Short at times might not look it but it is indeed a 3D animation made to look 2D with the use of flat colours. My case study though of course is going to revolve around the animation, more precisely, the character performance. 

I want to brush over the animation (disregarding the character performance for now), because the character of Usian Bolt (child) is stylized in his body proportions, it allows for more exaggeration with his animations. It allows the animations to have more bounce in my opinion. It seems to come naturally to the character. His long slender legs allow him to look believable while running at a fast pace. I have seen some animations with the similar style of legs where there is no change in thickness and they come across as more eerie than anything else, one of these examples though is Jack Skeleton, but he is animated in stop motion and this helps to create that eerie feeling in his movements. I suppose this shows how characters can be somewhat styled in the same fashion but be animated in completely different ways. There are three versions of Usain Bolt though in this animation, boy, teenager and man. As a teenager and man his legs have more definition but you can still see how they have captured his long legs in these later stages of his rig.

His slender legs as a child are probably to do with how children don't really have developed muscles at that age but compared to the other children in the short, Usains' legs appear longer.

Now onto the performance, when watching some bits in this later on in the short I really did feel like I was watching Usain Bolt. I had just assumed that the animators used reference footage of Usain Bolt himself but in the credits this is shown:

You can see one of the animators (as it appears) being recorded for some reference footage. This really puts into perspective for me how important and key acting is for an animator. The fact that this animator was able to mimic Usain Bolt himself and then animate the character using himself as reference is quite an eye opener. So he has basically not used Usain Bolt as direct reference for his animation but has opted to use him as reference for his own reference footage. You can also see some of the springiness that Usain Bolt has in the animations for teenage Usain Bolt as well which shows how the animators have tried to captures his character in all the ages.

One other very important factor in this animation is how his running technique progresses and improves throughout the whole short. There is very little technique as a child and as a teenager he is starting to show some better technique but still appears to be developing, it's only as a man that we see him running like a proper sprinter.

My conclusion for this animation is that there is a very strong character performance that also develops throughout the story to change with the characters life as he ages. We are seeing a character mature on the screen and his personality and body movements develop along side.

GIF time

This particular moment is just spell bounding in my opinion.  I just have to GIF this. Essentially, the way the character defies gravity for just a split second has amazing effect on the movement. This is the effect of timing in an action. it is exaggerated in the sense of timing and yet, it seems to fit in the action so well. It does not appear out of place.

Lip Syncing

Lip Syncing

Yesterday I started a lip sync file with Franklin (https://artella.leadpages.co/artella-character-giveaway/)

I have come across some useful resources for helping me with my first lip sync. Firstly, I have acquired the audio clip from the 11 second club: http://www.11secondclub.com/. I have also been using their forums to get some tips on lip syncing.

Digital Tutors: 

This is roughly a two and a half hours course that will be good for refernce when doing my own lip syncs.

Build Convincing Facial Animations: Tutor: Delano Athias:

http://www.digitaltutors.com/tutorial/65-Facial-Animation-in-Maya

Youtube:

Lip Sync Tutorial: AnimationMethods:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2hjRNODVXQ&feature=youtu.be

3D Animation Masterclass: Acting Tutorial High lights: Kyle Balda:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZYTmE5XJhw&feature=youtu.be 

How to make lip sync animation easy: DJ Nicke:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKjMvlP4CE&feature=youtu.be 

This video below is perhaps one of the most useful videos I have come across for lip syncing. This isn't a tutorial for doing the animations in Maya but it is rather how the man prepares himself for the lip syncing process. It involves him actually taking his reference footage and applying it to a plane in Maya and matching it up to the audio on the timeline in the scene. This seems incredibly useful and might actually make me feel the benefits of reference footage.

Lipsync Tutorial: Jason Ryan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sTOgnkto-A

Summary:

This has prepared me for continuing my lip syncing next week, at the start of next week I plan to go through the Digital Tutors course and then collect my reference footage to then go back to the animation. For the rest of today I am going to do some case studies of various styles of animations.

Life Drawing 02

Life Drawing 02

Today I have done another 2 hour session of life drawing. This was done in much the same format as the first 2 hour session. I focused on how the muscles lie underneath the skin and how they connect to each other. I haven't worried too much about the actual proportions though.

Summary:

Today has been another useful activity, I have managed to really get elbow deep in how the human figure moves and relates to each part of the body. One thing that doesn't come across in these drawing (and is something I have been paying close attention in my day to day life) is my analysis of how opening a door for example takes the whole body, it starts with the anticipation in my feet when I steady myself then it continues up into my knees then quickly jumps into my shoulder pulling back on the handle and all that results in some follow through as my chest gets involved. (this is a reasonably heavy door). My body then propels forward through the door. I know this might seem like a bit of a tangent but I think it's important to get this sort of observation done on the blog.

Fourth Animation Update

Fourth Animation Update

The rig I have used for this first animation has be sourced from (http://www.iashwin.net/rigs) and is free for myself to use.

The first animation can be seen below...

My aim here was to give another take on the "superhero landing" where traditionally a superhero would land on the ground from a high fall sometimes on one knee with a hand/fist on the ground and the other arm outstretched behind them. My take on it is that this superhero, Captain Atom, is a super human, thus allowing him to do a superhero landing with less effort. I thought about approaching it with this in mind and I have focused on this aspect. You can see that I have him landing on the ground with straight legs and there is a minimum amount of follow through. This is to emphasize the extreme power of the character.

The next animation I have chosen to go for is a punch, this is a good exercise since it is a famous example used to illustrate follow through and anticipation.

Both my attempts have been failures in my opinion, I have gone more for a hook though which involves keeping your fist close to your body and hooking your elbow around. My first attempt was with FK, I only used this because the character was already in FK from the previous animation. I read someone's opinion on a help forum saying that they would only really use FK arms for a walk/run cycle and nothing else...I'm starting to see where they were coming from. Whenever I animate with FK arms I always end up having to go into the graph editor to fix a lot of issues and I also need to add an excess amount of keyframes to correct the interpolation.

There are four animations below of the same FK punch animation but from different angles. He could definitely go further buck with the anticipation and his left shoulder should end up higher than it is. The animation as a whole also doesn't have that feeling of him throwing a punch.

FK Back


This back angle shows the weird anticipation for the punch. His arm is out too far and I did actually try fixing it but the FK just kept making things messy for me.

FK Front


FK Left Side


FK Right Side

This whole FK animation is a shambles.

This IK punch is a little better and the rig itself felt more stable while doing this. I still feel that this is pretty bad but it's a learning curve I am taking a lot from. I didn't manage to get the impact of the punch again. His head doesn't move much either and his feet are all wrong. I feel I got bogged down on the action of the arm itself.

IK Back


IK Front


IK Left Side


IK Right Side


Again, this punch animation has gone all wrong. I'm finding it rather difficult to animate this action. I know what's wrong but I can't seem to fix the problems.

Summary:

These animations have been a useful failure and one that I intend to improve from. I have had the thought though that I would prefer to do longer animations that focus a bit more on a narrative/character performance between two characters or even just one character. I will still do various small actions though but those can be done in a day whereas proper character performances could take me a couple of days to get right.

Fourth Animation Test

Fourth Animation Test

Today marks the ends of week 3 lectures for this Honours project.

It was primarily based around research methods and how we could use them, a quick summary to this is that the research methods I will be using for this project. One of the main ones is case studies, this will come in the form of case studies for animations, film and literature. I will develop criteria of which to analyse them for in the first place before actually doing the case study.

Another method will be in the form of mind maps but these shouldn't be too time consuming and they are better suited, in my opinion, for project related work. This would include subjects like what possible animations I could do or in relation to my dissertation, what books/industry professionals could be useful to research into.

It is towards the end of the day now and I have started to do an animation with one of the superhero rigs, have started an animation which is going to be a "superhero landing" except, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to experiment with how important some of the principles are when a character lands. The character in question is a superhero so I will do one animation where there is very limited follow through and exaggeration to try and emphasize the superhero qualities of this character, I expect this to look too rigid and it perhaps might not work out but I will do another animation with the same character but with a more exaggerated landing using more of the 12 principles of animation. Then I will analyse what works and what doesn't work in both the animations and hopefully I can discover something deeper about the 12 principles.

I was going to do one short post here today on the lectures and do one with this animation build up tomorrow when I have the animations ready and prepared to go up but I have already noticed my use of timing (one of the 12 principles) early on in my animation and I feel the need to discuss this.

Here are a few images to illustrate my point...

This image shows on the left, my camera for the animation and on the right is my working viewport where I am manipulating the rig. Before I have even started with key poses I am moving the rig into the places I need it to be and this is allowing me to easily adjust the overall timing of the animation. I originally just placed the second frame at frame 100...which would've been too slow for this action, I kept moving the frame closer towards the first frame so I could get the timing correct.

This is the last frame, you can see that I haven't moved the character from his 'A' pose yet. This shows me that timing, of course, is crucial to any form of animation. Perhaps for my Honours I shouldn't be exploring how the 12 principles can apply to my own animations in 3D but rather how I can utilize them to improve my own animations and how my analysis of them can better my understanding of the key principles of animation.

Summary:

I need to deeply explore the 12 principles but I think this should be more of a semester 1 mini project with my overarching question for my dissertation being based around how the 12 principles can be used in different scenarios or perhaps why they shouldn't be used in certain scenarios. I have a meeting with a lecturer next Wednesday where I will hopefully be able to get a clearly direction for my project, at the moment I feel the overall aim is perhaps too basic.

Third Animation Test

Third Animation Test

So today I am re-doing the teddy bear animation I did yesterday but using the Idleworm reference instead. The problem I had was that I always did a walk cycle across 24 frames for the two steps but in some cases that is too fast. I tried adjusting the timing of my animation yesterday but it was very tricky to get right without any jumps in the animation. I have overcome this issue though by simply putting in the three contact poses at frame 1, 12 and 24 then moving 12 and 24, 16 frames each along the timeline to get the slower speed I wanted for this animation. This has proved a much easier and quicker form of adjusting the timing of a walk cycle.

Side View



This is my teddy bear walk cycle from the side. I managed to achieve this in roughly an hour and a half. It has turned out pretty well with perhaps a few minor changes needed in the spine and head movement.

Front view



This is the same animation but from the front. I think I managed to get a sense of a fluffy teddy across quite convincingly. It still looks a bit alien though. I think this is a good attempt though, the only thing I have struggled with are the arms since they are in an unusual position that I have not animated in before. I am used to them being by the side swinging forward. This was a bit of a challenge to animate for me, I don't think I was 100% successful in rising to the challenge. I was maybe 90% there.

Normal View



This is just a normal view of the animation.

Final animation



I started off this animation by repeating the original walk cycle and then jumping into the part that follows. Once I had blocked in it all I went back over the whole animation and improved it as a whole. I made the teddy rock forwards and backwards in the steps forwards which mimics the walk of a toddler. The overall action in this animation is a teddy bear who basically wants a hug but doesn't get one.

Summary:

Overall, this animation has been successful, it has gone much smoother than the one yesterday where I didn't use the Idleworm reference. I have also, in my opinion, managed to inject some character into the teddy bear. I also feel that my animation process has gotten better and more efficient. I used the graph editor a few times to clean up some errors in the motion curves as well as correcting some interpolation in the graph editor.

Over the weekend I will read the John Lasseter SSIGRAPH papers in preparation for a blog post on Monday on the content and how it could potentially relate to my own project.

Fun Fact: The teddy bear is famously named after the American president, Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, who refused to kill a black bear cub on a hunting trip.